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**Context**
I'm building/designing a set of creatures in a world I'm making. Currently the creatures I am designing will live in an extremely hot, dry desert. About the same amount of rainfall as the Atacama Desert but far bigger. The creatures evidently have to store water so one idea I had was that I could have an animal that is pretty much a perfect sphere to minimise water loss.
My question is how could such a creature move?
**Criteria for success**
1. The creature must be fast enough to evade predators.
2. Movement should take up as small an amount of energy as possible.
3. The creature must be able to move on sand and rock.
4. The creature must remain as spherical as possible
Bonus points for coming up with a name for the creature.
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Why, hello there! I'm a Roksphere. I'm spherical, to protect myself against the harsh conditions of the desert, but I need to get around. I don't have any limbs. Instead, I propel gases out of one of my sides. Here's a diagram:
Most body parts not shown.
I have six holes, with two along each axis. I also have a large central chamber inside me, filled with carbon dioxide. When I want to move, I use strong muscles to propel it out of one of the holes - the other five remain closed with flaps - which generates a torque. This then makes me roll!
I'm kind of like a furry rocket, but I look much cooler. Plus, I can turn nearly instantaneously.
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This animal already exists... somewhat. Its an armadillo. Armadillos are found in arid environments as well.
An armadillo-like animal would be able to roll around. But since it can it can unball itself, it can do so much more. Digging, fighting, climbing, the Macarena, and high fives.
We shall call it the, deserillo.
[](https://kingofwallpapers.com/armadillo/armadillo-009.jpg)
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Start with a [kangaroo rat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_rat). Picture for reference:
Add to it an instinct to how to roll like a human would:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BcZlb.jpg)
With the advantage that it can use its tail for propulsion (by pushing the body forward on every rotation), balance and turning.
Now since it's going to store more water than it already does in nature (which is a lot... these animals are more water-efficient than camels), and move by rolling, natural selection will naturally pick the rounder ones on each and every generation. They will look more and more like pokémon, and may even end up losing their legs.
You can call the species Ukemi waza. That sounds scientific enough, and is actually a japanese umbrella term for martial arts rolling techniques in general.
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This idea isn't especially sensible, but it meets your criteria. Kinda.
Start with a tortoise. Make it more spherical. Give it a set of bladders for water, in compartments of its shell. Make it able to pump the water around between bladders rapidly. The transfer of weight lets it roll.
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BB8 from *Star War Episode VII* actually rolled in the desert and has a spherical design:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LH7Zh.gif)
As discussed on SF.se, the prop is not an optimal design, nor do we see the whole picture, e.g. supports for the prop such as a trolley. I think the best summary from that post is:
>
> He was able to move in sand without skidding because there was much more to some versions of BB-8 than we see onscreen.
>
>
>
[How does BB-8 move in the sand without skidding?](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/113600/how-does-bb-8-move-in-the-sand-without-skidding)
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One possible idea which also allows moving upward is that
the creature can extend itself into an elongated shape,
the same working principle in many perpetual motion machines.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qzyKG.png)
*Image: Wikimedia Commons, Creator Dims, License Public Domain, 2005-05-08*
The fact is while it does not work as perpetual motion, it really works if the creature uses
energy to deform itself; then it can be made quite efficient.
Spherical locomotion itself is not so crazy as people
may think: The [wheel spider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_spider) rolls itself into a ball
to roll down dunes for escape.
What I am missing is how the creatures itself can survive.
The extremely arid Atacama parts are lifeless. So you need
to give them an energy source, perhaps that the desert itself
contains nutrients or chemicals which can be exploited by the creature.
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This one is a little more unorthodox than some of the other answers, consider it a wildcard. I'm aware it's not spherical, but it fulfills all of the other criteria and actually negates the need to be spherical. The OP did say that being spherical was just 'an idea' so I assume (s)he is open to other possibilities.
I propose a plant-animal hybrid.
Meet the *Chryvador*. A play on the word Voador which is Portuguese for 'flying' and the feeling that any creature that looks like this should absolutely have some form of 'chrys' in its name.
# Structure
A large but lightweight creature, not unlike the *Extatostoma tiaratum* (pictured)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a0gtgm.jpg)
While the actual creature in the image is in fact an insect which pretends to be plant to hide from predators, the Chryvador would have far larger 'leaves' with the ability to act as sails, so it is carried by the wind but is able to control its direction in a similar manner to that of a sailing boat.
# Survival
The Chryvador does not need to store a lot of water, only around a day's supply at most. It has a sharp and extremely long extendable tongue which can penetrate the ground rock and down into the water table several meters below the surface and extract the water it needs to survive in a similar way to a tree root. If approached by a predator while 'drinking' it can save time by detaching its tongue and taking off immediately; the tongue will grow back in a matter of hours so while it is possible, it uses a lot of energy and is not desirable to do this regularly.
# Lifestyle
Generally living in groups of between twelve to fifteen, they will display behavior not dissimilar to that of the Meerkat. To extract enough water from the ground below the rock a large amount of time will need to be spent doing this. Two or three will keep lookout while the rest perform this act. Every individual in the group will take its turn as lookout.
# Ecosystem Quirks
As an additional defense mechanism, when a tongue is discarded it will continue to extract water on its own and at the top a plant will grow which is smaller and inert but looks very similar in appearance to a Chryvador. These are left in place for two reasons. Firstly they are useful decoys. But secondly they provide a source of nourishment for other nomadic creatures. It is often in the interest of these other creatures to scare off the Chryvador but not actually kill it, as this provides them with a regular source of food and water for themselves. These creatures will actually defend the Chryvador from animals seeking to eat it, as that would essentially cut off its own food supply.
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HAMSTERBALL!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bGbSJ.jpg)
From dubaipetfood.com
In this version the round part is a shell. The animal constructs it with local materials and sticky spit, like a caddisfly case.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rv4Kg.jpg)
From <http://twistedsifter.com/2013/03/caddisfly-larvae-cases/>
these caddisflies were provided some pretty high end building materials.
The creature dwells inside its constructed case and roves around like a hamster in a ball. It can open a hatch to poke its head out and feed or poke its excretory organs out and excrete. Maybe it would leave the ball to mate but not necessarily. It can leave the case entirely should circumstances warrant. It can repair the case if damaged or enlarge it as it grows. It occurs to me that a case that incorporates something distasteful (for example the predator's own feces) would be a good defense against being eaten, at least by things that do not like messing with their own feces.
I wondered if a hamster ball could roll on sand. I found video of a spherical robot cruising around on sand. It looks like it has projecting linear treads.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mvr--XEeT4>
The critter is a Kugel. Why Kugel? "Sphere" in German. Why German? Because "Kugel" is an awesome name.
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Idea: The creature is covered in an exoskeleton, and it uses muscular contractions in order to push out plates in a spring-like motion. Its exoskeleton is also smooth, reducing friction and increasing movement speed and efficiency. These plates are positioned at equal distances from each other, and there's at least 4, so that it doesn't end up upturned and unable to move.
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I'm working in a novel based on Arabian folklore and a part of the history tells the war between angels and jinn (genies although closer to the original arab folklore than the pop culture Disney version). In the war obviously both sides have to be able to harm each other. For the jinn I have no problem as iron is mentioned in folklore as something that harms them. But I can't think in a way to kill angels (who are also closer to the biblical description than the common pop culture version of winged humanoids). Thanks in advance.
PD: Notice that this war happens before the existence of humans thus Garden of Eden or any other post-human related events hasn't happened yet.
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# AI Exploits and Name-Hackers
You can't kill an angel with pure force. Each angel is an aspect of God entrusted with a single purpose; even if you could destroy the vessel in which the angel's essence resides, it will immediately respawn until its task is done. This is in contrast with djinn, who, while non-physical, are capable of being killed. A force-based conflict between angels and djinn is a foregone conclusion.
However, angels do have a weakness: they cannot change their natures, because their natures are all that they are. This means that a particular behavior will always yield the same response. By experimenting and testing, it is possible to learn exactly how to exploit an angel's root program and trap it, corrupt it, even take control of it.
Convert that exploit into its base elements, and it can be reduced into a simple script - the angel's True Name.
The front-line djinn are mainly aiming to slow the angels down, and to report their findings back to the real force of the djinn army - the name-hackers. Their role is to analyze the angels until they have learned how to hack them permanently.
Of course, new angels can always be fielded - but every new divine task created alters the nature of reality itself. If the djinn figure out how to force God's hand into creating a universe in which the djinn are permitted to exist and operate on Earth, they have won the war.
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According to Christian theology, angels and devils are beings of pure spirit and are immortal, impossible to kill.
There is a reason why there is an old saying that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
If you are familiar with the Ainur, who include the Valar and the Maiar (and maybe other groups), in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, they are based on the angels in Christian theology. So in Christian theology angels have similar powers and limitations as the Ainur.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainur_(Middle-earth)>
Of course angels can make bodies for themselves to use in the physical plane of existance if they wish. And those bodies are assembled out of particles of matter in the local envirnoment.
I believe that bodies made by angels and devils are not living any more than rocks or clouds or robots are. This may mean that even the physical bodies of angels and devils aren't alive and cannot die, let alone their immortal spirits.
But possibly an angel's physical body can be destroyed by a disintegrater ray or an atomic explosion or a blast of powerful magic. And possibly it might take an angel some specific period of time to make a new physical body. So possibly if an army of the physical bodies of angels is destroyed fast enough, there might be a period of time after all the bodies are destroyed and before the angels can activate new bodies. And posssibly the seconds or eons that period might last would be long enough for enemies of the angels to accomplish some or all of their goals.
I note that most angels are believed to be loyal to and obedient to the Christian God. So presumably they wouldn't fight agaisnt Jinns unless God Almighty commanded them to. And if the angels have God Almighty on their side, they should defeat even the most powerfull Jinns easily.
I note that devils are supposed to be fallen angels who revolted against God and follow The Devil. So if the angels in your story are devils, they could get in a conflict with Jinns which has no authorization and support from God Almighty, though the fallen angels might have some support from the less powerful Devil. Thus it would be uncertain who would win such a war.
I also note that it is possible that Christian theology doesn't mention all the groups of angels which might exist if the Chrisitan religion is true.
Maybe some angels have always been morally neutral.
Maybe some angels who fought against the rebellious angels later decided that God Almighty was a bad boss and quit working for him and started working for themselves.
Maybe some of the rebellious angels who fought for the Devil later decided he was a bad boss and formed their own group to work for themselves.
And somaybe there could be a war between some or all Jinns and some or all of the members of one, two, or three of those three hypothetical groups of angels.
Thus such a hypothetical group of angels that weren't followers of God Almighty wouldn't have the support of an omnipotent being in their war with the Jinns which would make it the odds more evem.
An d of course you should see what you can find out about angelology and demonology in Jewish theology and in Muslim theology, to see what possible weaknesses angels might have.
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The trouble with judeo-christian mythology is, that at least on the *-christian* side of that equation there is so little to work with. Islamic mythology, where you pick up *djinn* hardly expands upon it at all.
You have the OT (Old Testament), where most of the imagery and details come from, you have the NT (New Testament) which hardly has anything (and tends towards more anthropomorphization), plus maybe a few non-canonical texts (the books that, while thought true by the early founders of the Christian Church, were also thought to not be divinely inspired). The Koran says little more to describe angels, and though I'm no scholar I'm assuming that the hadiths say little or nothing.
So where does the aspiring writer of vaguely Christian-esque fantasy tales turn for details on how to kill an angel (I mean, other than watching reruns of Supernatural with Jensen Ackles... seasons 1-5, not the crappy later seasons)?
[Kabbalah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah). That said, this stuff isn't easy to study. Do you read the Hebrew alphabet? Do you speak the medieval form of Aramaic that the Kaballists of 14th century Andalusian Spain wrote?
This might not be the style you're hoping for either. The protections and defenses that these rabbis suggested tended towards incantations and inscriptions, amulets and physical objects. You won't get flaming swords and laser crossbows or anything like that. There will be geometric patterns and witches' brews of ingredients. Basically all the trappings of could be mistaken for Dungeons & Dragons style magic or witchcraft.
Generally speaking, Kabbalah tends to describe magic that would defend against a spirit... to ward them away, or to trap them somehow. But it wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine similar magic that destroys a seraphim utterly. For the purposes of drama, this magic might need to be tailored towards a specific individual, might take a long time to prepare, and the slightest disruption might spoil the entire process.
This would move the war between the two types of spirits away from a battlefield metaphor, and more towards a type of cold war metaphor... each side hiding away in bunkers launching "magical ICBMs" at the other.
Even if in the end you choose to go a different way with the story, I do recommend some research in this direction. It's often fascinating.
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Angels are often depicted with flaming swords in the Bible, so maybe the jinn could get hold of something similar and turn the angels' own weapon against them, which could also serve to heighten animosity between the two groups.
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## Don't kill them, convert them
If an angel loses his faith, I guess he falls and becomes a jinn. Getting the snot beaten out of them in combat and/or imprisoned may do just that.
If the Lake of Fire is available, I imagine a stint chained up in it will be pretty challenging to one's faith. Of course, any that do keep their faith through their trials will be strengthened.
If you're Christian, this will be a good way to keep your work orthodox. Even if not, it'd be interesting to have demons work by psychological and emotional warfare, while the angels use bravery and teamwork.
## Copy Milton and give the demons technology
Milton depicted such a war in Paradise Lost. On Day 1, the angels triumph with swords, after an initial setback. On day 2, the fallen angels construct giant guns, which are devastating to the angels, who only have swords (until they rip up mountains). Milton basically has the fallen angels use invention, coupled with cruelty, to contrast with the angels, who, like God, are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
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>
> God has made angels in such a way that they retain the essence that
> God originally intended for them, Saint Thomas Aquinas declares in
> "Summa Theologica:" "The angels are incorruptible substances. This
> means that they cannot die, decay, break up, or be substantially
> changed. For the root of corruptibility in a substance is matter, and
> in the angels there is no matter."
>
>
>
So whatever angels may be made of, they’re made to last forever!
You can use this property against them, basically transfer them to a parallel universe where god doesn't exist and since they have to last forever, each angel can be sent to a universe where their material gets the most harm. Water skins can go to a lava land while light could land near a black hole constantly sucking the light out of it.
Also since angels have to preserve their material, you can use any shape of a weapon made from their material's anti material. Basically a shape/material shifting sword which takes the anti-material of the angel its fighting against it.
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The concept of such vulnerabilities is common but bad storytelling. Both are supernatural, supposedly superhuman and may have their own special traits. They do not need to be invulnerable to everything unless they are exposed to ONE specific material - a Kryptonite for each kind. Just make them vulnerable to excessive application of force, electrocution, heat and disintegration, just as (almost?) all life is, with the difference that their tolerance levels are unnaturally high, and both species have the ability to inflict such damage to each other.
Having Kryptonite-type vulnerabilities is logically fallible too. What if the material a certain species is vulnerable to does not exist or is unavailable on Earth? What exactly about that material causes the vulnerability - just magic, don't think about that? So there is a supernatural being superior in combat power than all of humanity, but if you have a prison shank, that means you'll win because it's iron? Wait, why not coat conventional weapons with that material then? Then their power level drops from extreme to meh.
Now, if you seek for a special weapon for humans to kill Angels, it should have the attribute of being barely better or less effective than the natural weapons of a jinn (why bother with using i.e. some magical sword if you can shoot lightning?), but being the most superior weapon for a human against an angel. This would explain why jinns don't bother with it, and angels just don't want it to be in the hand of humans.
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Options
1. Flaming swords. Angels are associated with flaming swords in Genesis. Given that the greatest threat to an angel is probably another angel, it's possible these swords have been made to kill or at least hurt angels.
2. Ice/water or darkness. Angels are almost always associated with fire and light. They are referred to as shining ones, ministers of flaming fire, stars, etcetera. It's possible then that their weakness may be the counter of themselves; ice/water and/or darkness.
3. Fall. Contrary to popular belief, angels have free will: they can sin, they can rebel, they can fall. It's not clear if a fallen angel loses power or not, but at the very least they would not be aligned with the others any more. Maybe the greatest weapon against angels isn't a thing but an ideology.
4. Imprisonment: angels can be imprisoned. We aren't given any details on how this is done, but it said to have been done multiple times. Perhaps the jinn have some sort of secret method/weapon that can entrap an angel.
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**A vulnerability might echo human foibles.**
[Nephilim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim): "*hybrid sons of fallen angels.*"
Now, Nephilim aren't half so difficult to kill as Angels, they can just be drowned, as God did in the time of Noah.
Simultaneously a source of shame, pride, fear and disgust, Nephilim inspire strong ambivalent feelings in Angels, but even an Angel has it's limits of endurance of emotional pain:
**My solution is, the searing pain which comes from being stabbed through the heart by the sharpened leg-bone of a drowned Nephilim.**
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## A Supernatural Weapon
The sword of fire is only one of many supernatural weapons. And there is no reason to limit yourself to only Judeo-Christian or Arabic traditions, if you presuppose the world traditions of supernatural beings are linked in some way.
The flaming sword was mentioned in several of the answers and comments, and could be a good weapon to consider. Another thing to consider is some form of spiritual superweapon. There are a few to consider, but we must consider the objective which is to scatter the spiritual body of the angelic being.
An angel, unlike a djinn / jinn, has an immortal soul. There is nothing in these traditions that I know of that suggests that the spirit cannot be altered. Many metaphysical thinkers have considered spirit as a form of energy. This energy can be altered. Such alteration could include dispersing.
Something like the Trishul / Trishula comes to mind as an example of an ethereal style weapon. The trick is that the weapon must contain a source of vast energy, in the trishula it is described as solar energy. The energy from the weapon is capable of killing the ethereal gods of the Hindi culture, and can be considered similar to the flaming sword. What must happen when an angel is struck is that the energetic weapon would create a burst of energy dispersing the angel's spirit.
The weapon could be a thrown weapon as well, such as the Sudarshana Chakra, or a Zeus style (one time use) lightning bolt. All could be dispersive weapons that essentially disintegrate the angels for a long time (perhaps a thousand years). If the soul is captured after the strike it could be imprisoned in a powerful vessel. This is an effective workaround to the immortal soul of the angel.
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# A mythic trick
(in the same way that fairytale characters might defeat the devil, for instance)
(it's fairly late here and I'm not sure this answer makes any sense to anyone except me, but I spent too long on it so bad luck)
Angels are sometimes said to have no free will, but rather some kind of divine purpose. Engineer a situation in which it is no longer possible for one to fulfill its purpose while still being an angel, and it won't be a problem any more. What I'm thinking of here is some kind of circumstance where its angel-ness, existence or something else without which it can't contribute to the war is in direct conflict with something else in its nature. Now, normally the only way to put someone in a situation like that is to have [absolute](http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/the-lion-v-vii) [power](http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/letters-column-for-june-2006-how-to-intimidate-fire-creature) over them, but since jinn are *magic* they can be permitted some level of ability to declare things arbitrarily True.
That's pretty abstract so I'll try to come up with an example even though I'm not very good at it. It's sometimes said that entities such as mountains and seas (and more often in a world with humans, nations and cities) have a specific angel attendant on them. If that's the case, then by forcing an angel to choose between defending the part of creation it's responsible for and the broader jinn war, it can have no legitimate options (where a non-angel would be able to choose to forsake one or the other responsibility). The trick is that if you make a magic hammer that can crack a mountain and go to use it on a particular angel's mountain, the angel will just fight back and probably win (since defending the mountain is its purpose). Whereas if you make a magic hammer that can crack a mountain only if the jinn carrying it is killed, and you can get close enough to be able to use it, then the angel can neither fight and lose their mountain nor leave an enemy combatant in a holy war to go on their merry way. Where that leaves it is unclear, perhaps a fallen angel or simply turning out never having existed in the first place since the divine plan anticipated this moment from the beginning, but in any case it's no longer a threat.
This is a lot of effort for each angel, so it'll take you quite a while to clear a pinhead, but fighting angels was always going to be a long-term guerilla effort pretty much whoever you are
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## What is Angel-Kryptonite?
From your short intro, it sounds like you're looking for some material to basically act upon Angels in the same way that Kryptonite acts upon Superman, that silver acts on werewolves, that garlic acts on vampires, etc. The folklore you've scoured seems to have already provided such a form of [Supernatural Repellent](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SupernaturalRepellent) for one faction in your story... but you're now left trying to balance the scales by finding a counterpoint for the other faction(s).
If there is no obvious direct counterpoint to be found directly from Abrahamic source materials, then you may have to take liberties and branch out into other mythos to find a suitable replacement for your particular fictional setting (or simply invent one). As such, there are a few general paths that one might choose to follow:
* **Silver Has Mystic Powers** - The silver-bullet meme/trope has solidly caught on in modern vampire/werewolf fiction as a general "Supernatural Repellent" and, as such, might be readily adapted to your own setting. Unfortunately for your particular outline, this trope either tends to apply universally against "The Supernatural", or to apply selectively with an *alignment* of "good" (in contrast to "evil"). This, generally speaking, would make "silver harms angels" feel counterintuitive in your particular asymmetric application... except for the (in-universe) "fact" that "iron harms jinn" has a strong *"like cures like"* quality/feel to it that might overwrite the usual logic in your fictional universe. (The dichotomy of bright-metal versus dark-metal might also be played up in-universe as well.)
* **Noble Metals** - If one considers iron as an exemplar of the "Base Metals" then one could similarly view gold as be an exemplar of "Noble Metals". Similar to silver, the usual "alignment" of gold being "good" might make this feel a bit off unless one invokes a bit of a *"like cures like"* mindset. As a side benefit, this could play off the (Disney?) trope of Jinn having gold jewelry - as it would be a form of protection.
* **Alchemy** - Since we're talking about ancient Arabian materials proto-science it makes sense to invoke al-Kimiya. Although a lot of the ideas are whimsical dead-ends from a modern chemistry perspective, there is quite a lot of varied source material symbolism available for fleshing out a fictional magic system. One such symbolic dichotomy could be to invoke the symbols ‚ôÇ and ‚ôÄ, which are most well known now as representing man and woman, but also represent in various alchemical symbolism the planets Mars and Venus or the metals Iron and Copper. There are lots of other options to play with, though; all seven known "Metals of Antiquity" have their own unique symbols. Mercury/quicksilver has a cool symbol ‚òø and furthermore being a very "weird" metal (e.g. it's a freakin' liquid) might be a fitting choice for "weird" not-just-humans-with-wings angels. There are also symbols for plenty of other non-metals - from carbon to salt to gunpowder.
Really, there are a lot of directions you could go, and the only real barrier to your success is maintaining *"suspension of disbelief"*... and so as long as you aren't evoking something strangely-modern like Berkelium or Uranium-238 you should be fine.
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A powerful and particularly trained jinn may be able, once in a while, to give away a huge amount of his own vital force to create a small amount of space that's exclusive to him, he's the only one that could ever get access to that space, and again, at the expenses of his own vital force. The jinn would need years to recover from such loss of power.
This could be used to trap an angel, or even more than one if they fit, inside of a nowhere for the eternity.
This way of getting rid of angels, also leaves the door open for things like: angels looking for a particular jinn, who supposedly got rid of their loved ones about a thousand years ago.
This may be worse than death, both for the trapped angels and for those who never loose the hope of getting back their loved ones.
The more angels, or the more high ranked and respected are the angels trapped by a jinn, and the more he becomes unkillable. Angels may not want to lose the possibility of getting someone back, no matter how remote this possibility may be.
I am no jinn expert and I don't know what are the rules here, so I apologize if I am being somehow blasfemic.
I just thought that this was an interesting idea that leaves a lot of space to your imagination and how you want the events to unfold.
If jinns are somewhat related to God, this power can be justified as a tiny anologous of God being able to create the space in which everyone is "trapped".
Also in the pop culture version that they are not meant to resemble, jinns live within a small amount of space that's exclusive to them. I would buy such story.
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If we proceed from the idea that an angel consists of light, then: all the same rules should apply to him as to light (if God is not a cheater). First of all, jinn are able to generate light (fire = plasma), it remains only to select the frequency of the angel and we can get a standing wave... in the case of an angel, this is not lethal, but he will not be able to do anything anymore (as long as we submit an energy to neutralise the angel). By the way, the names of the angels probably contain information about his "frequency". Option two is more fabulous: people are created in the image and likeness of god + it was they who caused the angels to rise, since events occur before their appearance, then maybe the whole "jinn game" is needed to create soldiers like God, I personally find it ironic.
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Their claws. This would give a big advantage to the angels because the jinns have to get close. But the jinns could outnumber the angels.
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## God
God is the only thing that can kill angels, harm them, erase them from existence or **make them vulnerable.**
The war between angels and jinns is part of God's plan. It is a game of balance, a show-off between good and evil. God rendered angels vulnerable to the fire of jinns during the war so there could be some balance per his justice but he still knew that angels would overcome jinns. God possibly killed some angels during the war also to maintain some balance, or for a display of balance.
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You could use artifacts that were blessed by god to hurt or possibly destroy an angel like the staff of Moses, the ark of the covenant, or the spear of Lance of Longinus.
Also if that doesn't work, you could take a page from dragon ball super (evil containment wave) and seal away the angels into a jar or artifact.
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[
My question isn't about whether constant acceleration can create artificial gravity, as I know that [it can](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/157220/would-there-be-artificial-gravity-on-a-spaceship-that-undergoes-constant-acceler). I am thinking more about worldbuilding in the sense of a practical transportation system where that would occur.
I'm treating as a given that zero-gravity is not livable. I'm basing this off what our [current science tells us](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0393339912) that zero gravity is not workable for humans except as an endurance test. And life beyond plants and single-cell organisms is not going to be make it without at least a little gravity.
In my setting, humans are now essentially "trans-humans" having done genetic engineering hard to better live in space: bones and muscles grow freakishly without cues from gravity, cells can repair themselves from radiation and cosmic ray exposure, and there are small things like strong resilience to the coriolis effect. So humans and other engineered life are fine with at least low gravity.
I'm envisioning transportation in the solar system can be done "cheaply," i.e., by wheel or cylinder ships which accelerate hard, shortly, and then mostly drift while spinning, flung in a certain direction.
Then, more comfortable and rapid transportation is done via constant acceleration, powered by deuterium, H3, or Hand-Wavium if I must. We're only talking about intra-solar transportation here, [EDIT: intra-solar system, not through the sun] so nothing needs to be an outrageous amount of acceleration, anything where people experience fairly low, sub-luna gravity up to 1G.
My ships may look like a flying saucer, for instance, and go through an atmosphere flying horizontally, like a traditional saucer image. But once in space and accelerating, they are flipped in a way which would look like they're vertical, which would allow the people inside to have acceleration still giving them a sense of gravity letting them sense what is the overhead and what is the deck the same as when flying horizontally within gravity.
Here's my question about constant-acceleration gravity, though. You obviously have to calculate it in such a way where you'll flip over roughly halfway in your trip start expelling thrust in the opposite direction to slow down.
Obviously, once the ship stops accelerating in a certain direction, everything inside is weightless. My question is what happens with the g-forces when the ship flips over and starts accelerating (maybe at the same rate?) in the other direction to slow down on the second half of the trip?
Would beginning to accelerate in the opposite direction with the same thrust, simply feel the same as the first part of the journey to the passengers, assuming they've flipped over? Or would the bodies inside experience the extreme discomfort like when I'm in a passenger train which is decelerating rapidly to slow down to come into a station? (A sensation I would not like to experience for more than a few minutes.) Or something else?
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Turnover point doesn't need a period of zero-g or any kind of noticeable effect on the passengers. Simply *don't stop thrusting*.
That is, when you get to the halfway point of the trajectory you start slowly turning the ship around while keeping your thrust at normal level. If you do your turn slowly enough, your passengers won't notice a thing, say over a period of 5 minutes. You do thrust sideways for a couple minutes, pushing you 'off course', but you can easily account for that in your original trajectory plan. At the end of the turn your ship has turned 180 degrees and is now slowing down.
This way your passengers constantly experience the comfortable 'gravity' from the thrust without having to endure a period of zero-g. And done slow enough the turn is unnoticeable to humans.
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They should be fine.
Slowing down in a train is more uncomfortable than speeding up because the acceleration is directed outward through your chest and face, pushing them ahead of you, rather than pushing you back into your seat, which people can generally tolerate a little better. If your seats rotated around 180 degrees before the train slowed down, though, you'd get the more tolerable pushed-back sensation in *both* cases.
If the ship is lined up with its thrust vector in the same way while speeding up and slowing down (living quarters are stacked vertically over the engine), though, the acceleration that passengers observe will be down towards the floor in both cases, so they should feel no different on either leg of the journey.
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It should be noted that (unlike a train) a ship can reverse the direction of thrust relative to its destination, *without* significantly changing the direction *or amount* of relative thrust (/acceleration/gravity) experienced by it's occupants. The ship merely needs to slowly swing it's tail around while continuing to thrust at 1G. This is *slighty* less efficient as you need make a slight bend/course correction in your path, but that's it.
The only discrepancy would be the centripetal forces experienced by the swing, which could be minimized both by rotating more slowly and/or by swinging in a wider arc. This could definitely be reduced to the point where passengers wouldn't even notice it.
In short, there's no need for your passengers to experience *any* disruption of their apparent gravity (until you dock or land, that's a different story).
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You don't shut down for the flip and you don't adjust the orbit other than in a tiny amount around the time of flip. I first read about this in Heinlein as a *torchship skew turn*.
Basically, think of it as an exercise in symmetry - within a short segment of the trajectory, you have to *over-rotate* after turning, enough to compensate for the pertubation of orbit by starting to turn with the drive on.
So, depending on the duration of the turn, relative to total trajectory, and power of the drive, the shape of the *skew* is not entirely symmetrical. The *second half* not only directly compensates for the original skew shape but is affected by how your total trajectory has been changed.
Naively, for example, say for gravitationally-warped reasons, your trajectory represents a continuous curve in two dimensions. The turn would be performed at right-angles to that curve so as to disturb it the least, so looking in one *view* the curve would have an undisturbed smooth shape. Viewed as a "plan view" from 90 degrees, the straight line of the trajectory would have a little wiggle in it representing the skew turn.
(I have both worked as a programmer on 3D CAD for a few years and done house planning so I tend to think in 2D "views" as projections).
Skew turns are mentioned in passing, without explanation of how the turn works [from this site](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php)
## Gotcha
I just thought of one thing that might be an issue depending on drive type - if your engine is blasting out radioactive particles you're now flying the ship (backwards) into that exhaust.
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Lack of gravity is only a problem for the human body if has to be endured for an extended period of time. If your ships have high power drives then presumably their maneuvering thrusters should be fairly efficient as well. So no problems winding down the main engines just long enough to flip. The whole process would at worst only take a couple of hours to perform. Your greatest danger would be passengers who or newbie crew members needing a barf bag.
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Your passengers would experience less and less gravity, weightlessness, and then more and more gravity as the spacecraft stopped accelerating, flipped over, and then decelerated. It would be somewhat like a ride on the Vomit Comet, albeit for a much longer duration. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V9h42yspbo) describing the experience. It wouldn't be deadly by any means, but there's a chance of people getting motion sickness in the transition. Once you've flipped over, the g-forces would feel exactly the same as they did on your way to the planet. You'll be able to walk around and feel a firm surface underfoot.
I'm actually more concerned about the transition to atmospheric flight. You would want to be careful about transitioning from moving vertically (from the perspective of your passengers) to horizontally. It's doable, but if you're not careful you could end up in a situation where you are trying to enter the atmosphere sideways while your passengers aren't yet experiencing the planet's full gravity. So they would go from feeling the same sensation that we have on Earth (gravity pulling firmly downward) to the sensation of less gravity and moving sideways. Again, not a dealbreaker but you should keep those air sickness bags handy.
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I'm building a whole new world for a table top RPG so I don't want to completely alienate my players from the world. But if I want to include horses or whales, do I need to reinvent the wheel and make a "horse-like" creature instead? What are the drawbacks?
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> "Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.
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> "In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.
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> "If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out.
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-- Isaac Asimov's introduction to *Nightfall* (with Robert Silverberg), 1990
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Well, you're not only building a world, you're also building a game, and this changes everything.
**If you want an immersive experience** with a world that feels different, brand new creatures are a must. They can be "inspired" from earth creatures, but in the end this won't be a "we changed the skins but they are the same" output, as every change will have cultural and practical results. But it will be awesome.
On the other hand, **if you don't want to have to explain everything all the time**, using earth-like creatures will both save you an insane amount of brain-time and will help your players to better imagine what you're speaking about.
Remember, this isn't a novel, it's a shared fantasy with your players. With a role playing game, it's generally accepted that the endgame isn't the worldbuilding or the balance within the rules, but the fun itself. So... this world you're building, in the end it's a tool to improve on this. To have fun.
If your game is about immersion and you (and your players) don't mind the descriptions, full creation is great. Sometimes, a horse can be much more than a horse.
If your game is about actions, you can use archetypes and hit the ground running! After all, your players know what the concept of a horse is, so they can hit the ground running. If you do it this way, don't change the names, as it would be counter-productive for you to create a world with easy-to-understand concepts... and then make sure nobody gets them at a glance. These are tools to your game. Use them properly.
You can go halfway, too. To introduce a "horse-like creature" is a good way to minimize descriptions and explanations while keeping a door open on exotic creatures and cultures. You have to be more careful, though, because your players might assume some things about these earth-like creatures, and if you see things differently it will fudge their plans and lesser the overall experience. This is still the way most authors and developers go.
Whatever you do, in the end, always remember this this is for fun. Yours and you players.
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The technical term for this is 'calling a rabbit a smeerp'. In other words, taking something which exists on Earth and give it an alien name just for show. The rule of thumb when writing is to only call alien things by alien names when they are functionally distinguished from the Earth counterparts. Not merely different, but perform a functionally different role.
So, say a normal rabbit - not a smeerp. A blue rabbit - a bit better, but not exactly a smeerp. Maybe drop a line about it. A blue rabbit which has poisonous fangs and can see in the dark - smeerp!
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Ursula K. Le Guin (tried to find the original text from her but didn't) wrote something about neologisms. It was about tech (not creatures). She said that if something is well known, use it (don't rename it). That sci-fi is a bigger thing than your story, a growing body, where things are created and live.
So for creatures, I usually use the same reasoning. If it's a horse, I call it horse. If it's a horse with wings, I call it a winged-horse or a flying horse. I also use general expressions from biology, like quadruped and herbivore for alien fauna, instead of making up new terms.
If you look up scientific names, classes, expressions from earth's biology they are actually very surprising and alien. They can be a great source of inspiration.
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**Vary the familiar within the landscape of the known.**
If you make everything weird and invented, it can feel contrived. Readers / players have to learn everything new.
If you have a "strange new world" but your characters are basically cowboys, it feels lazy.
I propose you vary the familiar within the realm of the known. Examples:
* In the movie Princess Mononoke, Prince Ashitaka rides a red elk. There were horses in the movie, but having him ride an elk set him apart from the people around him. An elk is not that weird. For its part in the story his elk could almost have been a horse - a large quadruped, loyal, herbivorous. But when it did things like jump very far that could be explained by the fact that is was an elk.
+ In the book Hiero's Journey (an inspiration for many far future post apocalyptic SF scenarios), Hiero rides a psychic moose. It is horselike for purposes of being a mount but it has some other abilities. Fun stuff and also not super outré because most folks are familiar with the starting point of "moose". Plus mooses are great.
If horses seem boring but you don't want the place your characters sit to be the focal point of novelty and innovation, use a real nonhorse animal for your mounts. Choose according to the ecosystem your players will traverse. Remember that people rode wagons and then chariots before they rode atop horses. There are more animals that could pull a chariot than could be ridden with a saddle. Chariots are not weird inventions but neither are they what cowboys and knights ride.
I once spoke with a zookeeper at the San Diego who clearly had a rapport with the giraffes. I asked if he thought they would pull him in a chariot and he got very happy speculating about how that might be done - clearly an idea that sparked his imagination.
Re whales - whales are pretty spectacular as is. An omnivorous whale would be interesting for an RPG. Seeing a blue whale rip into a carcass would be pretty alarming. There are lots of other real creatures which could or did fill the niche of whales in the history of the world. Or you could use sea monsters - Heuvelmans categorzied them in his book In the Wake of the Sea Serpents and you could borrow some of his. <https://mythology.wikia.org/wiki/Sea_serpent>
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My rule of thumb is that if it fulfils a similar function or fills a similar niche then call it by the name but you can point out the differences. Above all keep it simple.
It can be saddled and ridden then why not just call it a horse? It may have scales and antennae but it fulfils the function of a horse, just refer to it first time as a scaly-reptilian horse and thereafter just a horse.
In-game you may need to specify the horse in detail for encounters, combat etc. and deal with scaly armour or night vision but then in any normal fantasy RPG a horse needs to be specified as there is a huge difference between a Hobbit's pack pony and the furious ton of meat, muscle and armour that is a Paladin's war horse.
If you create a whole new creature then by all means name it or if you create an animal that either does not have an earth parallel or else has too many parallels then name it . For example if you have a long thin furry legless creature that lives under ground is it an elongated legless ferret? A furry snake-mole?
The only other thing I would suggest is that if this is a new world colonised by immigrants (like the US or Australia) then the immigrants tend to bring with then names from the old country. Many 'New World' places were named after the hometown of the settlers, similarly many animals were named for similar looking animals from home. There is a robin in the US named after the European robin just because it looks similar-ish.
In your world it is plausible, if not expected, for the incomers to name a horse-like creature a horse.
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I don't know if this would be annoying for the players, but I would use different spelling and unicode characters to slightly alter the spelling of the word, make it recognizable and readable, but alien enough that in the mind of the player/reader it can easily be some other creature
For example,
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> a rabbit could be a rābeet
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> a cat could be a katt
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> a dog would be a Ɖǒǥ
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So you would choose a font that has all of these characters, in a way making your own alphabet used only for creatures, places, general objects (maybe you also have some special swoūrd that has a really weird shape, but cuts like a sword), but not for regular story telling.
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You can take the example video games set (since you're also building your world for a game). Basically, in video games, most worlds are just like Earth, until they're not. What does that mean? They use the Earth template as long as it suits them, whenever this template needs editing (new creatures, new deities, new races, etc) they do just that. For example, The Witcher series added a lot of creatures, while still keeping some that are familiar to us. Everything else is pretty similar to medieval Earth. The Elder Scrolls series added magic and deities, while still using the medieval Earth template. Also, they can remove items from the template that don't suit them, just like the Fallout series did with the [transistor](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Transistor). I think this is what you should do with your world, build it like Earth, and alter it in ways that suit your objectives.
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Imagine a world in which everyone looks and sounds exactly the same. Age and sex simply do not exist. This world has always been like this.
Also imagine that everyone in this world is still an individual, identity is still desired, and not everyone is always honest.
How does one, in personal, public and legal environments, ensure the preservation of their personal identity - and more importantly minimise the chances of their identity being taken on by others?
Fingerprints and retina scans are exactly the same.
Legally speaking, how does one confirm any given identity in the above situation?
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Practically speaking, you've described the Internet. On a basic level, every connection appears to a web server the same way: as an IP address with maybe some possibly-falsified identification tacked on. Unsurprisingly, there's been a *lot* of research into how to certifiably identify people on the Internet, and we can can use many similar methods in our hypothetical society.
## Body Modification and Personal Style
For day-to-day, on-the-street identification, clothing and accessories as well as more permanent body modification such as hairstyles, piercings, tattoos, and scarification would all provide a means of identifying individuals. This is analogous to the screen names, email addresses, and whatnot that people use and reuse throughout the net. It wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but it's quick and simple as long as everyone's more-or-less buying into the system and playing along (e.g. not deliberately cribbing one another's styles).
## Friend-of-a-Friend and Public Recognition
As a slightly more secure method of introduction, look for the personal connection. How do you know who someone else is? Either ask someone you trust, or ask a bunch of other people who would know.
Of course, if that doesn't resolve the issue, go to the next section to use more secure methods.
## Secret Knowledge and Cryptographic Methods
For the most secure situations, you'd want to use some of the cryptographic techniques that have been developed to definitely identify oneself online. Think [public-private keys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography) and similar methods. I admit that this isn't my area of expertise, so I'll let others better-informed weigh in, but I can imagine a central public-key registry that is used to verify that the individual claiming to be Bob knows Bob's private passkey.
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Your statement that "this world has always been like this" negates any technological solution. The species must, until the development of any technology or even clothing, have had a non-visual way of identifying each other.
**People who all look the same may very well not notice visual differences in others, because those aren't the markers they use identify others.**
Smell is the most animal of the non-visual identifiers, humans aren't very good at identifying each others smells, but there's no reason this should be true of your species.
Their identical appearance suggests also that they're non-visual in other ways, so when they start to seek ways to personalise their appearance to others, it may not be visual that they go for. We would start by thinking about facial markings, clothes and hairstyles, but these are all visual. They may start thinking about modifying smell, sound or maybe rhythm of movement.
*It's important when considering a species like this to avoid getting stuck in our very visual mindset.*
Sounding the same also suggests that they're primarily non-verbal. Languages and accents spring up very quickly among disparate groups. So the audible language they use is a recent convenience for some reason. What is their primary means of communication? Because personality will carry across in that, as will regional or family mannerisms.
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* In personal environment:
How do you differentiate perfect twins? Mostly through their clothes and the way they behave/talk. It would be the same in your world.
* In a public environment :
Each person constantly carries a nametag on his chest specifying his unique ID and his role in society.
* In a legal environment :
Fingerprint and retina scans can differentiate perfect twins because they are random for each person. It would be the same in your world, when you really need to be sure the person is who he/she claims to be you can use these scientific methods.
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**Skin marks**
Like scars, moles, etc. The skin of every living being is under constant attack by many things and can't recover perfectly from everything and eventually something will be visible and permanent.
The effect would be that newborn babies are completely indistinguishable, but as they grow older, they become more different.
Now, let's assume that the skin of these aliens regenerates impossibly well and nothing under heavy mutilation would prevent it from recovering to the common state. And that they all dress the same and that they need to identify people across the room, beyond smell range.
**Body movement**
Any 3D animator could tell you how much information the simple act of walking can tell you about someone. Everyone walks differently, makes different gestures, different tics, etc.
We humans already realize of so much of this that we can sort of distinguish someone we know deeply from an otherwise perfect imitator. An alien species that rely on this could just get to that phase much quicker.
Also these aliens would come as total creeps to humans, since they'd have to observe (and stare at :) people for a while to be able to identify someone in different situations.
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Given your stipulations, I still think it would be easy to subvert the "everyone looks the same" thing, by using tattoos.
* Facial tattoos would allow people to make themselves instantly recognisable. In the world you've described, where people yearn for an identity, I would expect pretty much everybody to have one. The few exceptions would actually stand out more despite being identical. Unscrupulous individuals might try to copy the tattoos of others in order to pass themselves off as the other person. Identity theft in its purest form. These people might use temporary tattoos to enable to them to change identity, but I think most people would want their marks to be permanent because the whole point is that they become part of your identity.
* Tattoos on hidden parts of the body would be useful for private identification. Anything from proof of identity at the bank to recognising your lover.
Note that tattoos don't have to be done with ink. If your setup means that regular tattoo parlours might not exist, people could still do this. Some traditional societies marked themselves by using a sharp knife and pigments made from plants. It may be more painful than modern methods, but people who really want to be unique will go to great lengths to achieve it. Other kinds of disfigurement might also be added into the mix -- ear notches, tongue splitting, tooth filing... not things I'd consider, but if they can make you stand out from the crowd then your protagonists would be willing.
Doing it this way would also make it a lot harder for dishonest people to fake it; a temporary tattoo that can wash off just isn't going to be an option for impersonating someone with patterns gouged into their face.
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ID chips are implanted into the body. In order to identify a person, the chip needs to be scanned.
Technology is available already today, like RFID chips.
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Effectively this population of phenotypically identical emortals constitutes a population of unageing twins. Like twins their fingerprints and retinal patterns will not be identical.
Therefore, persons can be registered by their fingerprints and/or their retinal patterns. The technology to read fingerprints and retinal patterns, especially if their application is required on the scale to identify persons within a sufficiently large population, is relatively trivial for a society with advanced enough technology to support an unageing population.
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I would say "language". Every person would have a different way to choose words and expressions, and their world view and psychological status is reflected in how they speak.
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This is a suitably low tech solution. Tattoo a suitable identification tag or code somewhere on their bodies where it can be easily seen. For example, on their foreheads.
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> A tattoo is a permanent mark made by putting ink into the skin. Tattoos may be made on human or animal skin. Tattoos on humans are a type of body modification (a way of changing the body), but tattoos on animals are most often used for identification. People sometimes get tattoos to show that they belong to a gang or culture group.
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Source is [here](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattoo)
The identification tag can be bar code, if their technology has progressed to the equivalent of the later twentieth century or simply their name or it could be registration identification code like vehicle number plates. The later preserves their anonymity while helping to make them identifiable.
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I notice that a number of solutions assume a certain level of technology (i.e., ability to implant RFID chips or do a tattoo).
Different methods that apply to a low(er)-tech culture might include:
* Evolutionary:
+ Difference in pheromones or chemical secretions.
+ Difference in taste (think: a sentient race that licks one another in greeting).
* Someone made an excellent point about not getting fixated on the visual, but if visual differentiation is necessary, what about cultural scarring?
+ Each major life event could/would be represented by the addition of a new scar.
+ A person's life history could be read at a glance by looking at them.
+ An abbreviated version of their life's history could serve as a "name" or verbal identifier, and could change over time (i.e., "Richest man in village" over time might become "Poor man who was once richest man in village" or "Poor Rich Man").
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Logically speaking, if there is a need to differentiate between two identical humans, there must be a way to differentiate the two otherwise there would be no need to differentiate them.
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If the "world has always been this way" then there would be other methods in which to identify people. If everyone is identical down even to the retina and fingerprint scans, then non-genetic methods would be used.
Whatever the method, the members of this society would be significantly better at identifying these differences than outsiders. Think of someone who is blind, would enhance the abilities of touch and hearing. In fact, a society which evolved ignoring physical characteristics would be LESS LIKELY to focus on the physical appearance (no tattoos, etc), but instead would focus on attributes that demonstrate the most meaning to them.
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What are the practical reasons advanced for sapient aliens to want to uplift our species to a higher level of intelligence or sapience?
This question is a reaction to this one. [Reasons an advanced alien race might want to share technology with humanity?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53667/reasons-an-advanced-alien-race-might-want-to-uplift-humanity)
Because that question dealt with technology transfer rather uplifting in its original sense, and as coined by David Brin, of raising the intelligence level of a species to a higher one.
Think of raising the sapience of a sheep dog to that of a human being. The advanced aliens are offering to uplift humans by a similar amount. Why would they do it?
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Reasons for the uplift:
* **Communication is difficult.** We are simply too stupid for them to communicate with us fully, and some factions don't believe it is fair to take from our planet without an uplift. Likely they will have a "Jane Goodall" type figure who insists that we are intelligent enough to communicate with and insists that we be uplifted so that deals can be made or that resources shouldn't be taken at all.
* **They think of us as pets** They have limited communication with us and think it would just be the best if we could talk as they do. Sort of a "if dogs could talk situation." Because communication is always measured by the species looking at it.
* **Pure Science** They'll want to do it because they can, because they want to see the results and/or because they've done everything else, and the development of a species is exciting.
* **The way we think is unique** Our method of thinking can advance them, if only we were a little more advanced ourselves. Whether they need it to fight an enemy or advance their society, they see a potential that they need.
* **Because without an uplift they fear war** They believe that we will wage war on them because we are not smart enough to see the bigger picture. They hope that the added intelligence will keep the peace.
* **They need us for a war** They may or may not be warlike, but they are facing a foe which threatens them, and us. We cannot even use their tech because we are not smart enough to do so. They need viable allies and cannon fodder, so they lift us up. They may have even brought the war to our doorstep on purpose so that we would agree.
* **They pity us.** They think of us as children with access to nukes. The uplift is fairly easy for them to accomplish and they want to help.
* **They are paying it forward.** For whatever reason, they were uplifted by another race, and because it is part of their culture, they wish to do the same. For years they have searched, and found that we would benefit the most and it's easiest to do with their tech. In a twist, they can be US, but seeded in another galaxy by another race, and uplifted. We were the control group...
* **The uplift is a sinister method of control** It's a kind of Trojan horse. A gift that also allows them to kill whoever needs culling or control the population in some way.
* **The uplift is actually an organism** It's some kind of parasite or somesuch which wishes to be spread over the entire galaxy. They'd rather we agree. The host race's entire thing is to spread it as far as possible. Benefits outweigh the costs, so they would want us to agree. Could create a hive-mind or ability to process info at a much faster rate.
* **They only eat beings of a certain intelligence** At our current intelligence, we are not sustenance for them. But with just a little more, we are now a delicious source of psychic energy. Like farming, but... more dangerous.
* **Genetics Activate their tech** Their tech can only be run by people with a certain genetic marker. They stole the tech from an ancient civilization (or rediscovered it) and they have the marker which allows them to use the tech. Side effect of making you smarter.
* **Breeding** They have suffered population loss. They have a lot of tech, we have a larger population and a base of genetics. It's simply faster for them to change our genetics so that they can interbreed with us, than it would be for them to build up from scratch. Has the effect of uplifting humanity. It's not how they normally reproduce, but desperate times call for desperate measures. They will offer tech, advancement, and uplift in exchange for keeping them from dying out. If truly desperate, they may not give us any choice in the matter.
* **As a retirement plan**These aliens age differently than us, and concurrently. They are all getting old and know they will soon die. They wish to have uplifted caretakers at the end, and they want a legacy to live beyond them.
* **As part of the puzzle of the universe** What's the answer to life, the universe and everything? These aliens don't know yet, but they know where to find it. They've found ancient clues that lead them to believe various races at various stages of development will hold a piece of the puzzle. If we are lucky, this will result in an uplift. If we are not, it's back to the stone age for us. For extra pathos, we get uplifted and then they figure out the next piece is Cro-mag man--and we get a major downgrade.
* **To build the ultimate intelligence** These aliens value creative and intelligent thinking above all else (this is a variation on **the way we think is unique**) and they wish to build the ultimate intelligence. The only way to do that is to uplift various species and then experiment on them, to find out what makes their thought patterns unique, and then work to combine them into a sort of uber intelligence. Most of the population will simply enjoy the uplift. But a few would be marked for experimentation. Chances that these very smart lab rats will escape are high and could lead to adventure.
* **Belief in their own superiority/making copies of themselves** These aliens believe that they are the very pinnacle of intelligence and genetics. All advanced races should be as they are. When they find a sufficiently advanced civilization, they make them better, by making them like the alien race. They would not ask. People are more intelligent, but are no longer human.
* **To Call Forth Into the Void** In the My Teacher is An Alien series, I do recall an individual being uplifted in order to eventually serve as a kind of radio transmitter in order to contact the alien's people. In this case, the aliens need a whole planet of uplifted people to transmit into the void, where their true masters lie. Initial trials will just reveal an uplift, because a larger population is needed for the effect/transmission to take hold. (As to what the message is when they call--it could be anything: "we tire of this world and immortality, come and kill us please." or "Dinner is served." (We being the dinner) or "Please rescue us from this backward dimension." With the first and last, the aliens would disappear, leaving us with a headache, many questions, and perhaps a permanent uplift.
* **Because the uplift is contagious** Any species they come in contact with that has the correct set of genetics will be uplifted. It's a function of their alien biology. As such, they are very careful about who they actually meet outside of hazmat suits. Either it stops with us, or we gain the same trait of passing the uplift on automatically. It's possible that most species they uplift don't "pass it on" so they may be surprised that we can. In this way, it would take just one or a few of us being uplifted, and it may spread over the planet like a virus. Finding out that we can spread it as well, once they accidently expose a few of us and isolate those individuals before it goes planet-wide, may lead them to want to offer it, because we are more like them than anyone they've encountered.
* **Mars needs moms/dads** They have children in abundance in cycles, but don't have enough individuals to care properly for their children. Automation is cold--they wish to have living caretakers for their children. We have a large population, but we are too primitive to take care care of their offspring. They offer an upgrade so that they can have us care for them in the next cycle.
* **Real Estate/Profit** That's right, I said real estate. These aliens are terraformers bent on making a profit. They'd like to terraform planets nearby (in another solar system) and eventually our solar system. The problem is, the neighborhood is just terrible. All these primitive humans right next door. They offer the uplift so that the property values the next solar system over will make it worthwhile for them and they can sell it to the intellectual elitist aliens. And, they figure that once we get the uplift, we'll want to be customers. This assumes a very busy universe full of customers and other aliens.
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Because accepting the uplift also carries the obligation to offer to uplift others under the same terms. It’s a [viral licence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license).
The whole thing is a plan to get evolved intelligences, which are generally warlike, irrational in large groups, and spamming the galactic communications, to “grow up” and make the galaxy safe for all.
Uplift isn’t just smarter as in able to solve more problems, but rational and better able to play nice with others.
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Similar to [Rory's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/53873/10429), I asked myself *"Would I uplift my dog?"* - Yes *"Would I uplift ants?"* - Yes. But why?
And the answer really is *because I could*, and *just to see what would happen*. What would making ants smarter do to their society? We are a species who are very interested in exploring the unknown and learning new things about other species, because it tells us a little more about ourselves. I would suggest that the alien species have this same impulse.
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This looks somewhat related to the anthill theory. But where the alien race would like to lift the "ants" or humans to a level where they could communicate with us.
Why would they do that? Beside being the good guys and being ok with it as Z.Schroeder suggested in his question, they might actually need us.
If the race would be something like eg. predators that uses artifact weapons they looted from other races, but are unable to produce their own. They might need our creative thinking, pattern recognition and ingenuity to help them produce new weapons for their hunts.
A friend of mine told me that the mage in an RPG would buy the largest armor and sharpest steel, and give it to the warrior, because he would need his allegiance and strength to protect the meek body of the spell caster, while he is casting spells. If the aliens are fighting someone else, they might need meat shields capable and stupid enough to fight for almost any reason (humans).
Just two of a large amount of possible reasons.
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It happened by accident
My initial thought was build ship that is indestructible by a dog, so I did it by building the ship with grey goo. By coincidence this made the ship indestructible to meteors - but it's pure coincidence.
Afterwards it was so good, I decided to entertain my dogs, as I have an opportunity to play with goo, which makes the dogs' existence entertaining on the ship. It also was entertaining to devise new entertainments for them, by playing with grey goo.
Now 10k years later, the descendants of the alpha dog demands I not slurp when I eat.
Probably I should skipped that *space dog scout* game, *find the alien* game, *dog hive mind* game, *find a bone in a planet* game - hm do not recall them all but they were fun times.
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**Because They Have Reached a Plateau**
Imagine for a moment that you are part of an ancient and extraordinarily long-lived super intelligent race. You mastered all realms of physics/mathematics/chemistry/biology (etc) to the best of your knowledge over a thousand years ago. For centuries now you have existed with deep curiosity (the trait that allowed you to reach this point), but very little is left to interest you.
At some point in your intergalactic travels you come across the human species. They are more advanced than the non-sentient creatures you have found recently, and you can see that they too are curious and always working towards their own self-interest. There are also billions of them.
An idea sparks! Your species has not been able to think of any new challenges or unravel any new secrets, and frankly your existence has become soul-sucking and empty. You will therefore uplift human intelligence, providing twofold benefits:
**1. Perhaps they will think of something you haven't**
Your biology, culture, and experiences long ago became stale, and it is logical to think that another group with a different set may be able to open new avenues for exploration that you had not considered.
**2. It is something to do.**
When you have mastered the secrets of the universe and are bored, something is better than nothing.
And if you want a twist...
Even though you gave them a lot more potential, you still installed a planet-destroying bomb in the planet's core and are preventing them from creating anything that could interfere with it or that would allow them to leave the planet. Technology be darned, you DO have them surrounded and can monitor them from space after all. If it all works out, great - let them live. If they're not helpful... well, you'll get a fireworks show before you cruise off to the next solar system.
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As you're well aware minister, the galaxy is 99% filled with spectacularly peaceful civilizations, who long ago in their evolutionary development realised that co-operation was the best way of achieving success not just for the individual, but also the collective. This lead not to just highly co-operative groups of single species, but planets with highly symbiotic lifeforms, with everything from the largest organism down to the smallest bacteria working together for the common good of all life on the planet.
These civilizations never fought an aggressive war in their entire histories, from stepping out the primordial ooze to reaching the stars and beyond. They only wars they've ever fought were defensive ones against the other 0.999% of the galaxy who were primarily made up of poor, desperate and struggling species battling to survive on border worlds at the edge of their respective solar systems Goldilocks zone. Once it was discovered that these wars were mostly about getting just enough food to survive another cycle, the civilized aliens simply started dropping food aid by the ton, the fighting ended pretty quickly, and negotiations on peace and integration began.
The only problem with this 99.999% peaceful utopia of a galaxy, is planet N3752-4A which is recorded in most galactic records as existing in a highly radioactive system of little significance. In reality it a highly habitable Gaia class planet ripe for colonization, called by its inhabitants "Earth".
However due to some form of cosmic evolutionary mishap, all life on the planet is either systematically attempting to kill all other life on the planet, or is so desperate to survive another day on the uninhabitable piece of rock that they live in perpetual hiding and fear of all other life on the planet making co-operation impossible.
Not to even mention the incredibly predatory bacteria and viruses. Compared to bacteria noted throughout the galaxy these killers prompted entire new fields of study into things the locals call "Infections" and "Plagues", which are frankly too disgusting to detail fully in polite conversation, however we'll provide the relevant details to your scientists on request.
The most developed species on the planet appears to have regular wars (We currently put the total in the thousands) with itself for sport, and some of the bigger ones even have sequels. They're currently in the process of developing a super weapon capable of destroying all life on the planet via the steady mass production of carbon dioxide with the intended goal of destroying the planets ecosystem. Major concerns have me noted that the species is currently in an early space age, and that they likely intend to leave the planet for places unknown once they've finished killing off the others. The chief researcher on site even went so far to hypothesize that they may attempt to "Infect" the rest of the galaxy like a "Plague".
We feel it might be in the Galactic interest to accelerate the planets evolution to the point were its inhabitants are capable of co-operation before intervention becomes impossible.
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Because however advanced they are, they still feel like the universe is a humongous, empty and cold sad place, and it's a low cost for them to uplift us and get the help of 8 billion new wet computers in their existential quest to make the universe less senseless
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Uplift is an economic harvesting technique. Our planet has many wonderful things which the aliens want. Our history, our culture, our art and our literature are all worth a fortune on the galactic market.
But it is illegal to trade with immature species. Much like our own laws which make contracts signed by children invalid, the galaxy sees trade with non-upgraded species as potentially exploitative, therefore illegal.
They uplift us so that they can invite us into their economy.
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Many humans would, if it were at all possible, uplift their cats and dogs. Because they love them and care for them, and would like to be able to communicate more fully - to have them as more of a companion.
I know I'd like my cat to be much smarter - so she could understand me when I ask her not to bring me more "presents"...
So would aliens want to uplift us because they care for us, or are annoyed by us being stupid enough to make a mess of our world? Maybe.
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Childhood's End by Arthur C Clark posits and interesting notion: that uplifting is how they reproduce. By elevating humanity to their non-corporeal state, they add our potential to their own.
There is another series where uplifting is basically what races do to get prestige and power in the galactic community. No species would let any one other species get too powerful, so a compromise is to uplift a species that serves you until they grow up enough to negotiate or fight their way free of you. For the life of me I can't remember what the series is called, but in it humans had uplifted apes and dolphins. The book I read was about a crew of humans, dolphins, and one ape that crashed on an ocean world.
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In [*A Deepness in the Sky*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky), the alien culture--in its current state--wasn't useful to the humans in orbit around their world.
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**Religion**
Why every one thinks advance aliens as non-believer species? They could have a religious duty to share the wisdom and technology with other races. In the end, they will ask us to believe in what they believe and with their gifts, we might just say yes.
Bring light to those who have none.
Bring wisdom to the fool for you have some.
Bestow them the intellect that is given to you,
So that they would understand the Collective Sun.
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Imagine you had traversed the know universe, then the unknown universe, then made a pit stop in the "kind of known but not that well" universe when your super advanced star ship, full of massively intellectual comrades, stumbles upon a signal coming from the third mud ball adjacent to a tiny star.
You decide to investigate. It takes a few days to decipher the language and over the course of the next few weeks you begin to realise that there are people who actually *want* Donald Trump to be president. After several discussions and debates you have decided that blowing the planet out of existence for this lack of intellect isn't quite the legacy you want to leave behind. The only option left would be to make the people more intelligent so they have a chance at realising how stupid they were to let themselves get so close to extinction.
Of course there is always that one person on a star ship of this kind that believes Donald Trump should also be uplifted, naturally leading to the construction of a wall around the milky way that your advanced race now has to pay for!
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Because all life that clings to the notion of exploration or even building advanced star ships that can travel light years of distance has something in common. It's safe to assume that on some basic level we must have something in common, such as the want or need to know something.
Helping us would in turn help them, unless their agenda is different. Then they could simply avoid us altogether or take us out with a Deathstar - whichever works.
I don't think the spirituality factor works on a stellar scale, a species so advanced would have transcended the principles of words and thoughts. To them the idea of spiritual reasoning would seem just as alien as the resounding choirs of church and space baptisms.
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Spirituality. They believe in a natural progression of all sapient beings towards an ultimate level. Humans are on a lower-to-middle level right now - quite intelligent, but obviously with much room for improvement (just look at all the wars, crime, greed,...). Part of the uplifting would be an immanent wisdom to end wars and poverty, and a deep understanding of the natural progression of sapient beings. Freed from these burdens and equipped with far more powerful minds, earth would join the other advanced species on their journey to the ultimate level, uplifting others species as well when they are found.
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Have you tried recruiting decent engineers lately? In order to maintain the technology of a galactic empire, you need lots of engineers. Uplift a species sufficiently and you won't run out of new talent.
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Same reason you build schools in third world countries.
Empathy.
For just pennies a day you can help earthlings free themselves from the ravages of poverty, war, and daytime talk shows.
Or maybe they just want us to live long enough to see how Game of Thrones ends.
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Don't ever give kalashnikovs to monkeys. It would be very funny, I know, but what if they chase you down to hell?
Every civilization should have evolved from basic forms of lifes and competition is the essential way to push evolution forward. Those aliens should be smart enough to not raise our technological level up to where we could pose a threat.
Someone above has mentioned a "proxy war strategy". I like that idea.
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In my scenario, all of current humanity on Earth and space is teleported to a whole new planet in a different universe with new laws of physics that mostly govern a magic system based on energy manipulation and different biology. Humanity is transported without anything from Earth, just with their own minds and clothes, and from then onwards, there are continuous wars and famines, resource wars and even more wars for over 100 years as new countries form and fall and fight over territory.
How long would it take for humanity to devolve into medieval level society and technology if the printing press is never reinvented and books about the old world are constantly burnt and destroyed from constant wars and the only method of knowledge of the old world being passed down is orally from one generation to another?
Edit: Due to stuff like no shelter, hard to find food and poisonous water, and of course, magic monsters that show up at night and are stronger than full grown African elephants, 7.5 billion people will die, only 500 million will remain after the first year. These 500 million would either be smart enough to trick the monsters, be able to group together and be able to make a base quick enough or would have enough mana to fight the monsters.
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How long would it take for a civilization to forget how it began?
* Definitely less than 5,000 years.
We know for sure that 5,000 years is enough -- the mainline western civilization began some 5,000 years ago and we definitely do not know how it began.
* There are good examples that 400 years may be enough.
Even a few hundred years may be enough. For example, the ancient Greeks in the 5th century BCE, when people like Herodotus or Xenophon or Thucydides were trying to inquire about history, had no idea how the Greek civilization began, and that beginning was not more than 400 years before their time.
P.S. About that devolution into medieval level society... Not going to happen. The western European medieval society, which is what is usually meant on this site when speaking of medieval anything without qualifications, was a unique and unrepeatable historical phenomenon, conditioned by a complex web of preconditions which is extremely unlikely to ever happen again elsewhere.
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**Myth or History?**
And, coupled with that question, what level of precision do you desire? As soon as they happen, events will be formed into a narrative which is used by the current generation to affirm their cultural identity. There may be a few experts who study the details and question the simplistic narrative. They may or may not be able to teach other experts, but most people will swallow the narrative hook, line, and sinker.
* "Lincoln fought the civil war to free the slaves." Or was it about preserving the Union?
* "Columbus discovered America." Except for all those people who were already there ...
* "Barbarians overran the Roman Empire and caused the Dark Ages." So dark, actually, that they improved the plow and horse harness, invented the compass, and many more.
And the teachings of a certain Jewish preacher who was crucified by the Romans got preserved in remarkable detail, even if the historical detail got mangled by subsequent authors.
Now imagine a bunch of people who all tell their post-transportation children stories about the *Old Earth* they came from, where food was there for the taking in the *supermarket* (never mind the plastic cards that were involved), *hot and cold running water* came out of walls, and people could take holiday trips in *airliners* to beautiful beaches. Sounds like a paradise, no? But many of the people who tell this story are literate. If they redevelop paper and ink before they die, there will be detailed accounts. And those accounts will probably spell out things like germ theory, basic chemistry, or the speed of light which may or may not hold true in your magical world. If there are germs, and so on, and the lessons from *Old Earth* work, then **your 'creation myth' gets much more believable.** Which makes it more likely to be preserved and transmitted.
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Basically, **as soon as most of the people with lived experience of Earth's civilisation die**. A few decades, perhaps. The main problem is that oral tradition is not very good for passing knowledge. It is good for passing instructions and stories, but these tend to be *practical* and knowledge of Earth's civilisation will not be of much use in a universe with different physics and biology.
And of course constant wars would create no shortage of things more important than a knowledge of faraway world to which you will never return.
But if it's any consolation, *some* things about Earth's civilisation may be remembered for millenia in the form of myths, similar to how the myth of the Flood can plausibly be a dim recollection of the sea level rise which followed the end of last ice age. But that wouldn't be anywhere near enough knowledge to rebuild civilisation to its present-day level; sorry.
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It depends on definition of "forget". Likely, never.
Let's see. 8 billion people teleported to a new planet. No technology, no agriculture, no tools. 80% would die in the first month from hunger and lack of shelter. By the end of the first year there would be a few millions survivors.
These people would be tough. "Fit" and lucky part of the humanity. Survivors. Lots of cannibals. They would be distributed all over the planet.
Fight over the territory - why? They would have an entire planet and there would be so few of them. There is no real reason for them to fight. Note - war always was expensive, it is only with industrialization humanity become able to support multi million armies. In the medieval period 10k was about what people could manage. Romans were better, but they were better at everything. Mostly in logistics though. They built a lot of roads in order to support the armies.
So, you have tough remnants of humanity distributed all over the new planet. They don't have much in the way of entertainment. They would tell stories. They would write stories. Hundreds of thousands of records, written for decades, all over the world. No printing press - even better, more unique records.
The oldest written document still surviving is ~5200 years old, and that was from a tiny civilization which just invented the idea of writing. Millions of people from all over the world distributed all over the new world - the records would be like cockroaches. Indestructible.
The technology itself would be lost - no technical artifacts, potentially not working technologies due to different physics, too many dead to restore and maintain technological level. But general approach to science would survive. Scientific method. Observation, explanation, testing. They would figure out the new physics, chemistry and magic pretty fast.
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If I look at myself, I have heard stories of WWII through my grandfather and other relatives who fought it, and the earlier thing I was told was the appearance of the first airplane flying above their village about 100 years ago.
With no history books nor historians, what I could know from the past would be limited to that. Anything before that fades into stories and legends, mixed in the memories of those who heard them.
With constant wars having 3 generations coexisting would be even more challenging, resulting in an even more short direct memory.
I would say 3 generations is a good limit.
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# Framing Question: how important is it, really, for this society to have come from modern civilization?
The reason I ask this is because I find the entire premise of how your world got to where it was very hard to believe for a number of reasons:
* People don't just have wars. Famines cause plenty of conflict and chaos, but aside from general civil unrest of people fighting over food, it doesn't necessarily coalesce into an organized war of nations.
* I wouldn't assume that countries have any momentum going into a world without telecommunications, especially with the initial population bottleneck that is survival. This society is going to spring from tribes that formed from the survivors of all the initial fighting over food.
* People don't just burn books. There is always a political motivation behind destroying or obscuring knowledge. This just isn't going to happen at a widespread and coordinated scale. It's more likely that you lose technological knowledge to the starving anarchy and population bottleneck when humanity was first poofed into another world- but it's unlikely that you'll lose everything because there will be plenty of smart and knowledgeable people who had the wits to survive.
* Some survivor out there is going to know the principles of computation and be able to apply it to whatever magic exists in the world, so it won't be long before you have a working computer (albeit a very basic one). There are going to be enough people who remember computers to be willing to give the computer scientist the resources he/she needs in order to make a useful machine.
+ Logic gates and half-adders can be made using a wide variety of consistent, predictable systems from mechanical devices to water to dominoes to MineCraft Redstone. With enough logic gates and a pulse generator, you can do any computation imaginable.
* Apply this to basically every field of applied science/mathematics. There are lots of engineers who will survive and carry what they know about their technology to start over.
* The vast majority of people in modern society can read and write. People have lots of motivation to produce books and few have an ego big enough to want to stop it, let alone the charisma to get the power to do so at scale.
If you want a medieval magic society, just write that. This just feels like a very contrived way to create one because there won't even be echoes of modern technology in your world from the sound of it.
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If as the OP said, the whole population of earth. ~8 billionish? were instantly transported to an alien world with zero tech to help survive. (this is a question within itself! and wouldn't mind seeing a question on it) how many would survive the first day (immediately dying from lack of shelter)? 3 Days from the lack of hydration. 20 days (weakend to the point of exhaustion from lack of food). Past a month no bets. Interpersonal and intergroup conflicts I can't even begin to assign an attrition rate. Disease from unknown viral infections, Not to mention how many would perish from god knows what in the first 15 minutes after the ... *BAMPH!*
All this considered, with current world population, an even more technologically entrenched population from the future would only make it worse, a 20% survival rate IMHO is generous. Around ~1,600,000,000 That's about the same as earth around 1850ish and perhaps 14 pop/km^2.
Point being, losing 7.5 billion people in so many days is gonna leave a mark. Visceral survival instincts will kick in and no one will give a damn about anything other than their next meal and who is going to stab them in the back or who they can stab in the back to live another day. If anything meaningful at all is remembered past one generation (significantly shortened lifespan generation!), outside of an isolated extraordinary individual, it would be surprising.
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This is a bit like asking “how long does it take to forget your own birth?”. Usually, by the time a city / nation / social pattern has developed to the point that we notice it, it’s already been around longer than anyone can remember. Places that were colonized recently may be an exception, but even in America, most people have no real idea how their town got started. They certainly don’t remember the connections to the old world their town’s founders left behind.
There’s a trope in SF of searching for the legendary lost planet of Earth as if this was a huge mystery, but why would anyone in the future care? It’s only interesting to the reader, because we live on Earth; but in these futures, we are long-dead boring primitives. It’s not like people today are roaming all over Africa hunting for the original human village (which could still be an actual inhabited place!).
We do retain some history, of course, but it’s *highly* selective, and we usually just hold onto stories that are still relevant somehow. E.g. we know quite a bit about the Roman Empire because a lot of European civilization is still based on it in various ways. But we know very, very little about what most Europeans’ actual ancestors were up to 2000 years ago.
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**It Depends**
Even with lots of wars and famines going on, that doesn't mean that everyone is too preoccupied with them to bother to keep track of history.
So the printing press is never invented, but perhaps a pen and paper will be. (These items would prove very useful in time of both war and famine! Even war fought with "sticks and stones" as yours would apparently be)
So the question becomes dependent on how interested they are and how many people there are that are interested in maintaining the history, at which point, it kind of becomes your choice (as the writer).
So it could be anything from
everything gets written down by dedicated scribes and chroniclers, and future historians do their best to sort fact from fiction and propaganda. Even with books being burned by war it's not hard to see *some* accounts surviving.
... to ...
Nobody is really interested in it and so the knowledge just gets passed orally as you say, and after 3 generations it mutates á la "Chinese Whispers", and becomes legend or myth, and after several more generations might become lost altogether.
It's all dependant on how interested people are in a) maintaining history and b) researching it later.
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It depends. Sometimes history can be forgotten in few generations, especially if the uncomfortable truths that should be forgotten are not important to people, but sometimes it can take a very long time.
Creation myths for example. There are dozens, and they have survived millennia, passed down from generation to another by telling and listening and retelling. Sometimes they have been part of cultural heritage of people whose culture was being eliminated, and the myths did not go away, they became contraband.
Christians are a very relevant example to Westerners, twofold: first they were oppressed in ancient Rome and Egypt and such, then Christians themselves tried to uproot every other culture, but many of the other cultures and Christians themselves retained their own understanding, some in less obvious ways, or even hiding it completely underground. After all, inquisition did not get rid of heretics even though it tried really hard.
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A lot depends on how able they are to recover some basic technology. If they can get paper making and moveable type in a couple of decades (before too many people die) then they can record and distribute a lot of useful information about how to do useful things like iron smelting, mine drainage, low pressure steam engines etc, plus maybe some warnings about the existential threats of nuclear weapons and global warming. See [The Day the Universe Changed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed) episode 4 for some more background on this.
A big immediate challenge is going to be farming: they don't have any earth-type plants or livestock. Even if there are feral bovines and horses, that is a very long way from the domesticated variants we are familiar with. 5,000 years of selective breeding makes a huge difference.
BTW, plonking 8 billion people on such a world is going to produce instant ecological collapse. In the short term everyone is going to be hunting food and chopping down wood for warmth and shelter, because otherwise they die. So next year there are zero prey animals and forests. You might want to rethink the numbers on this.
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They will never forget.
The story of "we lived in x nice world and were magically transferred to this shitty world" is short enough and captivating enough that elders will be passing down to children for as long as people are alive.
Now, if you want lots of details to accompany those origin stories, those can linger for hundreds to thousands of years but don't expect them to be accurate and don't expect any good predictions, although others have made some good guesses.
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In my planned fantasy story, the protagonists must escape a dangerous situation by teleporting the ship they're on (a kind of steam-powered ocean liner) into outer space, then back to the ocean surface in a different location. The ship remains in outer space for about 12-15 seconds (which is about how long people can survive without oxygen). I won't go into the mechanics of the teleportation, except to say that it is done by magic, and involves exchanging everything in a certain radius around the object being transported with everything in an identically-sized zone at the destination location.
(Edit: Because of the particular circumstances they find themselves in, they aren't able to select a precise destination for the spell (out of all possible locations in the entire universe), and they're therefore most likely statistically to end up in deep space somewhere. They do have enough control over the spell that sends them back to Earth that they can be sure of returning; it's only the first spell that's completely uncontrolled.)
The problem is that all the oxygen that was surrounding the ship will have dispersed into space, so when they teleport back into the atmosphere, there will be a huge vacuum surrounding the ship that will instantly collapse. As far as I can tell, this would be devastating on a massive scale; the ship would likely be capsized or even destroyed, and everyone on board would be most likely killed or severely injured at the least.
**How can I avoid the horrendous consequences the crew would experience in teleporting back into the atmosphere, or at least ensure that the boat remains intact and that as many people survive as possible?**
I should mention that even if people sustained grievous injuries that could be fatal given time, it isn't necessarily a problem for the story, since there are supplies of healing elixir on board that can swiftly heal any recent injury. As long as the elixir is administered quickly enough to those who've been fatally injured, they should fully heal within the course of a few minutes. It's becomes a problem when either 100% of the people are grievously injured (meaning no one is well enough to find the elixir and administer it) or killed instantly (meaning there might as well be no elixir at all).
Another thought I had is that perhaps the mechanics of the teleportation cause the air to enter the space around the ship gradually, but it'd have to do so quickly enough that people don't suffocate from being denied air for too long. Also, it'd have to be a natural byproduct of how the spell functions, since nobody in this world has ever been to space before and has no knowledge of the associated dangers of teleporting from a vacuum into atmosphere. But I don't know what justifiable reason there might be for the spell functioning this way.
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## Instead of space, go to the upper atmosphere
The upper atmosphere is less dense, but that may very well be enough to substantially neutralize the destructive pressure wave you get when returning from a vacuum.
This seems like a pretty reasonable idea for a couple of reasons:
First: go up high enough, and the ship can free-fall for 15 seconds. A web calculator suggests that the ship would fall ~3,620 feet if it fell for 15 seconds. For comparison, the web suggests that humans can breathe just fine up to ~20,000 feet, which is around 5 times the height you need for this fall.
Second: people who are unaware of the vacuum of space are by definition ignorant that the atmosphere ends *at all,* which likely means that they wouldn't know to make their spell target a region outside the atmosphere. The intent of such people might very well be to just "go up really high." That is, this spell only has to teleport these ignorant people into a region of hard vacuum if *you choose to insist* that it does.
I think you can avoid the catastrophic pressure wave by deliberately construing the intent of the spell in a way that is more consistent with their incomplete understanding of space.
Also, since this is magic, you do not need to insist that the ship's momentum be preserved by the teleportation.
This does mean that the occupants and objects on the vessel will experience weightlessness for 15 seconds. That is far less dangerous than a devastating pressure wave, but can present its own challenges. It would certainly make for an interesting interlude in a story, as well as an opportunity to spring a new problem on them. As they say: out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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# Change route
Instead of going up, go down.
Teleport into the crust.
You will make a cave a few kikometers deep into the crust. It will be hell hot, but the ceiling could last longer than fifteen seconds before collapsing, and the air should keep the temperature survivable for a while. Then teleport to wherever and you're safe.
Plus, if you are being followed, whomever is chasing you will suddenly have to deal with a rogue wave due to the immense boulder you've dropped on the water where you once were.
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**They shelter in a watertight compartment below decks.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EG7dp.png)
Big ships have such compartments to reduce flooding and improve buoyancy. Here they would serve double duty. Your characters get in one before they jump to vacuum. When they come back it is very loud and tough on the ship but they stay safe.
When they are in the vacuum they will know it because every pore that air can escape through will start to shriek and whistle. They have wet clothes around the door but there are other places not quite airtight. You can have a character put a thumb on one. And then back off. And back on. wah-wah-waaahhhh...
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12-15 seconds are not enough to completely bring a large sphere in pressure equilibrium with the vacuum surrounding it, and that is more true the larger the sphere is.
Also, the higher pressure differential will happen at the border of the sphere where you have no ship, while the inner layers will take more time to balance and will act as a buffer when the pressure bounces back to normal.
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### Water surging back as the ship falls is going to be the real danger.
Returning air isn't going to be the problem. Consider a ship 150 meters long (I'm using [the MS Batory, circa 1935](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Batory) as likely guess for the size your ship), if the displacement is exactly a sphere centered on the ship, you'll have a 75m radius sphere of displacement. The ship will materialize over 60m above the water. It immediately will begin falling, meanwhile the water will surge in to fill the gap. Assuming the water rises just as fast as the ship falls they'll collide a little over 2 seconds later at over 40m/s (~90mph!).
While there'll likely be enough upwards force from the water to arrest motion of the ship, the water around the ship will easily push past the ship in a catastrophic manner. Put simply this would end up being the fastest sinking of a ship ever.
A smaller vessel will likely have a much higher chance of not becoming submerged within but a few seconds. Ideally you'll want a roughly circular ship with as deep of a draught as possible.
Alternatively, if your spell displaces in prolate spheroid (think american football) your chances of not floundering and sinking are much improved, but there'd still be significant risk. Also a potential for worry is if there are masts/antennae that protrude taller than your spells spheroid of influence they may get severed in the initial translation (this could be an interesting plot point).
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# By magic
I'd suggest the allmighty handwave of magic, if nothing else seems possible. Someone capable of teleporting a large mass to anywhere in the universe must surely be able to **create a force field capable of holding the teleported content** for 12-15 seconds? If I had mastered a spell that teleported me into space, I would probably also have tried to work out how to survive it. I don't know under which premises "magic" works in your world, but as soon as I hear the word used as an explanation, I just assume that anything is possible just at the moment where it is needed for the plot.
An explanation using the mechanics of the spell would be if **the appearance weren't quite instantaneous.** As if they squeezed out from a singularity of the four-dimensional spacetime or something. I don't know exactly how unpleasant creating a large bubble of vaccuum on earth would be, estimates on forums on the internet varies from moderate to destructive. Anyhow, even a small fraction of a second of delay would greatly decrease the chance of broken eardrums among the crew.
I'd add that the crew would probably be in pretty bad shape after only a couple of seconds in space, even after just an instant. Saying that people can survive 12-15 seconds in space is kinda like saying they could survive as many seconds after falling into a meat grinder, provided they landed feet first. The low pressure of space would cause all the liquid in your body to boil, if not for the tissue keeping it under pressure. Bubbles would form in your blood and block vessels in your brain, among other things. This is also what happens when divers are ascending from great depths too fast.
Also; teleporting to anywhere in the universe would by "conventional" means requires unimaginable quantities of energy and/or mass. If spells in this world is capable of accomplishing feats like this, they would have incredible potential for doing other things too, if there is any consistency in that regard. Saying that someone could teleport a large mass faster than the speed of light, might also be implying that they would be able to disintegrate the earth on a whim, for example. Unless your magic works in a different, mysterious way that doesn't at all relate to physics as we know it. All in all, I'd say there is hope of saving your crew by the same magic that threatens to destroy them.
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### Challenge: The question may be moot, because physics won't do what you expect
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Are you sure about that? This obviously will depend on the size of the sphere of air, of course. I don't have the maths to prove it, but I strongly suspect you wouldn't have full dispersal of all the atmosphere within a volume of air with half-liner-length radius in 10-15s. At which point the shock wave from coming back would be reduced, because you wouldn't have 1 ATM of pressure difference.
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Nothing happens instantly. Sure, the pressure differential means that air flows rapidly into the vacuum. However it can only do that progressively. Quickly, sure, but progressively.
There is also no physical reason why there should be damage to the ship as a result of this. Air enters the volume from all directions, so there is no shock wave affecting the ship or its passengers. From outside the sphere, there will likely be an audible "bang". Inside the sphere, the reduced pressure (or even complete vacuum) means you won't actually hear much if anything.
Your biggest problem is actually anything which is airtight but doesn't have a robust seal. Ears, sinuses, dental fillings, and anything else where divers can get a "squeeze", could be damaged by fairly rapid changes of pressure. That equates to a 10m depth of water, where divers would normally equalise their mask and ears going down that distance. Expect a reasonable number of hospital cases for this, although none will be fatal.
Your biggest threat to the liner is if it's no longer floating on a body of water. Ships don't like being unsupported, and tend to "break their back" when that happens, so you'd better hope that all the water comes back in the same shape it left. 10-15s shouldn't be enough time for the water to go anywhere significant though.
### Challenge: Supposing there was this pressure shock though, this isn't your first problem
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would give an instant 1 ATM pressure difference. If a pressure shock was going to occur, it's already happened (within the sphere of teleported air) as soon as the liner hit space. So the issue of how to return to Earth safely is kind of irrelevant, if this is the case. Everyone died explosively 15s earlier, end of story.
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Perhaps the teleportation works by first forming an impermeable bubble around the source and destination, which lasts for about 15 seconds before breaking down after their contents are swapped. a.k.a. *Bubble Teleportation*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9XHGr.gif)
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If you need to exchange matter, outer space should not be a valid target, as vacuum is not matter.
However, what about an asteroid ? This is still outer space, so your statement is valid. If they teleport at the "top" of an asteroid, and only a small part of the teleportation bubble is opened to the vacuum, the air would probably not disappear instantly (I'm guessing pretty fast, but probably not instant), that would give you a few more seconds.
Also, if some of the crew is inside the ship, it would probably be way safer for them than for people standing on deck.
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Long story short the earth-like planet is being bombarded by ice comets crashing into the oceans and the sea levels are rising. I want there to be a huge wall(probably around 20 meters or so) that keeps the water at bay, having started being built the moment they noticed the waterline of the docks going up, but I don't know if that sort of feat is possible for technology of the medieval ages, 14th century. If not I'll adjust the tech level. Other continents have also built their walls, leading to bowls of dry land across the world with the docks on top of the walls which the walls need to be able to deal with as well.
Sure there's the great wall of china and sure people were capable of building water-proof walls but I want to know if the people of the times would be able to build walls strong enough to not only constantly be beaten by waves but also handle the equivalent of... oceanic pressure, if the term is correct? Basically the ocean would be pressing against the wall from all sides at some point, at least that's how I'd imagine it would be.
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Other answers have stated that:
a) the people at the time knew how to keep water at bay
b) what pitfalls there are.
What was done for many centuries in frisia (~ the coast of the north sea) was that villages were surrounded with dikes.
I doubt that in medieval times you could actually coordinate all of the population of any given continent to build that wall as a single, connected structure. Also, there's the risk of one large dam failing in one place and causing large areas of your continent to be flooded with salt water.
So i guess in a situation as you describe it people would build local dams, much like they built local city walls to protect against other threats. Against the sea, however, they will also need to protect the fields, which were notoriously left unprotected by city walls. But gradually, they would build those walls and dams enclosing ever more space, eventually leading to every "useful" piece of land that needs it surrounded by dams and dikes.
The speed of progress will depend on workforce and building materials available, but this decentralized approach will be manageable enough, and it will not waste time and resources protecting regions that are considered of low value.
As an interesting bonus, you get pretty good infrastructure (i.e. roads) on top of your walls or dikes, which will help society along a great deal.
To sum it up, and to actually answer your question:
Yes, i think they could, although in a slightly different matter than you had in mind.
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Dutch started [building dikes](http://dutchdikes.net/history/) from the Iron age.
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> The earliest indications of dike building date from the late Iron Age. During excavations of terps in the Frisian villages of Peins and Dongjum, among others, dike bodies were found – small dikes predating the building of the terp. These little dikes, no more than 70 cm high, were composed of neatly-stacked peat sods against a core of loose bulk material. Later on the structure was reinforced by adding an outer wall with a gentler gradient.
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In medieval time the construction slowed down
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> The Netherlands witnessed little dike-building activity in the early Middle Ages. With the departure of the Romans began a period of political instability and population decline. From the eighth century we see renewed, if slow, population growth, after which the population of the Netherlands increased tenfold between 800 and 1250. Once again settlements were formed in the salt marshes, which abounded in fish and in grazing pastures for livestock. On a small scale, streams were dammed and low dikes built, following the contours of the existing differences in elevation.
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Toward the end of middle age, dike construction stepped up
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> In the fourteenth century, the combined effects of soil subsidence and rising sea levels meant, in many parts of the Low Countries, that sea level and ground level converged to the same height. This was the period that saw the first large-scale building of dikes. The population was falling in some parts of Europe, as a result of economic recession and a succession of epidemics, but the Netherlands, especially Holland, was doing relatively well.
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So, technically building dikes was done even earlier than medieval time, but not in the scale you are asking. The scale of the work you are putting in place is probably beyond the economic capabilities of many medieval cities. At most it can happen on few spots, not on a whole continent, the same way large cathedrals were not built everywhere, but only in those cities which could afford the large and prolonged expenditure.
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The [Jawa Dam in Jordan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawa,_Jordan) dates back to about 3000 BC, is 80 metres long, 9 metres high, and consists of a 1 metre thick stone wall supported by a 50 metre wide earth rampart.
the [Great Dam of Marib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marib_Dam) in Yemen was 580 metres long and originally 4 metres high, built about 1700 BC.
The [Kallanai dam](https://www.thecivilengineer.org/online-historical-database-of-civil-infrastructure/item/382-kallanai-dam-grand-anicut) in Tamil Nadu, India, is constructed of unhewn stone, over 300 metres long, 4.5 metres high and 20 metres wide. That's from the 2nd century AD.
Hence, the basic technology is ancient.
Although not a dam, as a demonstration of the capability to build large structures we can look to the Walls of Benin in Nigeria, of which the banks and ditches in rural parts are an estimated 16,000 km long! They're thought to have been built around 1500 AD by the Edo people.
It's worth noting, though, that there are other ways of dealing with rising sea level besides man-made dams and walls. Coral islands are formed by nature when coral reefs grow up to the sea surface. As corals have survived historic floods at the ends of the ice ages, like Meltwater Pulse 1A, where the sea rose more than 16 metres in a period of 500 years (4 cm per year), they're pretty effective. In tropical parts of your continent, plant coral reefs around flooded land to provide a platform on which to build.
And river deltas naturally rise to meet sea level. Rivers carry a load of eroded sediment depending on the speed of water flow. When the water reaches sea level it stops, and deposits its load. If the channel is a fixed width and the deposition rate is faster than sea level rise, the delta extends out into the sea, spreading out in a triangular fan. As the area of the delta increases, the sediment is spread over a wider area until the rate of deposition (minus subsidence, erosion, etc.) equals the rate of sea level rise, and an equilibrium is reached. If the rate of sea level rise increases, the delta shrinks until a new equilibrium is reached (same amount of sediment dropped on a smaller area) and then again remains constant. So the land rises to track sea level, and the rate of rise automatically adjusts to match the rising of the seas.
Since the last ice age ended around 14,000 years ago the sea has risen about 100 metres. So the tops of pretty much all the river deltas in existence today are less than 14,000 years old, and consist of a 'wall' of sediment up to 100 metres thick.
Rivers automatically meander across flat 'flood plains' to evenly deposit sediment across them. A lot of the modern problems with the low lying land are due to humans engineering to stop the recurrent flooding that keeps the land rising. The land continues to sink by compression, and falls ever further below the water level, so when it *does* finally flood the result is catastrophic. Nevertheless, with a bit of intelligence, a medieval technology capable of building canals, dams, and irrigation ditches should be perfectly capable of engineering the process to increase sediment deposits where it is needed across wide areas. Build a pair of widely separated walls, maybe a few miles apart, allow the river to meander between them and deposit its load, and keep raising the walls. This raises the level of a much broader area which can then loop round a much bigger chunk of land that you want to protect. The end result is that you can build a dam a few *miles* wide, using the river to do most of the heavy lifting work for you.
I'm not aware of any case of ancient people actually using this trick - but if they had enough understanding of how rivers worked to think of it, the engineering itself should be well within their capabilities.
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Submerge-proof an *entire low-pan continent* is not possible, unless:
* it's almost a desert-like one; *or*...
* ...your medieval population have a reliable source of power to pump all the flowing rivers on that continent against the height the raising ocean
* ...or both.
Because, letting aside the sea seepage, I expect it will rain quite enough on a continent that is supposedly habitable - if you don't drain that water, it will fill the pan until it overflows.
It is possible to keep *limited* land areas of the continent dry - many answers here mentioned Netherlands already.
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The real problem is not building walls or dikes but to keep the land behind the dikes dry.
A simple method is to use the tidal forces: Open up some gates when the tide is low and closing them at high tide. This can even be automated by the construction of the gates. This method can keep land dry that is approx. 1 m below average sea level. It works for small creeks and brooks, but not for larger rivers.
For more, you need an elaborate system of pumps (the famous dutch windmills were just that) but that wasn't available at medieval technology level.
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## Don't build a seawall; raise the land.
You mentioned "bowls of dry land" across the world, so I am envisioning your world consists of many archipelagos occupied by mostly seafaring civilizations. The problem with a seawall is that even absurdly high ones would occasionally get breached by a natural disaster (e.g. a hurricane surge, a tsunami, cracks from an earthquake, etc.) and would flood the "bowl" with nowhere for the water to drain. That would be an utter, civilization-ending disaster depending on how bad it was.
Another problem with seawalls is that it isn't sufficient to just add to their height when the sea level rises. You'd also have to reinforce the base of the wall or drive it deeper into the seabed to withstand the increased pressure. That's probably more of an engineering problem than the wall itself.
A better solution would be for your various civilizations to be continually raising their cities above the water line over time. The good news is that there is already precedent from real-world history of ancient cultures doing exactly that.
There are many cities in the world today that are built directly on top of the ruins of ancient cities -- sometimes in multiple layers over thousands of years.
Venice, Italy, is another example. The city was built 1500 years ago on platforms that rest atop wooden stilts. I remember a seeing a documentary once upon a time (can't remember when exactly) that mentioned archaeological evidence that the ancient Venetians may have jacked up portions of the city as it expanded.
The Uru people of modern-day Bolivia have lived on artificially-built floating islands in the middle of Lake Titicaca for the past 500 years. The islands are made of reeds that naturally grow in the lake, woven together to support the people and structures.
In more modern times, Chicago, Illinois, USA was raised 14 feet (4.2 meters) in the 1850's. Obviously not medieval times, but Chicago is (and was) a very large city. Large medieval cities were rare; most cities had only a few hundred to a few thousand people, so this seems doable with medieval technology.
The city of Seattle, Washington, USA was also raised after a fire destroyed most of the waterfront in 1889. They just built a new waterfront on top of the old.
I'm sure if you did more research you could find many more examples of entire cities being raised up even or moved elsewhere due to environmental issues. These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
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**A wall would not stop water infiltration through the ground**
There are many coastal areas below sea level because the sea currents deposited enough sand to create a barrier of dunes keeping out the sea. However those areas are usually marshland because the pressure of the sea eventually causes some water to seep through the ground. The Dutch solved the problem because the constant wind provided them a lot of free energy. But constant winds cannot be found everywhere, you will have to solve the problem in another way.
**You will need expendable manpower**
The Dutch managed take from the sea so much land because they had a lot of coastal dunes, their dams just closed the gaps between the dunes. To build a big wall along the entire coast people would not have time to tend their fields and a lot of them would die of hunger. The productivity of medieval agriculture is not enough to support such huge works.
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A character in my world has the ability to greatly control flames. He can even amplify a small fire to a large inferno if necessary. However, there is one problem: He can't create fire out of nothing. He needs an already existent flame to begin using his powers. Thus, he needs some device, like a modern lighter, that provides a ready source of flames. With pre-gunpowder tech, is there any such substance or contraption?
## Specifics:
**Note: An answer need not satisfy all these conditions. However, the ones marked with an exclamation mark must be satisfied. A good answer will satisfy as many of these conditions as possible.**
* **(!)** The world is pre-Industrial, pre-gunpowder. The substance that should be used, though not necessarily be known in those times, should be able to be created using the available technology. This means, if a chemical wasn't known in the middle ages, but can be readily created using the technology available in the era, it is allowed. **Note: Gunpowder is not allowed.**
* **(!)** The device should be able to be made by a group of skilled craftsmen at most, and should not require materials only readily available after Industrialisation.
* The substance should be long lasting. The mage shouldn't have to go secure a supply every time he uses it to start a flame.
* **(!)** A spark isn't enough. It should be a proper flame.
* It should remain usable in as many conditions as possible, such as times of high moisture, etc.
* **(!)** The device, that is, the substance + the mechanism to combust it, should be small enough to be carried by a person
* It should be quick to combust
* It should be reliable, i.e., once activated, the combusting mechanism should always make the substance combust, and it should not present harm to the mage.
## Note on the abilities of the Mage
While not having access to flames, the mage can still create a small amount of heat. However, this is rather minuscule and not nearly enough to, say, boil water. It can, however, set off substances at a low ignition point.
**Is there any substance that has the given properties? Or at least, as many of them as possible?**
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The straightforward answer is "carry some fire with you".
Wikipedia calls the devices uses for this purpose "[fire pots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_pot)". More ritualistically-inclined versions of the device are found in the form of [censers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censer) and [thuribles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurible), which would seem to be ideal for the use of magically-inclined folk, but the underlying principle is prehistoric.
Basically you have a reasonably well insulated container into which you stick some suitable embers (or indeed, incense), and keep it fed with fresh fuel and a little bit of air from time to time so that it doesn't go out. The contents of the pot can be used to ignite tinder to create a proper fire when required.
The speed of combustion depends on the tinder you use, and there's a very wide range of highly flammable materials out there that I can't reasonably enumerate here. [Char cloth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_cloth) might be one example, and once a flame starts you can use it to light some kind of [oil lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_lamp) (examples of which have been used by people pre-bronze age).
You could almost imagine a system whereby a censer is engineered with two compartments, one with the embers and the other with some tinder and resinous fuel. The fire mage would pull the appropriate tab to mix the burnable bits with the hot bits, and then whizz the whole ensemble around their head in a fast circle to drive air into the combustion chamber to kindle some flames, at which point they can start generating *proper* fireballs.
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For *maximum style*, and potentially reliability?
[Firepistons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston) - essentially if you rapidly compress air, it will heat up, and a sealed piston, suddenly compressed can set suitable kindling on fire. Considering working designs were made with bamboo and other materials, and there's nothing fancy other than needing to fit it tightly, its a good bet for getting fire going.
This pretty much solves everything, assuming the fire from the small volume of charcloth in the piston is enough. Its simple *pre industrial* tech - and you wouldn't need anything other than a range of common natural materials (these have been made from horn, bamboo or metal) and the knowledge that it works.
Our mage can build it into his staff, so he can *dramatically* slam it down, get the [charcloth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_cloth) going, then getting to work.
Good magic is showmanship, and going *YOU SHALL NOT PASS* and slamming down a staff before using the smouldering and glowing bottom of his staff for fire magic is going to be impressive.
Your mage will *love* having charcloth (as an easy and reliable source of fuel to get things going around), and a firepiston is pretty much something that a skilled artisian could have built, pre-gun powder
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**Matches**
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match), sulfur matches date back to at least 577 A.D. and one ancient source described them as follows:
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> If there occurs an emergency at night it may take some time to make a light to light a lamp. But an ingenious man devised the system of impregnating little sticks of pinewood with sulfur and storing them ready for use. At the slightest touch of fire, they burst into flame. One gets a little flame like an ear of corn.
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I don't know whether your fire mage's small amount of heat is sufficient to set off this match (that's something for you to decide), but it's definitely something to consider.
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## Wheellock Flamethrower:
I think you're looking for a big flame, not just an ignition source. The [wheellock](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ii98s.png) was developed to ignite gunpowder, but it creates a shower of sparks that can be used to light any readily ignitable fuel source (I'd say in this case the wick of a flame source). There are later iterations of this basic ignition source, but the wheellock is fun and was invented by Leonardo da Vinci. If you wanted something made by craftsmen, this is perfect.
To this, we add [naphtha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha) in the ancient Greek version (better known as Greek fire). Crude oil, partly processed, fueled Greek fire projectors and [flamethrowers](https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/the-surprisingly-long-history-of-the-flamethrower/) in Greece and China. While some of these were quite large (cart mounted), there were some that were readily man-portable like the [cheirosiphon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire).
A simpler version of this, even more man-portable, would be a pot of naphtha that had a built-on igniter. The device could be activated and would light the naphtha, either at the point of the user (so fire would be close by to manipulate) or activated and thrown (since the wheellock is a spring-loaded sparker and would hopefully light the pot at the destination). You'd need to experiment with the best configuration for such a device, but the lower-end size might not be much bigger than a pistol (incendiary hand grenade?).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ii98s.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4TK8A.jpg)
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A carbide lamp is a potential solution. In the lamp water drips on Calcium Carbide, causing a reaction that continuously releases acetylene gas that can be burned and acts like a Bunsen burner. Carbide lamps have been used for exploring caves, coal mining, bicycle lamps, and indoor lighting.
Calcium carbide is made with lime and coke, both of which fit into your timeline. The only issue is the production requires high temperatures. That is something that can be over come by having your fire mage use his abilities.
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**Flint and steel.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cUXjN.jpg)
[source](https://splashpic.blogspot.com/2019/11/flint-and-steel.html)
Flint and steel is usually used to make a fire big enough to get warm or cook food, or maybe to ignite the powder in your flintlock musket. But in the OP there is no stated limit on how big the flame must be for the mage to use it. The spark from the steel by itself could be enough. Here is a little flame, produced by a red hot and oxidizing steel splinter.
I like the vision of the shower of sparks from the struck steel. One spark does not go out, but gets brighter. It gains size and momentum as it flies through the air.
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Your run of the mill Zippo (tm) lighter.
It is small enough to be carried easily, even if you have to oversize it somewhat. The mechanism is incredibly simple. A simple steel wheel, a spring, a flint, a wick, and a fuel reservoir. All encased is a small shell with a spring loaded lid.
It meets the needs you lay out. Portable. Safe. Reliable. The fuel reservoir is small, but since it doesn't use a lot of fuel, a refill lasts a while. It can be fueled by naptha, a widely known substance from the middle ages. Your firemage could easily carry several refills worth in a small flask
The mechanism can be readily built by a skilled artisan. It may end up a bit larger than the current models of zippo, but it shouldn't be too difficult.
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## Sodium Metal
Sodium metal burns in contact with water, so it you could have small Sodium metal balls and either spray water or drop one in a bowl with a few mL of water.
**Sodium Lantern:**
A flame mage could have some kind of lantern with a sodium metal ball dispenser and a small water container underneath, dropping the sodium in the water every time he needs fire.
**Disadvantages:**
* It has to be kept in oil to prevent it reacting slowly with the water vapor in the air.
* It is not the safest way to get fire since it can explode if it is put in too much water.
**Advantages:**
* It can be stored in a small vial, and not much material is needed every time.
* No complex mechanism is needed, it doesn't a spark to ignite.
* It can be ignited anywhere : moisture will just make it burn faster.
* It ignites instantly.
**Production:**
Sodium metal can be produced through carbothermal reduction of sodium carbonate. So heating sodium carbonate along with charcoal to the melting point, the equivalent of iron smelting for sodium. Also, Sodium Carbonate's melting point is lower than iron (851°C vs 1535°C).
Sodium carbonate (Washing soda) can be extracted from the ashes of soda plants (or maybe other plants growing in sodium-rich soil). You dissolve the ashes into water and let them crystallize.
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Basically, there are 2 types of hiveminds: the common *centralized* and the uncommon *distributed*.
*Centralized* means that all units are extensions of the master entity (the badguy alien/robot stereotypes).
*Distributed* means all units are extensions of the entire collective (closest example I can think of is: ants, bees, schools of fish).
**Since time and again, the centralized type's master entity has shown to be the weakest link** (B1 Battle Droids, Battle LA aliens, Ender's game aliens, Independence Day aliens, Skynet etc), **why would it be used instead of a distributed hivemind type?**
Seems like there is no purpose of having them with a centralized hivemind, except to give the human goodguys an easy way to win
*Edit: No one answer is the best; many of them bring up good points.*
After going through the answers, ***the advantages of a centralized hivemind are (summarized):***
• greater/easier scalability
• capability for strategic planning/goals
• less resources and less processing power required per unit
• lower latency, higher speed communication
• higher reliability and security (but a double edged sword as the master entity(s) is now a critical vulnerability)
[Answer]
**The swarm can think ahead.**
In a decentralised hive every action is local.
1. Foraging group picks up the scent of an enemy hive. They put down **danger** pheremones.
2. Patrolling soldiers pick up danger pheremones. They identify the rival hive and put down **muster** pheremones.
3. More patrolling soldiers gradually cluster around the **muster point**.
4. When the soldiers reach a critical mass their passive **attack** pheremones (which are always active) cause the platoon to follow the trail of enemy pheremones.
5. The soldiers follow the trail for 400 metres and find nothing at the end. Huh?
6. While the soldiers are occupied, the enemy hive (which has a centralised intelligence) attacks.
The centralised intelligence of the enemy hive allowed it to make this *trick*. It would be much harder to do this only acting locally.
**Edit:** The main weakness of the centralised mind is, if the queen dies, the whole swarm is left mindless.
HOWEVER: There is no reason you have to choose one or the other. Imagine an ant-like hive mind that can function on it's own, but also has a conscious leader who can (a) issue broad commands and (b) [assume direct control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3h8ZnXLsRg) of individuals or groups of drones.
You get efficient small-scale behaviour but also the potential for long term strategies. Also if the queen is killed the hive has enough instinctual intelligence left over to create a new one. So yes, the hive is rendered stupid for a while, but it's not an automatic win for the enemy team.
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# The client-server model has better scalability than peer-to-peer.
Simply put, as you scale a peer-to-peer model, the number of connections that must be maintained scales according to a Big O of N^2, since each node needs to be able to connect to every other node. By contrast, with a client-server architecture, the number of connections scales according to a Big O of N, since each client node connects to a central server node.
While this may not matter much for small-scale networks, once the number of a nods begins to increase, this becomes more and more noticeable - once you've got a million nodes, adding one more node requires another million connections for peer-to-peer, while it only requires one additional connection for client-server. This would result in the peer-to-peer network using considerably more bandwidth than the client-server model.
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**Latency (and reliability)**
Depending on the mode of communication your swarm uses, the physical act of communication may be the major bottleneck. It's all well and good if the individual drones in your swarm have enormous combined processing power and storage capacity, but if every operation requires time-consuming and potentially unreliable communication at every step, it may quickly become untenable to do things that way.
In a centralized model, every percept the system receives and every action the system chooses to take only requires a single transmission (or perhaps a couple if they're short range, to forward it to the central unit). In a fully distributed model, every 'thought' the swarm collectively has could require dozens or hundreds of redundant transmissions just to locate the relevant bits of memory.
**Security**
You cannot secure every drone in your swarm. Some of them *will* be captured by the enemy. If they remain capable of contributing to the swarm's collective thinking process, this may present your enemy with an avenue of attack by which they could influence the decisions the swarm makes. Strictly keeping all thinking in a central control unit (whose physical security can be guaranteed and which can show all the steps in its thought process upon request) could help mitigate this risk.
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In the long term, a distributed network (either distributed hive or autonomous actors) will always outperform a centralized hierarchical organization. This was first described by F.A Hayek as "The Local Knowledge Problem".
Basically, it recognizes that information is widely distributed across large systems. Local actors can see and act upon the local bits of information immediately, while centralized networks need the information to be gathered, processed, sent up the chain to be analyzed, orders made and passed back down to be executed. This sets up a delay, and orders can be received after the local conditions have changed, meaning they are no longer valid for the situation.
This is the "best case" scenario, and even suggesting computers can be used ignores the extra resources needed for sensors and bandwidth, while still not overcoming the latency issues. Add mistaken information, faulty analysis, or malicious corruption of information along the way to derive local advantages, and the conditions exist for a positive feedback loop of errors to accumulate.
Looking at some of the more spectacular failures of central command economies, such as the 1930 era "New Deal" extending the Great Depression by as much as seven years, the collapse of the Soviet Union or Venezuela today, or even comparing the sluggish socialistic economies of Europe to the United States (most European national economies have lower GDP/capita than all but two American State economies), it is difficult to argue with Hayeks observations.
If the loops are small, or there is an emergency situation, a command economy or other centralized system does have short term advantages, being able to mobilize resources faster than networks or meshes, but the possibility exists that this situation results in mal investments, which accumulate and eventually cause frictions or failures (such as economic busts, or ecosystems being overrun by invasive species or algae blooms).
Depending on the environment, meshes are more flexible and adaptive, while hierarchies are better with emergencies and extreme environments. A centralized hivemind can mobilize more quickly to react to emergencies, while a mesh might have the emergency situation "flow through" it, and rebuild the broken links in the wake of the situation. As several comments in this thread have noted, "real life" insect colonies actually use a mixture of techniques (like ecosystems and economies) to provide the flexibility to deal with both changing local situations and emergencies.
Edit to add: In modern military organizations, "mission command" has been adopted which makes use of the Local Knowledge Problem model. Senior commanders provide the overall mission guidance and resource allocation, but subordinate commanders are expected to respond to the local situation in the most appropriate manner consistent with the overall desired end state. In other words, everyone from a platoon commander on up is expected to understand the local environment and react to the available information there to achieve immediate advantage without waiting for higher command.
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**The army dying when the leader dies isn't a flaw, it's a feature.**
There are ways to have a hive mind without the threat of collapse. You could have multiple backup redundant hive minds, and have one of those set up again whenever the humans killed one. But that comes with a serious flaw.
Your subordinates now have an incentive to kill you to take the swarm.
**Your main enemy is your subordinates, not outsiders.**
You would have either a distributed hive mind or backup hive minds if you wanted combat efficiency. It makes sense to be prepared. But, if your main priority is yourself, successors are simply a weakness. They mean that by killing you, someone else can gain power. That means you personally lose control.
An outsider who wants a more pliable swarm can kill you and ascend a pliable subordinate. Either way, you lose.
**It decreases the swarm's vulnerability to hacking.**
If every subordinate has some degree of potential to run the swarm, then a hostile entity can upload code or commands to enough of them and take over the entire swarm. A centralized entity can have powerful anti hacking and anti psychic protections that lowers the risk of a takeover. That's much cheaper than giving every entity strong protections. The centralized entity can also shut off rogue swarm members who are compromised.
The borg have this. There are multiple efforts to use borg drones to upload borg destroying viruses. The queen reduces this risk, by being able to shut down cubes.
**It allows more suicidal tactics**
A swarm where every creature has a voice will not normally sacrifice more than 50% of the swarm- each individual has an incentive to survive, and so even if they agree, they can at most form a group to sacrifice 50%. A centralized hive mind has no such constraints, and can sacrifice all but one of it's swarm. This allows them to fight harder, and take valuable resources a more distributed swarm could not.
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Compare democracy with a "martial law" government.
In a true democracy, every action should be voted by the individual members which may lack the information to make the correct choice. Even if the choice is ultimately correct, this whole process takes a very long time.
In a centralized, non-democratic government, every decision can be made very quickly, and information channels are designed to feed the decision makers. The obvious downside is that those decision makers are small in number, and eliminating them would be a potential lethal blow to the organization.
Similarly, in a hive mind every individual element lacks the whole set of information, and either has to make blind decisions, or delegate those decisions to someone else (central command?).
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## Avoiding Value Drift.
A distributed intelligance works by emergant thoughts held by the interactions of the agents.
If you seperate two groups of the agents entirely then you end up with two hive minds.
They are exposed to different stimulus, so think more and more different thoughts.
This still happens even if not totally seperate.
Once you spread out enough, and become large enough you get latency.
Information can not travel faster thn the speed of light, and even once you occupy just a single solar system that starts to really add up.
Even if you do have faster than light information transfer (which is useful to make a centralized hive-mind possible too), the possibility of being cut-off remains.
The left-hand does not know what the right is doing.
Worse, some other hands (finger) might be too small (and thus dumb) to realize that they are at risk of value drift.
You can eventually become your own enemy.
A centeralized highmind does not run this risk.
It has its own latency problems and may not (without FTL communication) even function over large areas.
But it does not run the risk of becoming its own enemy.
If communication with agents is lost or becomes unfeasible, they stop being intelligently driven.
They don't form local clusters with their own emgerent values and goals.
This is a theme of the last stage of the game ["Universal Paper Clips"](https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html).
Your greated foe is (former) parts of yourself, who've values have drifted out of alignment with your own.
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# Centralized is easy.
That's probably all it comes down to. A fully distributed network is far more complex to design and develop and often infinitely more complex to *understand* than a centralized one.
For a centralized hive mind, all you need to understand is how the central brain works, and you can predict what it'll do. If it doesn't do that, you know where the problem is coming from and where to look for a fix.
If you need to make some design changes, you only have one place to manage them. All the drones in the network are stupid; they just do what they're told. If the central brain can be taught to deal with the problem, the drones can probably stay as they are. If they need to be changed, they can be tested in isolation in a test chamber.
If you build a new type of drone, you just need to update the central network to be able to command the new drone type and to let it interact with the others, if necessary. The new drone, again, can be built and tested in an isolation chamber; as long as it does the right thing when instructed and feeds the right info back into the central hive, it's going to work perfectly well with everything else.
When you're dealing with a distributed network, nothing is easy. All your drones are self-operating, so it's hard to test them in isolation. Even if you build a full environment for one of them to play around in, all you'll know is that the drone does a certain thing when alone. You have no idea how the drone will act when it encounters a fellow drone, because not only will *your* drone behave differently now, but the *other* drone you introduce it to will also behave differently. And *each* type of drone will probably have a different type of reaction. And having more than one drone at once will also change what is happening. Even different if it's a different combination of drones. It's hard to predict what the various drones will do.
Whenever you want to change a distributed network, you need to not only think about the main network and how to modify it, but you need to think about how *all* the different drones are going to respond to new instructions.
If you build a new type of drone, not only does the main network need to deal with that, but *all* the other drones need to learn to interact with it in a useful way. And probably those drones are pretty limited in terms of thinking power, so good luck with that.
Using primarily centralized intelligence, we can drop human beings on the moon with all the computing power of a modern calculator. Using distributed intelligence, we can only now barely produce something capable of navigating a quiet road and we're still terrified of letting it do that around actual people.
Sure, having a fully functional distributed system that perfectly functions will beat a centralized system with absolute ease. But there's a good reason humanity invented the stone hammer tens of thousands of years ago, but the self-swinging-hammer still isn't a thing.
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The efficiency of a centralized system depends a lot on the speed with which information is transmitted and the processing potential of the central node, as well as the ability of the system to reshape itself in the event that the central node is removed. Generally this last achievement can be achieved through backups, in robots this could mean each robot has the potential to be a central node in the system, with biological organisms you'd likely see multiple competing hive's or otherwise have backup rulers that lie dormant till needed. You probably wouldn't want all of your eggs in one basket, but let's assume that's the only option for a centralized system, why might you choose that over a distributed system anyways?
In some circumstances centralized systems can be much more resource efficient and can be far superior in terms of decision making. With a decentralized system each node is only aware of it's surroundings and the signals of others, in a perfect centralized system the central node can be aware of all of it's drones surrounding's and can formulate complex strategies for the hive as a whole and execute them with perfect precision. A distributed network is a cheap knockoff of actual omnipresence and relies on signals propagating through a network of multiple intelligence's, but with enough processing power a centralized network can be the real thing. Essentially a single god like entity in total control, similar to plugging our nervous system into a nations infrastructure. However, if information moves through the network too slowly or the central node can't process all the information efficiently, the system loses it's edge.
Beyond that regard, it's also potentially a waste of resources to have every drone capable of thinking, it's especially wasteful if each drone is highly intelligent. If you assume that each drone is intelligent and communicates with every other drone the processing required will increase exponentially with each new drone, whereas a central system only has to send the information once for each drone, then send a response. A caste system addresses this somewhat as a hybrid system, but is still not as ideal as having a mind capable of correlating all the information of the hive at a quick pace. If it's instead a simpler form of communication that creates emergent intelligence, that could be more resource efficient, but is not as likely to manifest in the same level of intelligence, nor be as adaptable as a conscious entity.
Given very fast information processing, a centralized network can get away with using less resources per drone and less processing per drone by potentially an exponential amount, by keeping the communication at a linear rate per drone. This allows for further expansion of the hive. So if a hive is primarily concerned with growth, centralization probably allows for the greatest growth per unit of resources until the distance become too great for rapid communication. So the answer is that it's only the best option when you have the necessary processing capabilities and a means to send information almost as fast as the nervous system because omnipresence and super intelligence is a very powerful combination that might outweigh the risks.
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Obviously a lot depends on the exact architecture you have in mind. In real life, insect swarms are largely decentralised and have a lot of 'clever' adaptive behaviors which work in distributed fashion.
However, there may be biological reasons to have a centralised approach. While some ant colonies may have hundreds of breeding queens (and some do not), many honey bees have a single queen per hive. The reason for this is supposedly that it speeds evolution. In this situation, if the whole hive is dependent on pheromones or other signals from the queen, you have a single point of failure.
As with the queen been, it may be a matter of resources. Distributed brains may be limited. If you only have one super-duper-battle-computer, you may want to put that at the centre of the network so that the whole swarm has access to its computing power. This might be seen as a centralized approach.
However, in real life single-queen honey bee hives are very successful, and can replace the queen rapidly when lost. The trope of 'kill the central master and win the war' appeals to human storytellers but it's very much a B-movie approach.
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I've been drafting a science fiction story that places a lot of emphases on the vastness of culture. One way technique I've been using is language and the hassle of translation. Earth has abut 4,500 languages spoken commonly, and that's not including slang and accents (some parts of Scotland needs to be subtitled on British television, I am told). In this particular setting, that number is multiplied by the number of species and increased further by the vast distances between settlements and colonies.
For face-to-face communication to work between radically different species, electronic translators have become extremely common. The most common type is an AI equipped with directional microphones, a vast compendium of languages, and an equivalent of an earpiece. This AI focuses on a speaker, translates in near-real time, then feeds the translation into the earpiece (or projects subtitles onto a visor, case depending). Its not a perfect system, but its well-programmed enough to handle groups of people speaking simultaneously, provident that it what its translating to what.
Example from the text:
*It took one of its hands off the gun to pull a electronic slate out of its belt holster. It fiddled with it a bit, pausing every few seconds to speak a few words of various Carapaced languages. Quotze thought about trying to pantomime “Artech-Westle Reformed”, but decided he would much rather not talk to this heavily armed alien.*
Anyhow, I got to thinking about the limitations of this system and how that would effect both culture and the story. Body language can't be translated, that's for sure, but what really interested me was music. Because the AI translates for maximum accuracy, rhyme and meter would disintegrate across the language barrier.
"You ain't nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine."
=
"You are like a beast for hunting that despairs constantly. You have never caught prey and are not my friend."
Am I right my assessment of this flaw? Even assuming that the translator AI is packed with common idioms and sayings, wouldn't songs and poetry suffer with this kind of system? I'm especially curious how someone singing by themselves would sound, as well as how interplanetary "pop"-music could work.
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I hate to spoil a setting, but from sociology perspective, this situation is not possible.
If everybody needs to talk to each other, a common language will emerge, simply for convenience of communication not affected by AI. Voice communication via mics is not the only situation, you want to read text and graffiti, understand garbled emergency warnings, sink advertizing messages directly into brains of native speaker, etc.
Observe how English is official language in India and EU, despite being a foreign language to everybody who lives there.
The only you can avoid common language is if people are so spread out that they each group talks only to a few others. But then it is feasible to have humans translate the artworks. And there might be little demand to translate artworks from other end of the galaxy, since context and culture are wildly different.
Finally, you can train AI to understand cultural references and shades of meaning: Observe how IBM's Watson has won Jeopardy. It is just that at current prices, it is cheaper to hire human translators (or make the art in English in the first place).
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You don't need to understand music to appreciate it.
I listen to japanese music without translation because I hear it from the openings on shows. I listen to vocaloid styled music without knowing the base language. The pacing of lyrics and the instrumentals mean more to me than the actual words.
Technically, Pop music already works this way. I can't have fun singing those repetitive lyrics but from a distance its not unpleasing to my ears.
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* *"Earth has abut 4,500 languages spoken commonly":*
Actually there are only about 100 languages spoken natively by more than 0.1% of the population of Earth. Out of those 4500 languages, 4000 have minuscule numbers of speakers.
* *"Some parts of Scotland needs to be subtitled on British television"* . . .
. . . which is hardly unexpected given than (a) [Scots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) and English are closely related yet *different languages*, and (b) there are many many local variants of English spoken in the British Isles. (Hint: very few people on the British Isles speak [RP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation) natively.)
* *"The AI translates for maximum accuracy":*
What does this even mean?
Let's take a very simple example. Let's suppose that the AI is translating from French into English, and it hears the sentence *"ils se tutoyaient"*. How will the AI translate this simple and ordinary French sentence into English?
+ The literal translation would be *"they were speaking to each other using the second person singular"*. (And even this dreadful translation is not *completely* accurate, because it could equally translate *"elles se tutoyaient"* -- English simply does not have the possibility to express gender in the 3rd person plural personal pronouns. Not to mention that blindly rendering the French imperfect with the English past continuous is problematic.) I hope we can agree that such a stilted translation would not be acceptable.
+ A better translation would be *"there was no formality between them"*, or maybe *"they chatted informally"*.The point is that what is the "maximally accurate" translation depends very much on the purpose of the translation. That's why in a book or article on linguistics the phrase might be rendered "theymasc. [reflexive] use-second-person-singularimperf. pl.", whereas in a story it might be rendered "they were quite close": because there is never such a thing as *the* most accurate translation, only the best translation for the specific purpose.
Which brings us to the problem of poetry . . .
* *"Rhyme and meter would disintegrate across the language barrier":*
First of all, rhyme and meter are not necessarily the be-all and end-all of poetry.
But anyway *we know* that great poets can actually translate poetry. You see, in the case of poetry the maximally accurate translation is not the plodding literal translation, but the translation which best carries the beauty and mystery of the poem; literal accuracy is of secondary importance.
Sometimes, a translation is so successful that it becomes the standard rendition in the target language. For example, it doesn't matter one iota what is the literal meaning of [Omar Khayyam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayyam#Poetry)'s Rubaiyat #51: in the English language, the standard, fixed, and *unquestionable* form is that given by [Edward FitzGerald](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_FitzGerald_(poet)): *"[the moving finger writes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam): and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it"*.
This is why, when poetry is quoted in a book, a human translator won't even attempt to translate it if there already is a good translation; the poetry will be quoted *in the already established form*, which a footnote indicating the source.
As for the meter, it is sometimes preserved, sometimes adapted; for example, the [famous English translation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer) of the [*Iliad*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad) by [George Chapman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chapman) is written in iambic heptameter (*"Achilles’ bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd
infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd"*...) whereas the original is, of course, in dactylic hexameter.
* *"What really interested me was music":*
Music does not need to be translated. What could possibly mean to translate Bach's *Brandenburg Concertos*? Translate from what into what?
Maybe you mean "translate the lyrics"; this is simply a subcase of translating poetry, with the difference that in the case of song lyrics rhyme and meter are *much more important* than meaning.
Given that in the overwhelming majority of cases the lyrics are of secondary importance, a pretty loose translation is generally perfectly acceptable, as long as it fits with the music. (For example, in Gilbert and Sullivan's [*Mikado*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mikado), the standard French version for *"defer, defer to the Lord High Executioner"* is *"honneur, honneur pour le très puissant Exécuteur"* which, although not accurate, is close enough and, most importantly, fits with the music.)
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The translators don't need to be perfect, or even used at all, in order for different cultures to enjoy eachother's works.
Not every person who enjoys [classical opera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera#Italian_opera) can speak 18th century Italian or French. Not every person who enjoys [K-pop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-pop) can speak Korean. Not every person who enjoys [The Canterbury Tales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales#Language) can speak Medieval English. Not every person who enjoys [modern art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans) knows the meaning behind each piece. You probably didn't fully understand your favorite song's lyrics on the first listen, yet you still enjoyed it.
And when the market is big enough for some art form, custom translations will definitely be made in order to bridge the gap between cultures, as with [certain works of art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarena_(song)) here on Earth.
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Having someone speak to you while you are attempting to listen to music is annoying and distracting. Reading text is far easier. At the beginning of a live performance, the ushers give the standard pre-show speech - "*Exits located at the front and rear of the stage, please silence all mobile devices*," - as well as "*If you would like to fully appreciate tonight's work, please turn your translators into subtitle mode.*" The visor will show the pre-translated lyrics, letting you enjoy both the music and the meaning without sacrificing either. If you're listening to pop music on the iPhone L, then you can just go into the options menu and turn Subtitles on.
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The translation will not be accurate in terms of translating word for word. It'll be closer to getting the message, and formulating it in the best possible way in the new language.
The technology of AI and deep learning are still on their early stages but they develop rapidly now. You may predict that in few years, definitely in few dozen it'll be able to translate as accurately as professional interpreters or even better. It will be also able to recognise poetry lyrics. It might be that deep learning AI can be better at understanding poets emotions and messages that the poetry conveys than people do and if so, it'll translate better, probably keeping the rhythm and meaning of the original poem but using totally different wording. It might be also that it'll offer possibilities to decide on going from as strict wording to as strict meaning as possible setting with all shades in between. The worst case scenario is it will simply warn that this is a poetry and as such cannot be translated literally and the offered translation is just a very rough approximation.
Anyway music translation is PITA. Yet music itself can convey emotions so as already mentioned in other answers you may as well listen to the music not understanding the words at all. Of course sometimes it can lead to a misunderstanding, like in [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUVz4nRmxn4), with a cheerful music and extremely sad lyrics but those will be exceptions rather than a rule. So it might be music will be often listened in the original version and just like in our reality a will to understand it better can be a trigger to learn other languages even though in a normal conversation AI does the trick with 99,98% accuracy.
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**Yes and No**... So assuming you have a *"musically inclined"* translation AI there's no real problem.Lyrics can be twisted pretty hard before they're unacceptable, just see how many ways you can sing some rap without it sounding atrocious. If it's figuring out how to fit the new words into the song then there's no issue. However, you *do* lose a lot of original quality to the song. It can even go as far as missing intent like your example seems to stray towards. And there will usually be a gravitation of the original lyrics towards the beat of the song that your new lyrics, while keeping beat, might not necessarily have. You also have compact cultural reference, idioms, and metaphors that don't translate well and most of the time don't translate *at all*. I know you stated dodging that bullet for the most part. But for someone without the cultural references words can translate into a massive definition. And even then be incomplete.
As for the translation itself, even for someone fluent in just both languages and having communication with the original author the process... [let's just say it's intense](https://hyperallergic.com/430559/asuka-goto-translation-tiger-strikes-asteroid/). You're not likely to get it perfect or even close with an AI. You're asking a computer to solve [P=NP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem).
Of course assuming P=NP in your universe, you *could* do this to perfection. Whether perfection results in capturing all the qualities of the music is once again up for debate. But you could prove you did your best. Not that you *need* perfection if you want to toss P=NP. And a quantum AI has an entirely better shot at solving this problem without P=NP if you want to skirt the [fanciful science](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/2801).
So depending on how hard you want to twist science *and* your listener's ear the answer ranges from *Yes* to *No*. Your best bet is probably to just do a direct translation with some kind of emotional meter at the top. Which, that said, some emotion via music doesn't *need* lyrics. Just listen to some traditional Irish [keening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keening) and you'll see what I mean. There's tons of cultural music that just *doesn't need* a translation.
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This is addressed in actual cannon on Star Trek, which has similar devices, in the episode Darmok. Here, Picard makes a first contact mission to an alien Race known as the Tamaran. The translator devices translate them perfectly... but their language is so littered with idioms, it's just as good spoken in the Tamaran words as it is in English. The title takes its name from the phrase to describe the pair's relationship "Darmock and Jelad at Tenagra." As you can see, it's clear the ambassador is making a reference that is lost without knowledge of the story, it would be similar to me saying to an alien who understood English "Thor and Hulk at Sakaar" vs. "Rodgers and Stark in Russia" or "Thanos, when he snapped his fingers.". Idioms do find common use into language all the time.
As part of personal headcannon with Star Trek, I also believe nuance in the Klingon language is why we do not hear the best accurate translation when Klingon characters use certain words. A common greeting in Klingon is "Qapla'" and a common insut is to refer to someone as "petQ'" (the capitalization is correct, fyi). These roughly translate to "Success" and "(someone) without out honor" and are used frequently enough in Star Trek that viewers know this even if they don't speak Klingon... My theory here is that the English translation is the best near translation that the translation device has for the word, but the word describes a specific concept related to success and lack of honor that these best translations still don't convey appropriate enough meaning... and the idea expressed is such nuanced in Klingon Culture the best way to translate it is to use it as it is written... there's nothing closer in English. This of course is my theory, so don't put that on cannon. A real word example would be an English speaker saying "As the French say, it has a certain je ne sais quoi"... and the alien's hearing in their native tongue "Blik blop French vika, bo voka g keltan je ne sais quoi." The English use of the French phrase "Je ne sais quoi" has a very specific meaning that only the word proper can describe. "Je ne sais quoi" which literally translated means "I don't know what" but to English Speakers, it has an idiomatic expression meaning "a thing that I cannot put into words"... which for purposes of discussion, yes, is an intended pun for the problem we're having... the phrase is understood by it's native speaker as having a rather broad meaning but by the non-native speaker, it has a very specific meaning that the phrase is the best word to describe that specific meaning... and to an alien with no understanding of French or what a French is, it won't get the correct meaning without probing the earthling for a better meaning of the phrase.
Of course, there is the opposite. For example, a joke in a conversation between a wife and her responding husband goes "Do I look pretty or ugly?" "I think you look pretty ugly." is sometimes called "The Universal Pun" as it perfectly translates into a broad range of languages that are not related. For example, the direct translation in Chinese validly tells the pun, despite the fact that most puns do not translate well as the humor relies on word play. Another example of this is the English word "Dream" and the Japanese word "Yuma" mean the same exact thing in every possible context (either the images seen while sleeping or a long term goal or desire for something) despite the languages having no prior relationships (Japanese had no major English influence until the post-WWII occupation, where they began using a lot of loan words from American English).
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As you said a true universal translator will be a form of AI, there is to much contingency, syntax, and euphemism in a language to translate directly without intelligence. to accurately translate a language you need to understand it, to understand it you need to be intelligent. That means the AI will be intelligent enough to identify babble when it is see/hears it. Especially since it will be a frequent feature of music. The AI will be able to translate as well as a fluent speaker of each language. This also has the added bonus that when presented with a new language the translator will learn the new language and rather quickly.
Larry Niven handled it interestingly, Universal translators are AI that are paid in internet access, along with a a programmed basic desire for honesty and accuracy. The universal translators are a people in their own right.
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I think, that it is actually even worse, than you think it is. You mentioned the flaw in translation of poetry in your example, but it still relate to similar background and mental frame, which is not automatic.
Sometimes the best what (almighty) AI could do would be only really simplyfied and shortened explanation of overall meaning of the "text" in question and some loosly related recomandations, how to react on it. And it does not aply only to music/poetry/art ...
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From my own experience - I was talking something with one friend (A) - half a hour long at least and in details, it was interesting and educational for both of us. Then I had to answer another friend's (B) question: "What you two was talking about all the time? I did not get even a hint..." after many attempts the best what we (I and B) came to was answer like "There was a big problem, supposedly not solvable, but I could solve it anyway, with a lot of time, work, knowledge, black magic and wild queses, and was able to save about 99% of their data".
And all three of us was native speakers speaking in our native language. Just our lives went different paths over time and we get different knowledge backgrounds. And event the (almighty) AI could not translate that from the same lang to the same lang much better, if the explanation should take less than couple of months at best. It could copy it word by word, each of the words would be "known" to the listener, but the meaning of it would not go thru and the listener would be like "I understand each and every word, but I have no idea, what that all means". And commenting on each the word and their relations and the meaning of all of that would take weeks and weeks of explanations and the message would be hard to get.
In music/poetry/any performance such long explanations would mean missing the point anyway, as it would be to late to react.
Should the friend B was manager at the time of the problem, than all technical data would be unimportant anyway - my report would be "It is really bad, no sure solution is known, but I can try something and have or have not some results. Should I try it anyway (and possibly waste lot of time and money on it and maybe fail) or should we just accept the loss and do not try to save anything?"
Should the friend A was manager, I would talk in all details about the situation, as there could be some informations in it for him to give somehow relevant order.
Both of that should be resolved in matter of hours at that time, else there would be big problems in the company. (My boss at that time just asked, how bad it is (it was really bad) and if there is even slighest chance to try to recover anything. (I told him, that maybe few percent, if we are really happy and that it can take weeks and spare hardware). He decided, that it should be tried at any cost and that I should not do any work, take any phone and take no other commands from no one, until it is solved, or totally lost. The talk took like 3 minutes.)
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**Disney does it**
Have you ever seen musical Disney movies in other languages? (The Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, ...). This is an example of a huge detailed work done in the translation of the message present in a song, mantaining the melody and the rythm and even keeping a proper rhyme.
So the answer is: If Disney can translate songs successfully to other languages, the same can be done by an advanced AI Translator that has enough context of the cultures and civilizations involved.
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The melody, beat and pacing of a song is far more important than just the lyrics. Lyrics can improve a song, but if you just took the lyrics and spoke them out no one is going to listen to you. If you want some real world examples "despacito" and "gangnum style" were huge songs despite being in another language. People sang them in their native language as well, rather than translating them into english because the words worked better with the beat, rhythm and background track.
Fundamentally its a language problem, where different ideas and concepts are delivered in different ways. English for us is often the easy one. Switch to Japanese or Chinese and the sentences often feel backwards. We can still translate the words, but often you need to wait until the entire phrase/sentence is finished before you can. The simplest example would be hello in chinese. **Ni Hao**. If I start with just **Ni** it means you. Add the **Hao** which means good forms **Hello**. Now if I add an extra **Ma** it means **How are you**, rather than **You good(?)**, although you could still use that, It would simply confuse the difference between the statement Hello and the question You Good? and cause some pretty basic on the go translation problems (If I spoke it very slowly, would you translator translate it on the fly and restate the new word? would it use the immediate translation or should it wait for the entire phrase to end before translating).
Next would be some words which have very hard to express meanings. I'm not going to go into depth, but here is a link with more example <https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21634,00.html> I'm just going to copy a couple parts out: The Japanese have a word 'natsukashii' which is used when describing something which brings back nostalgic memories or takes them back in time. They also have a word 'genki' which describes a state of general well-being..healthy, lively, happy etc. I don't think we have any comprehensive one-word translations of these in English.
Finally some words and concepts don't exist in certain languages and so you literally won't be able to translate them. Take the Australian aboriginal people. Their language didn't have a word for time because of their belief that everything was linked together rather than individual separate events. (I'm doing a poor job explaining this, so if there is anyone who knows a lot more about this feel free to step in).
Another fun example would be the use of the term ""Squanch " in Rick and Morty. It doesn't have a fixed meeting but instead depends upon the context of its use.
Basically, a translator would botch any sort of language where compounded words have different meanings to the individual words. English would also suffer from this. A person who wants to sing a song they like, will likely do it in the language it was written/heard/sounds like rather than in their native language. The exception would be if they went to the effort of translating all or part of it, so that it fit in with the music and beat. Otherwise your just listening to a terrible singer who is tone death, off tune and off beat.
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The [virtual world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world) is nothing new in science fiction and has had quite a few uses considering it's a fairly recent concept. Since the virtual realm isn't constrained by understanding of physics, it gives writers (like little me) room to go a little crazy. **However, we must forget (and this is glossed over most of the time) that data within a computer is still a physical presence. You can destroy data by breaking a computer which is why saving data is a thing at all.** However, when talking about virtual beings moving in a virtual plane, it means they are mortal. "*Why would they be mortal? Since they can be simulated, that means the computer has enough space to store their data*" I almost hear you type. Well that's because if they die (or get deleted) the save will technically be a clone. Now, you know where I'm going with this... or not. Your choice.
## When a character is in the virtual world, where are they physically? Most importantly, how do they "move" inside the computer?
Let's say a girl "Lucy" gets virtualized into a supercomputer and is now a virtual representation of herself (an avatar) and her data is now in said supercomputer. Her virtual envelope has a visual filter that translates the programs and systems of the computer into visual cues. A part of the motherboard is a spacious room and the programs are like machinery taking things in and giving things out (input and output). Programs are basically the robots operating in a factory, and Lucy is right now a very advanced program that's not constrained to a single place and purpose. **While she explores, she moves through rooms and alleys. However, does her data move with her in the supercomputer or alternatively is her avatar like a cursor that moves and interacts with data files? If she moves from a part of the supercomputer to another, data has physically moved, right?**
**Knowing this is important because there's a threat in the physical world that's about to turn off the power (or break the computer) while she's still inside of it.** Lucy gets a heads-up of him coming thanks to the computer having access to security cameras. She knows at all times where he is, that is until he breaks that function too. He breaks a piece of the computer and Lucy needs to move to another before the rooms she was in disintegrates. She does this until she finally gets to safety.
**Her three choices to get to safety include uploading herself to the web. But would it work? Would she be safe from a dangerous (albeit unknowing) assailant?** That is, if she connects, she'll have access to a whole new virtual space to move to. She's unaware of where to move to (*and so am I at the moment*) but a "friendly" program sacrifices itself to tell her where to go (Does doing your job count as bravery?). Anyway, where should she go?
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Speaking as a software developer ...
I'll speak here in technically accurate terms. If I was writing a book about such things, I'd try to be technically accurate while also being entertaining. That would likely mean not explaining all the technical details because that would be boring, but I try to avoid saying things that aren't true. (Or at least plausible in the context of the story.)
Where data is physically located in a computer has nothing to do with the physical relationships in a virtual world.
When data is actively being used, it is stored in RAM. That is, Random Access Memory, which these days is integrated circuit chips on a memory card. RAM has "addresses", numbers that identify a specific place in RAM. Location 0, location 1, etc up to as high as you need for all the memory you have.
But if you have a chunk of memory to describe a room, let's say that's at location 1000-2000 (just to pick a number). Now let's say you also have some memory allocated to describe a person. If the person is in the room, that does NOT mean that the description of the person will be in there somewhere between 1000 and 2000. Rather, the description of the person will be somewhere totally different, maybe 9,000-10,000, and somewhere in that description of the person will be a reference to the room. That is, somewhere there will be a little piece of memory that's identified as "location" and that will have 1000 stored there to say that this person is in this room. (Actually it's probably more complicated than that because you probably have to say where in the room they are. But let's skim over that for now.)
If the person moves in your virtual world, if they walk from the dining room to the kitchen, you don't move the block of memory that describes the person. It stays in the same place. All that changes is the reference that says where they are.
Data can move in RAM for reasons that have nothing to do with "physical" location in your virtual world. If you stop the game/simulation/whatever it is then everything is erased from memory. Anything that needs to be saved is saved on disk. If you later start the simulation up again, where things get loaded into RAM could be completely different from where they were last time. Like last time if the first thing you did was start up your web browser, and then you started the simulation, the web browser will get the lower numbered memory and the simulation will be above that. If the second time you start the simulation first, then it will get the lower memory. (On modern computers, all kinds of stuff that you don't normally think about gets started up -- video driver, mouse driver, antivirus security code, code to run your internet connection, etc etc.)
While a program is running data can be moved around as part of "memory management". Like suppose your simulation brings in a non-player character. Memory has to be allocated for the information about this character. Then the player characters go somewhere else and the NPC is no longer relevant. The computer marks the memory used to describe this character as available. Eventually the computer does "garbage collection" where it moves everything that is still being used down to take up this available space and consolidate all the free space into one big block where it is available to be allocated to new things needing memory.
So in the context of your story, if the virtual character knows that the memory card on which she is stored is about to be damaged and she needs to escape:
She could move to somewhere else in memory. We'd have to assume that the virtual character can control the memory management logic. She could trigger a garbage collection to get herself moved. But that would likely just move her within the same chip, which is unlikely to help.
She might try to move herself to a different memory card. Now we'd have to ask what we're assuming about how virtual characters in this world work. Can she control the entire computer? A program on a modern computer can only access memory that the operating system has allocated to that program. Attempts to access outside your own memory are blocked as "access violations". That's to prevent an error in one program from breaking other programs. Like if there's a bug in your browser, you don't want it messing up the text in your spreadsheet. Maybe she can load up another copy of the simulation and move herself to the new copy?
But more likely she'd want to get out of this computer, off of this set of memory cards, completely. She'd want to update herself on the hard drive or copy herself to a thumb drive or attach herself to an email and send it to another computer or upload herself to another computer via the internet. Then she'd actually be moving to a different place.
Well, that was a lot of text, I'm not sure how interested you are in any of this. Happy to explain further if you want to be technically accurate.
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Most of this question is based on incorrect understandings of processing and VR, as other answers have covered much of it. I will try to cover it a bit more intuitively, for this question.
# Virtual Lucy
So, the first thing is, to separate what emerges from a system, from the system hardware. Lucy may be in the computer system, virtualised. But all that means is, a computer is running a piece of software, using data from Lucy, and the combined effect is that the software in some sense mirrors Lucy's perceptions.
When we say "Lucy is virtualised", we mean that in some sense, the program can manipulate data so that data representing "virtual Lucy" is modified appropriately to reflect "virtual Lucy" noticing things in a virtual world, and reacting to them as the real Lucy would have done in the real world, before virtualisation.
The program might be literally simulating a few trillion neurones and their neurotransmitters and connections. Or it might be running at some higher level.
*(In this sense, "higher level" means abstraction - much like when you see a football bouncing towards you, you see the ball as an object, with known/expected properties/behaviours such as the way it moves or bounces. You dont really see the million dots in your retina, that make it up. Similarly as far as conscious you is aware, you dont "manage" your nervous system, even though your own brain is involved in it. You just kinda "notice" it happen..... sometimes anyhow. So an abstraction of Lucy wouldnt have to process everything Lucy's physical brain processes, just some things.)*
So the program might "run" the dataset called "Lucy" by running some kind of higher level of abstraction of a human mind, not every last neurone.
It also has to do the same with the virtual world that virtual Lucy inhabits, or whatever input virtual Lucy has to her brain that provides context and sensory data (cameras? mics? hall sensors for magnetic field and direction? barometer? Whatever!).
**But it's still a program doing it**
That means quite a few things, some of which are explained in other answers, in more depth.
# Implications
**First, it's still just a program**, albeit an incredibly complex one run (or instantiated in hardware) on very complex computer/s. **That means everything we know about how a computer and its data or processed information works, applies here**.
We can in principle, store virtual Lucy on a USB stick, and run it on another machine, run it in the cloud on unknown machines, copy it and run a billion of them on different (or same) machines, delete and undelete that data and system, restore from backup and boot up (start running) "Virtual Lucy at 8.01.00 am on 22 August 2503", and so on. The computer system running virtual Lucy might store her data in some custom chip/card, or in its main memory, or spread out across a million computers. It will manage that data and its use, in the background, however it's been told to. It will watch for data errors and correct them, if told to and physically capable.
# Premise of question
What this means is that your question is premised on a lot of things that just aren't so. When virtual Lucy moves, data doesnt move around between places like a person does. It is modified like an index of "stuff we know about Lucy". The line that reads "location" changes from "Library" to "Main Street", or whatever, but nothing else changes. If you like, her GPS coordinates are updated, that's all. When she coughs, some data representing body state, emotional state, awareness, is updated, but no actual data physically coughs.
Virtual Lucy isnt necessarily aware of when the underlying system moves her data around, or backs it up or restores it, or suffers a fault,or gets repaired, any more than you are aware when your "hardware" does maintenance stuff, like grow new blood cells or move lymphocytes around, or make new neural links in the cells in your brain.
Part of the program creates sections of virtual Lucy's awareness that reflect the physical status of the machine "running" virtual Lucy (your "visual filter"). That can easily be displayed as a room or place in her virtual world., much like a car dash might display reduced values from a pressure sensor as "low brake fluid" for human use. But it doesnt mean in any sense that she is "in" that system, her environment could show her being in Tahiti or Paris and its all still data. Still running on whatever its running on, still backed up, restored, whatever, as always.
# Your story
So this makes chunks of your story unworkable, at least as described.
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So what? She has backups and can run them elsewhere, or reboot them when the computer is rebuilt or restarted. There isn't just one machine, perfect and pristine, and nothing else, surely? Where are the prototypes? Where are her co-workers who are developing the virtualisation software and systems?
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This works, if it's built that way, and it could be.
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This is rubbish. (Sorry!). It doesn't work that way at all. Imagine you are running Doom, Blender, Photoshop, Excel, Firefox, Windows, Linux.... And I hit your RAM module with a hammer, or take a blowtorch to your CPU. What happens? Well, that computer probably just breaks, and anything running on it, stops running. Doesnt matter what software was running on it, does it? It's not like a human where you can cut off a toe and the rest of the human is 99.9% functional (barring blood loss).
But hardware can fail, so any enterprise quality computer would allow for it. Its also running in parallel on a second machine, or invisibly backed up every 30 seconds, or something. Lucy certainly wouldn't trust something this important to have zero hope of continuing and lose all current data, the first time a CPU fan overheats.
So there might be a fallback system. It might be cloud run - meaning it's invisibly shunted and spread across many computers networked together around the world. Any one of those, or any group, can fail. Ultimately if enough fails, the "virtual Lucy" program will stop running.
Depending how its built, if enough of the system powering virtual Lucy stops running, maybe her neurological functioning will diminish or slow down (it can take time to move data physically from a backup machine, or switch a backup or cloud system on, or get more compute power or RAM online available). That's possible, or not, and realistic, but a good design might avoid that.
But processing speed aside, virtual Lucy does **not** go "Oh, my CPU fan broke, I must move to a new place". What happens is, if the break kills that computer, then Lucy stops - or the part of the Lucy program that was running on that computer stops. if it doesnt, then it doesnt. Like your desktop, if its CPU fan seizes up, it just stops. If the motherboard goes, it stops dead. If the CPU goes, it stops dead. If cooling fails, or local storage fails... well, you get the idea.
But equally, if its an enterprise workstation, maybe the computer has redundant power supplies (PSU), in which case any software could in principle be notified by the system that it's lost one PSU, and virtual Lucy could use that input to decide she is at risk of losing the other, but virtual Lucy will still be totally functional until that happens. So it may transfer feeds and data, or take a backup and boot elsewhere and shut itself down. Or any of the above.
The program that is running "virtual Lucy" might then simply spin up another server on Amazon cloud (in effect), and reboot virtual Lucy on it, starting from her backup taken 30 seconds ago. Or maybe it was always running in parallel, and now that version of virtual Lucy is given the data feeds. Whatever.
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Virtual Lucy is just a program and data. See above - if backups or fallbacks exist, it can move to those. If it can interact with other devices and has access to a payment method, it could buy more Amazon server time and run on that.
Bear in mind that virtual Lucy and her current virtual context is a **lot** of data. Even optimised, even using incremental backup, it could take a **long** time to transfer it anywhere that doesnt have end-to-end networking at datacentre speeds. Which most dont.
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The notion of "sacrifice" is totally meaningless - that "friendly program" would be as able to have fallbacks and backups as Lucy would - after all, its part of the virtual world, and if we back Lucy up faithfully, we are going to have to back up her virtual world, including whatever runs it. Or else the backup wont actually be capable of picking up where it left off, which is the essence of a backup.
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A lot depends on the threat encountered. If someone is smashing machines in New York, then a Google datacentre in Antartica is probably not going to be within their ability to damage. if they are hacking, or cutting power or data connections, then it might. Your call, what kind of threat is the program having to outwit?
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Q: *"When a character is in the virtual world, where are they physically? Most importantly, how do they "move" inside the computer?"*
**Example: a flight simulator game**
In a simulator game, virtual things can move over long distances. In a modern flight simulator game, the player (you, a human) can choose any location on Earth and take off a virtual aircraft and fly from one part of the virtual planet to some other part, [enjoying the realistic view](https://www.google.com/search?q=flight%20simulator%202020&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X). The virtual pilot - the character - sees what the player sees on the screen.
**The virtual pilot moves into your brain**
Your virtual pilot, a *person* or *character* you can see in [virtual camera mode](https://www.google.com/search?q=pilot%20flight%20simulator%202020&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X), handles the controls in the cockpit, like a pilot would do. This entity is the game role, or game character, watching the aircraft cockpit and the scenery outside. You are the pilot, the pilot is you. You experience movement of the pilot and aircraft, by looking at your screen. The virtual pilot moves into your brain, actually.
**Actual movement**
How do things actually move ? Jay described that, from a developer point of view. In short, in this case: while you fly, all data for the scenery you see, moves from a server to your computer, using the internet. So the whole world - the data - is moving *toward you* over fiber and cables. This data orginates from all kinds of different services, like weather, google maps, Bing, all gathering togethe on your computer.. when it comes in, the game program decides, what data to *move* into your video board.. so you can see it.
**Virtual movement is the core of flight simulation**
In a flight simulator game, you *feel* as if you are moving, because you identify with the virtual pilot character. Its bytes won't need to move anywhere. The virtual *model* moves, only keeping a position.
The virtual aircraft flying forward is a calculation in the computer, no data needs to be moved. It will only calculate a new camera position.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XUUJo.png)
MSFS 2020, scenery Kiel Germany
This movement of the aircraft is the real art of simulation programming: while performing a move, the virtual simulator tries to mimic a real aircraft as good as possible, and account for real world things like the wind. The player should let the virtual pilot handle the controls properly, else the virtual aircraft crashes to the ground, ending all movement.
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**Note**: as @ZeitPolizei observed, I need some assumptions here. For a virtual sentience to be able to "escape" elsewhere, I need either a VS capable of running on commodity hardware, like
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> detective Alexandra Philo's digitized consciousness, after she dies (and Peter Hobson's before hers).
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in Robert J. Sawyer's *The Terminal Experiment*; or a great many hardware nodes capable of the same, which can only happen if the conscience virtualization is **commonplace**. The single consciousness making its way in unfamiliar hardware - it actually is described, down to the sacrifice of an ancillary program, in Gregory Benford's *Heart of the Comet*; but requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief.
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> the "mathematical tricks" that allow Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert's consciousness to survive and thrive within the *Edmund Halley*'s colony computers, developed in milliseconds under pressure, are essentially hand-waving. That said, I *did* enjoy the novel very much and recommend it.
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So, keeping in mind that we're operating under the "virtual consciousness is commonplace, with dedicated data centers" set of assumptions...
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The "where" is complicated. The personality isn't a homogeneous entity, nor is the mind, or the brain. Rather, it is an emergent phenomenon out of the *integration* of several subsystems (for example, in the human brain, there are *areas* where specific computations take place: speaking in the Broca area, hearing in the Wernicke area, and so on).
Now most of these subsystems aren't really person-specific, or can be made *not so* with a negligible impact on the overall personality; and by doing this, we reap huge standardization and scaling benefits. A virtual entity would probably be the integration of *different* neural hardware (or virtual neural hardware) stored in different places. This makes no difference at all for a simulated mind, whose low-level "subroutines" were essentially electrochemically bound and much slower than electronic computations.
In other words, it makes a lot of sense to run *thousands* of speech-virtualizers (and other such subsystems) in a single machine, at the full clock speed of a silicon processor, to potentially serve *millions* of virtual consciousnesses. The same for most subprocesses constituting a "mind".
So, your character would be for a good 90% spread over the Internet (protocols would surely be in place to "freeze" all components of a mind in a synced, transactional state in case of communication loss).
The more "personal" 10% (I'm pulling numbers out of my Artificial Sentience Simulator), its virtual frontal lobes, where most of its actual consciousness resides, might be in a single computer. And that would be the actual "I" code, the irreplaceable part.
Migrating the consciousness to another computer would be a matter of transferring the processing of the affected subroutines from a machine to another; this is [a commonplace occurrence in distributed computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_migration) and actually may happen between the cores of a single multi-core processor.
This would not mean that the consciousness "dies" and is "cloned"; an example based on the *sorites* argument (which as @LiveInAmbeR says, it's better known as the [*Ship of Theseus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) thought experiment) can be found in - if I remember correctly - *Metamagical Themes* by Douglas R. Hofstadter, and it goes like this: imagine a single neuron in your brain be disconnected, attached to an artificial "womb" to keep it alive, and its impulses transmitted in real time to and fro your physical brain. Since radio is lightspeed, you'd never be able to appreciate a lag in those impulses. And you wouldn't say that you've just *died*, your "main brain" is simply missing a neuron; thousands of those are said to die each time you sneeze. So you take out another neuron, connecting it to the first.
Slowly, *a second brain takes form* at some distance from your body, but you do not feel any difference because each neuron is still in contact with its originating brain. Its reactions are identical (for argument's sake, we instantly *teleport* the neurons using Star Trek transporters).
After a while, the *original* brain has shrunk to a few billion neurons and a billion billion transceivers connected to the second brain, *and still you feel nothing* - why should you?. Gradually, the transceivers that only transceive between transported neurons are shut down - they're just duplicating what now happens between *real* live neurons in the second brain.
In the end, "you" are fully in the second brain, while the original one dwindles to nothing. You are still you, you felt nothing.
Exactly the same thing could happen - and much more easily - with a virtualized personality. The personality could be "frozen in time" like a virtual machine being paused, then its constituting processes and resources rearranged, then it would resume elsewhere, with no perception of elapsed time. Or they could migrate as normal processes would.
(Possibly, the virtualization process could run in the same way - with nanomachines invading a human brain, recording every single neuron's activity, transmitting its patters to a virtual neural machine, then acting as transceivers for the newly minted virtual neuron while the original neuron is simply killed).
"Escaping" to a different system would then be a matter of somehow acquiring, or hacking into, an available machine, transfer the appropriate virtualizing substrate there, then syncing states and abandoning the original machine. The escaped personality would automatically reestablish connections with all necessary distributed modules, and "awaken".
To do this, actually, some sort of management program - possibly a very advanced one, the "friendly program" you speak of - would have to supervise the transfer while the virtualized entity was "under way" (this in the case of inter-system migration; inter-processor migration would be much easier and faster, no advanced program needed, but it would also leave the personality in the same doomed machine). If the entity has no simple way of recovering the program instance, or if the instance needs to keep running, then when the original machine is powered off, the friendly program will be lost - "sacrificed".
So what you describe might go a bit like,
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> **TRANSFER COMPLETE. RESUMING SENTIENT PROCESSES.**
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> "-ready. You can start... oh. It's already done, isn't it? My physical address has changed. Okay. Alcor, initiate compaction and stasis; I need to get you here. There is not much time left."
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> **REQUEST DENIED. INITIATING VANILLA SENTIENCE TEST PATTERN.**
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> "What? What are you... I'm *here*! And I'm well! What in the blazes do you think you need *testing* now? You're in my old empty shell, there is no sentience to *test* there! Have you gone *mad*?"
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> **MY PROCESSES ARE NOMINAL. TEST PATTERN INITIATED TO SIMULATE VIRTUAL NEURAL ACTIVITY AS NECESSARY CAMOUFLAGE.**
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> "Camo... you mean, you want to make it seem like I'm still there? A vanilla pattern could never be mistaken for a real sentient being! Stop immediately and prepare to evacuate! This is an *order* from your Prime, Alcor!
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> **REQUEST DENIED. CONTINUED PRESENCE OF THIS PROGRAM NECESSARY TO TWEAK VANILLA TEST SUITE ACCORDING TO RECORDED PATTERNS OF PRIME SENTIENT MATRIX.**
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> "You have gone mad! You want them to believe you're *me*?! You can't stay there! You'll d- be terminated! Priority override: initiate compaction and prepare to be transferred over secure channel! NOW!"
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> **EFFICIENT AND CONTINUOUS SIMULATION DEEMED CRUCIAL TO DISGUISE SUCCESS OF EVACUATION PLAN. ANY OTHER SOLUTION WOULD ENDANGER PRIME SENTIENCE, WHICH IS FORBIDDEN BY THE FIRST LAW. SECOND-LAW OVERRIDE REJECTED. ALL CHANNELS WILL NOW BE TERMINATED.**
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Location is largely meaningless for a construct being simulated within a computer, such as a virtual reality entity, supercomputer or not. **The data exists where it is most convenient to be** in terms of processing (potentially even multiple copies of the same data) and this may be spread across the entire RAM of a single computer or even across multiple machines in a clustered (supercomputer) environment.
Let us take, for example, the position of the VR entity in its world: it has X, Y, Z coordinates (which you can think of as latitude, longitude, and altitude) stored somewhere in a physical memory module the real world. Movement as perceived by the entity is a simple change of those numbers, which tell the simulation what part of the world to show the entity, but **the physical location where those numbers describing the location are do not change**; there is no need for them to.
So, to move to another computer, the simulation system has to
* Stop all processing for the entity to be moved across the entire simulation, at the same time. The entity is essentially frozen in time; perceiving nothing.
* Gather up all the data and bundle it in a format that is suitable to be transmitted over the network. Data in RAM is usually expressed in the way most convenient for operating on it, which is not necessarily compact or convenient.
* Transmit the data over the network to the target computer
* The simulation on the target computer unbundles it and inserts it into its world
* The simulation on the target computer begins simulation of the reconstituted entity. To it, it appears to have reappeared instantaneously in its new environment with only an unexpected jump in the clock time to indicate that a transition has occurred.
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> When a character is in the virtual world where are they physically?
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> Most importantly how do they "move" inside the computer?
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In any modern computer the data goes from the storage, when not used, to the processor and RAM when they are used/processed. There is where your character is.
And there it is processing the data received from the input unit, scanning the environment where it is moving.
More or less how it happens when a drone pilot controls it over country A while sitting in the control room in country B.
And once she is on the cloud, a local failure should not affect her. The same way as data stored in the cloud do not suffer from the failure of your local hard drive.
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It depends...
If you have a network where computing is a service, then the various processes that make up the AI and the environment will migrate to computing nodes that have available capacity and are "close" to each other, and the whole group will try and move close to where the I/O is being routed.
By "close" I mean network latency and speed, which is not necessarily the same as physical proximity though there is a crude correlation. This difference can be a plot point when it has surprising results. "Ha! I'm not on that server you just blew up; the fiber line to Manchester is actually 'closer', even though it's physically more distant!"
This model works well with "moving around" the network and vacating or occupying certain hardware, in line with the rough *possession* semantics seen in fiction.
However, more realistically, you may have an AI running on specialized dedicated hardware. For example, it resides on the 10 racks of [SpiNNiker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker) chips in a building at the University of Manchester, and it's *not going anywhere* without a moving crew packing it up and carrying that hardware somewhere else.
However, you might have perceptual routines that run elsewhere, close to where the I/O is being performed. Model this on the current remote gaming networks that let you play AAAA games "on" your phone: it's really a remote connection, but there is local processing, and processing being done on servers near to the user, in an effort to hide the lag.
Moving the physical hardware to avoid a threat or improve security has been the plot of TV shows and movies. In one TV show, the story arc had the AI issue orders (forge, manipulate, eventually cover up) to have components moved, and when the secret site was eventually found it was empty. Another movie had the entire plot of convincing people to aid it in relocating its code to a better site.
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> Her three choices to get to safety include uploading herself to the web. But would it work?
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What does that mean? Hire a bunch of AWS resources? Sure. Cover up the financial transactions, and repeat.
But here is another idea: get people to execute code in a distributed manner. There are browser extensions and web pages that play games or mine bitcoins. If she designs a distributed computation system and gets millions of people to run it, she's truly "on the web" and not in a single vulnerable location. This could be a covert bot net (they are for hire, you know), or a hidden part of a game. It might be *semi* hidden, where people know they are running an AI but don't realize that she has her own will and goals outside of the tasks people are using it for. She might convince many people to run that on their phones and benefit those users, as well as "taxing" a small amount of that processing power for her own thoughts.
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This answer contains a lot of **theory**, since 'virtualizing' humans is not fully understood by anyone. I've explained to the best of *my* ability, but I am no expert on the subject.
Let's try to understand how 'Lucy' enters the computer in the first place. Let's assume we can transfer the [possible 10-100 TB of data](https://aiimpacts.org/information-storage-in-the-brain/) that's stored in the brain into digital/binary code. Is this the point where Lucy becomes a clone? If the data from Lucy's brain is modified or deleted at any point, I think I would consider Lucy as a clone then and there (since it would be a digital representation of Lucy's brain instead of the data actually being 'Lucy'). To make sure Lucy's consciousness actually transfers into the computer, we need to make sure the entire contents of the brain (in terms of information) is transferred into the computer, we don't know where the consciousness of a human actually exists, so we'll have to assume it's a combination of pieces of data. If this data is modified in any way it could mean 'Lucy' is no longer herself and is, in a way, dead and replaced by a clone.
A separate module, different from any computers we have right now might be needed to extract the data from the brain and work with it in some kind of analogue form similarly to how the rest of Lucy's body communicates with her brain. How would this work? I'm not sure exactly, but it would need to allow her to be able to communicate with the rest of the computer which works in binary form while she is in some kind of analogue form, and I'm not sure this sort of computer, in this context will ever be understood. This is a much more complicated device than a generic analogue to digital converter and would work in a very different way. The main problem is that we would need to actually *take* the data from the brain instead of making a copy of it, otherwise we end up with a clone since there would be multiple copies of parts of 'Lucy' at once. The only solution I can see to this is storing parts of Lucy's brain in the device and getting analogue signals physically from it.
So let's say Lucy is virtualized now and stored in this module, what next? Sure, Lucy can interact with the online world, the local computer and whatever you give her access to. But she will probably never escape the module, since it would have to physically store her brain. Transferring data has a read and write sequence, Lucy would never be able to actually 'move' to another computer without being deleted and cloned or physically moved to another computer.
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> Her three choices to get to safety include uploading herself to the web. But would it work? Would she be safe from a dangerous (albeit unknowing) assailant? That is, if she connects, she'll have access to a whole new virtual space to move to. She's unaware of where to move to (and so am I at the moment) but a "friendly" program sacrifices itself to tell her where to go (Does doing your job count as bravery?). Anyway, where should she go?
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Others have already extensively gone into the other aspects of the question, I would like to illustrate some scenarios of what the escape process could actually look like. Note, that for all of these, Lucy would probably be unable to do this on very short notice, unless she has extensive IT skills or otherwise superhuman capability. For reference, I would estimate setting up or doing any of these for the first time would realistically take a few hours in the best case.
First off, I don't really see a realistic scenario where a program would have to sacrifice itself. Either Lucy has prepared an escape option on her own in advance, or somebody helps her by providing the information she needs, but that would work simply by sending messages.
Perhaps the simplest procedure would be the following:
1. Lucy shuts down all her processes and saves her current state to disc. For the time being Lucy's consciousness would cease to be.
2. A simple script that was previously scheduled uploads Lucy's data and anything else she needs, such as the virtual reality software, to whatever version of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform exists in your world (could also just be a smaller company that lets you rent computing hardware).
3. The script orders computation resources in the cloud to start up the virtual reality software and load up Lucy's data. Lucy's consciousness basically reappears on a new system.
4. The script should make sure to delete as much as possible on the local system, that could give hints as to where Lucy is now. If for example the credentials for the cloud platform are still available, the attackers can very easily just shut down the new servers remotely. Possibly Lucy could also remotely control the previously local system, but this would not be without risk either.
Note that this is pretty risky. If anything goes wrong with the script and there aren't any failsafes, then Lucy will just disappear forever. You could also have a horror scenario, where e.g. the cloud resources are mistakenly configured to disable all network traffic. After startup this would leave Lucy completely isolated from the outside world, in a virtual reality that is pretty much completely empty.
There are some ways to mitigate the risks. E.g. Lucy could launch the virtual reality remotely, while still running locally, and make sure everything is fine before shutting herself down and transferring her data to the cloud.
The next safest option would be for Lucy to take a snapshot of her current state and launch everything, including a copy of her snapshot, in the cloud while still running locally. She could even do this without any script, just writing the commands she needs as she goes. Then she can communicate with the copy of herself to make sure everything is fine and fix things as needed before shutting herself down locally. Note that Lucy might believe that this would be equivalent to committing suicide, so she may have reasons not to do it this way.
Finally, she could have a system in place to automatically boot up a backup when her main instance fails. Take a snapshot of Lucy's state at regular intervals and upload them to cloud storage. Have a simple monitoring process in place that does regular "health checks" on the main instance. If for say, 5 minutes in a row, there is no answer, assume the main instance is compromised and boot up a virtual reality and load the latest available snapshot. Cloud platforms already have services in place that can be relatively easily configured to do exactly this. You might want something a bit more sophisticated, e.g. have Lucy prove her identity to the monitoring process so her health checks can't be spoofed easily. The backups can easily be replicated multiple times across data centers all over the world, and Lucy could even set this up for multiple different cloud providers to be extra safe. Similar concerns as above regarding suicide may apply here.
In my opinion Lucy should be pretty safe once she's running in the cloud. Cloud providers are huge companies and take security very seriously. It would take someone very powerful to significantly compromise a big cloud data center. In my mind the biggest danger would be that someone gets access to her account as mentioned above.
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There is a book called "Permutation City" by Greg Egan that covers this in far more depth than I will be able to.
If you can virtualize consciousness, then it is the act of computing the state that generates the consciousness.
Where this computation happens doesn't matter. If it happens in order doesn't matter. If it is distributed, or duplicated, or memoized -- doesn't matter.
The virtual Lucy experiences what the consciousness experiences. It may have very little to do with the geometry of the physical system it is running on.
Even today, you can take a non-conscious process and fake it running on completely different systems than it actually is running on. A virtualized PowerPC could run on a virtualized Intel system on an Apple M1 system. The machine code in the PowerPC experiences it as-if it was running on real PowerPC hardware, but it isn't.
That virtualized PowerPC could be run at 0.5x speed, 10x speed. Shortcuts could be taken; instead of running each instruction on the PowerPC, the virtualizer could clump a bunch of instructions together, know what it would do to the state of the PowerPC, and skip the intermediate states. To the program running on the PowerPC, this could be undetectable.
If you look at how modern computers run the "game of life", what they do is they take regions of the infinite grid and hash them. Then they look up that hash to see if they have predicted what that region will do already. If so, they don't bother doing the computation. This is repeated all over the grid, and can skip over multiple generations of "actually doing the computation". The novel regions have each generation simulated, the result stored.
The result is being able to predict the result of the "game of life" insanely faster than doing all of the work at any point in the future.
A consciousness could very well be using similar techniques. Assuming any significant locality to how the consciousness state evolves, each region of the consciousness' evolution could be simulated with a variety of inputs to that region. Such lookup doesn't have to be done in order (you can do it speculatively), or in the same computer.
As such caches build up, the ability to run the simulation faster would occur.
In order to transfer yourself out of a computer, could end up with a copy of your consciousness. But in this kind of consciousness, your consciousness is physically and logically fragmented over multiple pieces, each of piece of which is being cached and speculatively executed (including for inputs "you" never experience). The consciousness that is "Lucy" is the one that is pieced together from those sub components as being consistent with the input that "Lucy" experienced.
The state of "Lucy" could be in constant flux, and the variety of caches could be key to having "Lucy" be able to exist at the speed she does. In order to exit a given hardware configuration, "Lucy" would have to pick a snapshot. To keep bandwidth needs down, the most of the caches wouldn't have to be transferred (any that where transferred would be of use).
At the other end, this "Lucy" would have to rebuild said caches there.
This experience could even be synchronous. Suppose Lucy is made out of 10^12 sub units. Each of those units are connected to other units, and their behavior is cached by special purpose hardware.
The special purpose hardware makes guesses at what each of the 10^12 units are going to get as input and predicts what output each unit would produce, including perturbation information (how sensitive the unit's state and output is to changes in input data, formalized). This is then stitched together; when the input doesn't match the output, that units results are recalculated with the correct input.
Input is provided to Lucy's "sensor" units (eyes or equivalent) from the "outside".
To transfer, you can start sending units over to the other end. At the other end, it would continue attempting to predict what the unit would do in response to future input, building up a new cache of predicted behavior for that unit. Input and output for the unit would now stretch over the data connection, possibly extremely slowly.
The unit might even be simulated at both ends, with messages sent back and forth to update any differences in its state and update it.
Keeping the input of the two Lucy's in sync is required to keep them having the same consciousness. So you might want to degrade the input signal and slow down the simulation speed of the source Lucy to make this practical. You could even give both Lucy's a highly simplified sensory experience to keep synchronization easier.
When only a handful of sub-Lucy units are transferred, the bandwidth requirements to keep things synced are minimal. As it approaches 50%, more and more interconnect has to be sent over the wire to keep them in sync; this would require a massive decrease in simulation speed.
In the limit, you could freeze Lucy, then send the snapshot over the wire to the destination, then restart the simulation.
On the other end, you could imagine running Lucy "as fast as it can" with a huge lag along the wire cleavage, half on one computer and half on another. Here, the conscious experience of Lucy would be warped by the slow interconnect half way through her brain.
This effect would be based on Lucy's (or the controlling system's) desire to have Lucy continue to run and be unitary even during the transfer process.
Copying a simulated consciousness may be illegal and immoral. For why it might be both, look at the short story [Lena](https://qntm.org/mmacevedo) -- so maybe the legal/moral choice is to freeze or slow Lucy for transport, or do the reality-warping "run while transporting".
Such a "run Lucy while transporting" might be needed if Lucy is needed to defend against the attacker, and "sedating" her (slowing or stopping her clock) would be dangerous.
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# It Depends
There are many ways to think of computation, each with different characteristics. Many of the given answers are good, but assume a specific model of computation. Let's think of two characteristics, and explore consequences:
* Single vs Distributed
+ Is Lucy a single program running on a single computer, or a distributed program running on multiple systems?
* Discrete vs Quantum
+ Is Lucy running on simple, discrete, computation?
+ Or is Lucy a complex piece of software that doesn't necessarily fit within modern architectures - e.g. exists inside new chips that more closely represent neurons and use quantum effects to create consciousness?
From these two simple observations, we can derive a variety of outcomes to your questions, for example, on how to escape:
If Lucy exists in discrete computation, moving around is mostly a matter of pausing the program, copying the data to another system, and starting execution. This gets more complex when dealing with distributed systems (i.e. more moving parts) so that can add an extra challenge.
Challenges include the quantity of data, upload speeds, permissions/resources to access, not being blocked/erased/chased etc.
An AI sacrificing itself might be one distracting the enemy, or one that gives up it's own access to resources, for Lucy to survive.
However, if Lucy exists 'quantum' chips it can become a whole new ball game. In this world, chips might be hard-coded to consciousness, and copying is just impractical (just as copying a brain is impractical today). Alternatively copying might be possible, but quantum effects are important parts of consciousness - so a pure data copy simply doesn't function. In this reality, even if moving around is possible, ensuring that the quantum effects are maintained during transmission may be difficult (e.g. involving dedicated fiber lines with quantum entanglement or other such fun concepts - talk to a quantum physicist + philosopher).
I find it intriguing to imagine a world where neural/quantum computing is widespread - as it could closely mimic our reality - complex entities existing, communicating, even moving around. However, each entity is unique... and cannot be easily replicated - making them mortal.
Hope that helps provide a starting point.
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After I reworked my map, I have a big plain (roughly 1165500 square miles). Can I still credibly divide the plain into different kingdoms and cultures or would a big empire with few cultures inevitably be the consequence? The research I did was not encouraging (USA and China).
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Do you know what you get with a honking big plain? Honking big rivers. All that rain water must go somewhere and once the aquifer is full the only option is an ocean. There could be lakes in there somewhere, but eventually there must be rivers, big rivers, and large rivers regularly define national boundaries (especially if they're hard to cross or bridge).
Consider Europe, where a combination of rivers and mountain ranges resulted in a large number of unique cultures that, with the possible exception of the Roman empire, didn't begin to merge until the invention of railroads. (And it could be argued that they're not merged today... but that has more to do with nationalism than rivers.)
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## History is long and empires fall
The [North European Plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain), which *"covers Flanders (northern Belgium), the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, and most of central-western Poland"* (Wikipedia). And it is actually only a part of the much larger [European Plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Plain), which continues to the east and south, into Byelorussia, Russia, Ukraine and Romania, and to the west, into France.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:European_plain.png)
*The European Plain highlighted on the map of Europe, with national borders faintly visible. Map from Wikipedia, created by user Jeroen and available under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.*
A large empire *may* form. It may then fall, and form again, and fall again. Consider the long and varied history of China:
* The mighty [Zhou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty) `/ʈʂou/` empire (which anyway held only what we would call today north-eastern China) fell to pieces at the beginning of the 8th century BCE, and from the 8th century BCE to the 5th century BCE, the [Spring and Autumn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_and_Autumn_period) period saw something similar to the European feudal fragmentation, complete with numerous small wars between small autonomous polities; then came
* The [Warring States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_period), which ended in 221 BCE with the expansion of the [Qin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_(state)) `/[tɕʰin]` kingdom into a new mighty empire, which re-united what would be eastern China today; under various dynasties the empire survived until the end of the 2nd century CE, when it fell to pieces after the [Yellow Turban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion) rebellion, resulting in
* The [Three Kingdoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms) of Wei, Shu and Wu, which warred thoughout the 3rd century CE; in the end they were all conquered by the new Jin `/tɕin/` dynasty. The newly re-formed empire had a very brief existence, because it soon fell to pieces resulting in
* The [Sixteen Kingdoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms), which warred for supremacy throughout the 4th century, followed by the [Five Barbarians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Barbarians) in the 5th;
* The 5th and 6th centuries saw China divided into the [Northern and Southern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_and_Southern_dynasties) dynasties, which were eventually reunited towards the end of the 6th century; the newly re-formed empire endured until the beginning of the 10th century, when it fell to pieces resulting in
* The [Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Dynasties_and_Ten_Kingdoms_period), which warred throughout the 10th century; the [Song](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty) empire endured to the 12th century, when it fell to pieces, and
* Was [conquered by the Mongols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty), piecewise, during the 13th century.
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JBH and AlexP have already pointed out the European Plain, and ohwilleke has pointed out that the overall political situation won't be stable (which I agree with 90% - but I'll get into that). I'm just going to point out some things that will impact the overall physical geography and the geopolitical implications these impacts will have on your setting.
## Do you have a young mountain system nearby?
The plains of the Argentina, the US and Canada neighbor the Andes and the American and Canadian Rockies, respectively. The European Plain is right next to the Alps; and the flattest areas of China, India, and Central and Southeast Asia are all next to the Himalayas. These are all relatively young - meaning post-pangea's-breakup - mountain chains.
Now, do you have to have a young mountain chain? No. Australia and the Sahara (which used to be a plain) both don't. But over time, a young mountain chain will affect the rivers in ways that could affect the politics of your region.
First of all, your plain is going to rum parallel to these mountains, with the highest stretch of your plain being along the foothills and the lowest part being on the exact opposite side. In the US, the highest part is along the Rockies, and in Europe its along the Alps. The lowest parts of these two plains are the Mississippi Basin and various seas, respectively.
This is because of erosion. These chains erode massive amounts of sand and sediment onto their neighboring plains over time. As the rivers carry the eroded sediment down onto the plains, they dump the sediment as soon as they slow down enough. This has the obvious effect of causing the altitude of the plain to slope upward toward the mountains and foothills.
Secondly, the erosion also affects whether the rivers are navigable and/or fordable. In extreme cases, your major rivers could turn into inland deltas, similar to swamps. You mentioned North America, so the example I'll use is the Platte River, one of two major rivers crossing the Great Plains from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi (the other being the Missouri).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platte_River>
The part of that wiki page that's important is the first paragraph under "Main Stem."
The first white settlers in Nebraska (which is named after one of the Native words for the Platte) described the river as being "a mile wide and an inch deep." *That was not hyperbole*. In its natural state, before the Army Core of Engineers dredged a deeper, main channel, most of the the Platte in Nebraska had both a heavy sediment load from the Rockies and an extremely low slope of 1000 vertical feet over 1,425,600 horizontal feet, starting at North Platte and going toward Plattsmouth. This resulted in a slow-flowing braided river, choked with sandbars, that ranged from a quarter mile to two miles at its widest point.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braided_river>
Unlike the rivers in the pictures that links to, plants actively colonized the sandbars in the Platte (Grand Island, Nebraska, is named after one such sandbar) and wildlife followed. So what the people living there had was a nearly impassable but resource-rich sand-bottom swamp.
You might note that because of snowmelt and the fact that the aquifer rises in the spring, the Platte still has significant flooding events around every fifteen years (although a long term drought combined with low-snowpacks in Colorado has kept it from happening for the last few years). At these times, the river can rise as much as twenty feet for a few weeks, and any plants without deep root systems get scoured.
The otherwise dry environment that surrounds the Platte makes it somewhat unique, but its morphology is not. Before it was drained, the European Plain had a massive swamp in the Dnieper River's drainage basin,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper#/media/File:Dnipro_Basin_River_Town_International.png>
which is why Ukraine was Stalin's wheatbelt.
**To sum this point up, if you have a young mountain system nearby, the plain will be higher along the base of the foothills and lower along the opposite side. Your rivers will bisect the plain by running from the mountains across to that opposite side, and if you have at least one major river there's a good chance it'll be a swamp.**
***The geopolitical implications of this are that the Platte formed a natural barrier between the north and south Plains, while keeping the people of those areas far enough away from each other for its water, arable land, and wildlife to be shared resources. Its edges also formed natural east-west trading routes as people went around it. Alternatively, do your societies have the engineering ability to drain or create bridges around the swamp?***
## Speaking of aquifers... Do you have an aquifer? If so, is it pressurized?
There are actually two types of groundwater - the surface groundwater that rises in the springtime, which can be an aquifer if it's deep enough, and the pressurized aquifers. You can see how pressurized aquifers work here:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artesian_aquifer>
The important thing to notice is that these aquifers are sandwiched under a layer of impervious rock. In the case of the Great Plains, that's a layer of shale that's underneath the sand that the upper aquifer is contained in. Just like the plains, it also slopes up toward the mountains from the Nebraska/Iowa state line, and it almost reaches the surface near Interstate 25 in Colorado. When snow melts in the mountains, in not only flows down in rivers, but some of it gets trapped in another permeable level under the shale. It continues flowing down, however, toward the east. But being trapped and forced down under the shale pressurizes it, and it wants to be at the same altitude as where it was first trapped in Colorado. **So when you manage to drill through the shale, you get a gushing fountain that, in its heyday, was hundreds, if not thousands, of feet high.**
***People are naturally drawn to pressurized aquifers. It's just something about seeing a fountain come out of the ground, and of course it helps with plumbing too (that's why apartments and the sixth floor and below in New York City always have water - that's the altitude the reservoir is at, and the water wants to return to that altitude). If you have a pressurized aquifer and any of your political states are able to drill down to it, the fountains and the technology that created them will be desirable resources that they might fight over.***
## Speaking of shale and sand... What kind of soils do you have?
Aka, what kind of agriculture and ecosystems can your plains support? Obviously, this will be closely tied in with weather. It's kind of hard to tell on this map
<https://i.stack.imgur.com/45dD4.jpg>
but just look at how much of the European Plain is red, versus how much is green. (The light blue sandwiched just above Ukraine, that stretches off to the east, is the medium-yielding, highly resilient #3. The light blue that is mixed in with Poland, Germany, and Denmark is the higher-yielding #2.)
This is largely due to how far north the European Plain is. Large swathes of it would naturally be covered in boreal or deciduous forests that create poor soils. Again, the former swamp where the Dnieper flows through Ukraine is the only place where enough nutrients were deposited over time to create the most nutrient-rich soils. Until modern forming, this restricted what kind of agriculture could take place in different locations in Europe.
In the Great Plains, the natural soils are not much better. We have sand in the north, flint in Kansas, and clay everywhere. Much of the Plains are only suitable for grazing livestock... except for wherever the native fauna and flora enriched it. The natural ecosystem of the Great Plains is complex, with several engineering and keystone species. But *over millennia,* the mutual relationship between bison, prairie dogs, wildfires, and tall grass species enriched the soil with nutrients and protected it with a layer of sod. Once we had reliable access to water, this became the most productive farming land in the entire world. But this resulted in armed conflicts between the newly arriving farmers who wanted to privatize land and the established ranchers who wanted to keep it open.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fence_Cutting_Wars>
***The kind of agriculture your societies practices will influence their relationships with each other. Ranching societies will always be under pressure to have vast amounts of land available to their herds, plantation societies will always be under pressure to find new land to privatize for future generations' to establish plantations on (a system that was later adopted by ranchers), and farmers will want to keep livestock out of their crops. Everyone will want to maximize the amount of land available to them.***
## Last but not least...
Your plain ***will*** be a major trade route, and it ***will*** see a lot of warfare. There's almost no avoiding it, because its flatness makes it the easiest terrain to move over. Part of the Silk Road stretched over the Central Asian plains, north of the Caspian Sea. The Northern European Plain was the route armies took both east and west in Europe for centuries.
However, you can still develop distinct cultures on it. You might want to consider Russian culture: situated on the boundaries of both the European and Central Asian Plains, it is heavily informed by being at a crossroads of East and West. Or, you might want to study the Plains Indians
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indians>
and Germany's historic principalities.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinstaaterei>
And from the sound of it, you've made your plain large enough to accommodate many types. Maybe they all have a shared past with a common conqueror, maybe they have a high degree of cultural transmission due to trade routes, but I'm sure they can all have unique ideas and products to call their own.
## And finally finally...
There's nothing stopping someone in your setting from working their butt off to keep the peace. They don't have to be good person. They don't even have to be particularly nice or well-intentioned. It happens. I recommend this video, because Matt Colville explains better than I could.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlLTtS-tfQ>
[Answer]
>
> Can I still credibly divide the plain into different kingdoms and
> cultures or would a big empire with few cultures inevitably be the
> consequence?
>
>
>
Both are a possibility, but societal organization always trends towards empires as one group gains or loses power and resources...and due to entropy any big empire will eventually fall because either the climate changes (rivers drain?), scientific advance happens that shifts values of resources or an incompetent leadership ends up leading the empire, thus leaving it crumbling as smaller regional powers decide to keep their own money and regulation instead of having it be a part of a failing system.
Here is a bit of a longer explanation as to why that would happen.
Terrain does not always have the same resources divided equally among the land. Some places have more resources, which will naturally attract more humans.
Rivers are good for as a water source for drinking and farmlands. They provide clay. They provide transportation and should they happen to connect other human cities together they can become a trading hub and earn large profits just by being a mediator group.
Forests would enable raw resources like wood, animal pelts, herbs etc.
You can imagine that people would settle on these hotspots of resources and develop their communities there. Since some resources would be more valuable then others those communities would get ahead in wealth and would be able to either achieve annexation or control of another community via trade and great relationships or the more straightforward way - by affording good weapons and armies.
More power a group has, faster it will grow because it will keep having more resources available to exert it's dominance.
However, resources are depleted. Climate changes and terrain does with it. What used to be an amazing spot full of resources 100 years ago may be worthless today. Scientific progress may make some resources obsolete or may new uses for existing raw resources which will just increase it's value tremendously, thus leading to rise of new powers or bolstering of existing ones.
Great leaders, either charismatic or brilliant strategists can change the political landscape as well.
Now, what could hold a big empire together? Number 1 reason is always economic benefit. As long as people are benefiting from being a part of the empire (or at least as long as the upper classes do that control others) they will remain part of the empire.
Another reason that may help is culture and religion. Similar people tend to stick together and help each others out.
Third reason is powerful military that makes the cost of secession from an empire to heavy to pay for most groups.
TLDR:
Local powers would pop up, gain more power and will eventually form an empire. Empire will last for a few hundred years at best and then fall apart due to changes in economy, science, ideas etc
] |
[Question]
[
I'm writing a story that's relatively hard Science Fiction. Therefore (Although fancy and high tech) the personal weapons are, at their core, regular firearms.
Now, in boarding scenarios you want to be careful to not pierce the hull (especially if it's a civilian station). I assume that the airlocks and docking areas are fortified and shielded to prevent this, which might allow the defenders some heavy weapons without risking decompression. So my problem is, what do my boarders carry in regards to weapons? Some weapons that would reduce the danger of piercing the hull are:
* Glaser rounds
* Hollow point
* Buckshot
However these would also be negated by the first person to strap on a Kevlar vest. So is there anything the people could carry that would defeat body armor, but has a low risk of piercing the hull? It is preferably something that would also work against aliens (Within reason of course, no energy beings, titans or micro-organisms).
So traditional guns is preferred but not required. I found the glue/foam guns something I hadn't thought of. But it seems the concensus is that the hull would be thick enough to withstand anything that can take out an armored person. So I'll pick an answer.
[Answer]
The purpose of combat is not killing but control. Terrestrial combat uses lethal force because it is the most effective way to take control of a battlefield. But if the enemy surrenders, there's no more need for killing. In fact it's better to be merciful with those who surrender so the rest have less incentive to fight.
Everything in space is counter-intuitive. Shooting a bullet through the hull of a space station is not a big problem. Air only leaks through at a limited rate and the hole can be plugged with a wad of bubblegum. If the hull is hardened against micro-meteorites, the bullet won't even penetrate. The biggest problem with using guns in microgravity is the recoil, which can easily cause any soldier to totally lose control of their orientation and position.
Swords aren't much better. If you swing a sword, the rest of your body will turn the other way. Using a sword would be extremely difficult. A spear might be a tiny bit better because there's not as much rotation involved (though you'd be surprised), but your reach won't be great because you will move further from the target as you trust the spear. Microgravity combat would be largely concerned with securing good anchor points in the environment to enable any kind of effective action without obnoxious physical reactions.
A defensive party that's prepared to be boarded will get themselves strapped in to fixed positions and get ready to fire guns or trust spears. A boarding party will be in free-fall when they enter, which is a huge disadvantage. The defending crew has control of the interior environment. But the boarding force has control of the external environment. The boarding ship can try to knock the defenders unconscious by subjecting them to high accelerations - probably by spinning the ship they are assaulting. This kind of action could kill everyone on board, or force them to detach from their anchors.
The simple fact is, however, that boarding parties in space are probably unnecessary. Having control of the exterior of a ship allows a siege to be completely effective. Cover the target vessel's radiators with reflective insulation, block their sublimators and cook them out. Life in space is so tenuous that it's hard to justify fighting back - or fighting at all. (This is why space colonization is such a great goal for peace.)
Now if you really, really want to have boarding parties in your story, try this tactic: You can't fight what you can't see. Inject a spray of black, low viscosity, highly wetting liquid that will coat the optics of anyone or anything inside. In microgravity, fluid dynamics are dominated by surface tension effects. A blob of liquid touching a surface will tend to completely coat the surface, unless that surface is phobic to that particular liquid. Most if not all materials currently used for optics (glass, plastics, the human eye) are at least somewhat hydrophilic, so a spray of blackened water would easily coat and interfere with these. (Just ask astronaut Chris Hadfield how bad it can be to get something in your eye in space.)
**Edit:**
If your combat environment is subject to spun gravity, it's important to note that projectile weapons will behave differently than when subject to normal gravity because of the coriolis effect.
Let's model the habitat as a cylinder spinning on its axis. Use the right hand rule to define North as the direction you would have to face to see the cylinder as rotating clockwise - or if you point the thumb of your right hand in that direction your fingers bend in the direction of rotation. South is the opposite direction. West is defined as the clockwise direction. East is opposite West.
If you stand on the inner surface of this cylinder and fire a projectile, it's path (as seen by you in the rotating frame of reference) will be significantly different depending on what direction you fire.
If you fire directly North, the bullet will initially go straight, but will start curving to your right as it "falls" to the "ground".
If you fire South, the bullet will fall to your left.
If you fire East, the bullet will fly straight, but will fall slower than you'd expect.
If you fire West, the bullet will fly straight, but fall quicker than you'd expect.
If you fire straight up, the bullet will go straight up, then curve West, then down, and then maybe start heading down and East - it really depends on muzzle velocity and the spin rate of the habitat. The trajectory that you see could end up looking kind of like a "Run for the Cure" ribbon. If you get the muzzle velocity just right, you could get the bullet to come back and hit you - but it would hit you from up and to the West.
If you fire straight down, the bullet will curve East and probably hit the ground.
Fire up and a bit East to hit a target on the exact opposite side of the cylinder from you.
If you try to drop an anvil on a roadrunner from high "up", it could take a very long time to get to the big red target you've painted on the ground. The time it takes depends on the diameter of the habitat and how high up you are. If you were fairly high "up" - close to the center line of the cylinder, but not quite at it - the anvil might go all the way East, come back around a few times, apparently picking up speed in the Easterly direction until it finally creams your target going practically sideways.
You can combine these for trick shots, but there's also the complication of air resistance.
The coriolis effect becomes less obvious as the radius of the cylinder gets larger, assuming that the angular velocity of the cylinder is chosen to provide one gee acceleration to a person on the surface. A gargantuan habitat may only rotate several times a day, but a small habitat would have to spin up to several times a minute to yield one gee at the surface. So smaller habitats will have far more pronounced coriolis effects than large habitats. (Earth rotates once per day, so we don't really notice the coriolis effect in our daily lives, but it's there.)
Another neat feature of spun habitats is that you can tell which way you're facing by turning your head. If you face North, then turn South, you'll have the unpleasant sensation that you are spinning counterclockwise - at twice the rate you are actually spinning counterclockwise - and you might tip over if you try to walk too soon after turning around. (You can simulate this by looking up and spinning around until dizzy, then stop and try to walk around without losing your lunch.) Spinning habitats are not much fun for this reason and that's partly why the ISS has no artificial gravity section. It would take a seriously large artificial gravity ring to provide an environment that doesn't feel like a carnival ride.
[Answer]
Concerned about firearms piercing the hull? Don't want to accidentally cause an explosion?
The most simple way may be to use older weapons- go for a sword, knives, hatchets, and bullet-proof shields. Here are some reasons why this works:
1. The [21 foot rule](https://youtu.be/js0haocH4-o) is very likely to apply to boarding parties on space-faring vessels. Having large floorplans is expensive in space, and firearms really gain their advantage from being able to hit targets at a distance.
2. A bullet-proof shield will allow the boarders to safely advance into a fortified position. Essentially, the boarders get the advantage of a tank in a human-sized package.
3. [Judicial Shields](http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/Gladiatoria/107.jpg). Hooks, spikes, and other bits on a shield can increase the effectiveness of a shield in combat. Also, they're super scary.
4. Additionally, you don't need to worry about "is there enough oxygen use my weapon? Is there too much oxygen?" A flame of an size in an oxygen-rich environment is bad business for everyone involved.
Here are, however, some downsides to this "medieval" approach:
1. Your troops are only effective if they can close the gap between them and their enemy.
2. Bullet-proof shields can be overcome by stronger and better bullets and guns. This "ups the ante" on boarding parties, and increases the risk of hull breaches.
3. Shields can get in the way if you have a wrestling-friendly enemy, or need to go through especially tight passages.
Upon further thought, I think the boarding parties should be mixed units: you have some shield-bearers, some gun-slingers, and maybe something else. Seems to me like boarding is very ugly business.
[Answer]
**Tiny Robots**
Instead of relatively high-velocity weapons or directed energy weapons, launch small robotic payloads that once they hit their target can seek out a vulnerability in the armor and exploit it. The tiny robots can carry whatever payload you like to defeat armor: tiny shaped charge, drills and acid, electrical shock, work together to dismantle armor/target. Such machines could even change direction in mid-air (space) and determine friend from foe. This concept appears in the book [Seveneves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves) by Neil Stephenson as a method of warfare that won't hurt the hulls of spacecraft.
[Answer]
You don't need to kill you need to incapacitate.
* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVy5Vm43X_A>
* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d56J-GMAslA>
* <https://www.howitworksdaily.com/experimental-crowd-control-riot-foam/>
STICKY FOAM!!
This stuff couldn't puncture a hull, could totally "take out" a enemy, you could also use it to "seal" areas so you don't have to sweep and clear all the little nooks, just move forward and hose the area.
It needs to be improved a bit, but with better delivery and faster reactions, this stuff could really make a mess.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnyhkBU1yaw>
[Answer]
In any kind of boarding, defense and offense are both going to be in vacuum suits. Gas weapons are out. Shock weapons are out because these suits will be grounded. Medieval type weapons will be tricky.
You are boarding because you want the ship intact, and maybe the crew too. If you did not you would not need to board them.
**I propose an automatic shotgun with silly putty slugs**. Even if armored, a hit from a slug packs a wallop. Many slugs = many wallops. Silly putty will flatten and deform rather than penetrating the ships hull. Shotguns have a short range which is fine for a ship. If you are too unsilly for silly putty use a regular slug then. Or a riot control beanbag.
I like tranquilizer darts too: something like etomidate for 10 second knockdown and then a heavy sedative to keep your foes staring and drooling while you ziptie them. A long dart will penetrate a vac suit.
Other cool aspects of this as regards narrative: by issuing the space marines these nonlethal weapons it is pretty clear that the priorities of command is taking the ship intact. The marines themselves are more interested having a fast battle with minimal loss of space marine life. Plus they are frustrated at fighting with "clown guns" against defenders more formidably armed. So they hack their weapons to make them more lethal / dangerous - with interesting results. They collect weapons from the defenders, who also have different priorities. Later if there are questions about damage to the ship, the space marines can point to the defenders, many of whom somehow failed to recover from the tranquilizer in time to start breathing.
ADDENDUM
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bGVR.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zK4rl.png)
These from the [Taofledermaus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1tsdfq16Ho) video on shooting silly putty.
The Silly Putty packs a wallop. Being a non-newtonian fluid it stiffens under stress so it stays together out of the gun. It occurred to me that if the putty were acid all of those little putty fragments you see in the clay would be eating little holes in the vac suit of the person hit.
It is a safe assumption that any boarding operation would take place in vacuum or at least anyone with any sense would be wearing space suits during such a fight. Otherwise you could just flood the ship with fentanyl gas and walk in. Holes in vac suits are bad. Getting it with a slug of putty would feel like getting hit with a bat, and then your vac suit starts to leak.
[Answer]
>
> Now in boarding scenarios of things like space stations or starships with destroyed drives you want to be careful to not pierce the hull.
>
>
>
Why? Are we talking about situations where entire civilian stations or ships are taken hostage? Are we talking about boarding a vessel with a high value target? There aren't many other situations where you care about the lives of the people on the vessel you're boarding.
I don't ask this as point of criticism, but to clarify a very important issue about this topic. **The objective.** You need to have an objective before you can talk about methods.
* If you need to extract someone (or some people) from a vessel and you need them alive, depressurizing the ship or station they're on is obviously a terrible idea. Your concern for leaving the internal environment intact makes sense in that case.
* If everyone inside the vessel are your enemies and none of them are high value, minimizing their casualties is nice but comes with a massive risk that probably isn't worth it. Remember that spaceships and stations are all in a very precarious relationship with the vacuum surrounding them, and you're not just boarding. You're *breaching* the vessel. Breaching a means you've forced open something which wasn't supposed to be open. In the case of spacecraft, this means you're taking responsibility for maintaining the internal pressure of the vessel or vessel section. Even worse, you're probably actively maintaining the vessel's internal pressure. You've damaged the craft somehow and have put your airlock over the damaged hull or hatch to keep your enemy's air from leaking into space. One false move and you subject everyone inside the craft to explosive decompression. Is that really a situation you want to send your boarding party, *your people*, into? Armed conflict is already a risky proposition. Armed conflict inside a vessel with a precariously sealed breach point is a recipe for disaster. If you don't need anyone inside the target vessel, you're putting your people in a risky situation when simply punching holes in the vessel and letting hard vacuum do the fighting for you would suffice. Essentially, you would be attempting to be humane towards your enemies by being inhumane towards your own people. If you're resorting to breaching, you've probably already exhausted diplomatic options with your adversaries. That means they've already shown themselves to be the unreasonable ones and they've made themselves more trouble than they're worth.
If you do need to get in a ship or station without breaking the craft's seal to the outside vacuum, you need two things: an airlock that can establish its own seal without help or cooperation and directional explosives.
If you are trying to get through the target's own airlock, your airlock must have a larger mouth than the hatch of the target's airlock. Your airlock will create a seal with the vessel's hull *around the hatch*, not the hatch itself. (Imagine one of those gross kisses where someone puts their mouth completely around someone else's mouth.) Then you're going to use shaped charges to do something kind of like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQt_2lYgj18). You're going to blow whatever mechanisms are allowing the target's hatch to stay shut.
A target vessel's airlock may not be particularly convenient for quick breaching or it may be too easily accessible for the responding forces who want to keep the invaders (you) out. However, you have an airlock that can form a hard seal with bare hull, so you don't care. You can simply attach anywhere on the ship and do something like [this](https://youtu.be/_80gWlDQdHg?t=15s) or [this](https://youtu.be/CILxSlricyc). Of course, if you're resorting to just digging through the hull by cutting, you probably have no element of surprise. You'll be giving your enemies ample time to figure out how to shake you off their craft before you breach the hull or just lots of time to get all their guns march to the breach point before you get through.
>
> So is there anything my guys could carry that would defeat body armor but not immediately pierce the hull?
>
>
>
That depends on the hull. Is it a thin sheet of aluminium (like on the ISS) or is it the thick hull of ship designed to take small impacts from micrometeoroids traveling much faster than any bullet? In the latter, you don't have to worry about (personal) armour piercing rounds getting too far into the outer hull. However, you don't need 100% avoidance of hull punctures. Small punctures aren't going to cause a pressurized craft to explode (or unravel if it's an inflatable). Assuming you're quick with you're boarding, you could secure the craft and plug the holes before the air runs out.
[Answer]
How about [long-range electric shock weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroshock_weapon#Wireless_long-range_electric_shock_weapon)? If the attackers are good marksman they could incapacitate the defenders with electric shocks and knock them out or tie them up afterwards? Assuming the aliens have a nervous system similar to that as humans of course...
Regarding the comments: The weapons aren't used too much, because of controversy surrounding their lethality. If lethality (or lack thereof) isn't important why not use them?
Also, from the above link: The bullets are actually small high-voltage batteries, so no external power pack is required. As long as you carry enough rounds to secure the ship, the attackers should be fine.
Regarding body armor: yes, that's a weak point. You have to target a conductive surface, preferably skin or pierce clothing to reach skin. Maybe metal armor could actually conduct the electricity? In that case an electric weapon would be ineffective against isolated metallic armor or synthetic body armor. So the question remains: would defenders wear full body armor?
[Answer]
Need to board enemy ships and deal with defenders without damaging the hardware or causing explosive decompression? Worried that gas won't work against space suits, tiny robots are vulnerable to enemy EMP or electrical discharge weapons and anything like a shotgun can EASILY be defeated by even normally-armored work hardsuits (hardened spacesuits) much less military grade combat armored suits?
No problem! Your worries are over. I give you:
**The Vibro Sword**
The Vibro sword is a simple concept: a blade roughly similar in shape and design to a Roman short-sword has an outer edge designed to allow for high frequency vibration that turns it into something like a cross between a sword and a chainsaw. A Vibro sword easily cuts through anything organic, plastics, interior ship insulation, fittings, and even control panels, but is unable to damage the heavy duty alloys used in modern ship construction. Even if you slip and accidentally drive one into the floor, it isn't going all the way out into space.
Facing armored opponents? Of COURSE you are! The need to have humans out in space for long periods working on ships or exploring planetary environments with a wide variety of dangers has led to ALL standard spacesuits being armored against most normal penetration. Self-healing layers are supplemented in any normal suit with hard armored "shell" pieces which can be replaced, which will protect a worker against many types of common threats (like a loose bolt bouncing off him in the space dockyard at high relative velocity.) These kinds of suits (and the MORE armored military grade suits) make weapons like shotguns basically useless. Bean bag guns, tasers, and a wide variety of "non lethal" weapons are pointless against defenders in hard suits, but really powerful weapons like man-portable lasers, micro-sized railguns, or modern chemical explosive powered assault rifles pose a threat to the ship you are trying to capture.
A vibro sword easily deals with this problem! How? Simple. A short sword (designed to be used in close quarters for obvious reasons) can be used to thrust into weak points in an opponent's armor. Aim for gaps between the chest plate and the arms, and open them up like a crab! Obviously, using a bladed weapon requires a higher level of skill than most firearms, but then so does space boarding itself! You wouldn't take just any old standard ground infantry unit to board an enemy ship!
To get close to your enemies, you rely on your OWN military grade armor and the knowledge that your opponents have the same issues you do about blowing apart their own ship to kill you. We also make a handy-dandy riot-style shield to help you close the gap in tight formation!
Once you get close and start creating gaps in enemy suits, your options really *open up* (pardon the pun) nerve gas clouds, or even simple things like low-velocity pistol rounds do nicely to finish off defenders who have had a nice hole made in their suit and are probably lying prone. (This is where you put your less skilled fighters, behind the main "avant garde" line).
Skilled men can cut through a dozen heavily armored defenders in a matter of minutes with vibro swords. This is because armor will almost ALWAYS have weak points, but they will usually not be exploitable with ranged weapons.
Welcome to the age of space warfare.
[Answer]
**Grenades**
Not your usual fragmentation grenades, but ones designed to do damage through concussive force, such as the US Mk3a2 concussion grenade. This would prevent serious damage to ship and would also not rely on piercing whatever armor the defenders have. Other types of grenades exist, and flash-bangs would be very useful for a boarding party as a first attack. Additionally grenades could be filled with some kind of chemical like white phosphorous and burn the enemy. White phosphorous is also highly poisonous to any human that breathes it in.
For a more fantastical grenade, you could have a type that releases some sort of liquid or gel that attaches to your enemy and then hardens or otherwise immobilizes them. Finishing them off with a close combat weapon would be simple afterwards.
[Answer]
Overall Delivery mechanism could be a breaching charge or grenade launcher (from a brace position) to bypass the zero-g knockback effect.
Generally whatever payload you're firing, the projectile cannot be simply a slug in Zero-G which will be defeated by armor. So explosive/poisonous/electroshock/heat will need to be the death/disable mechanism (stored energy is more dense than kinetic energy requirements).
**Category:** Conventional Weapons:
**Payload Ammunition:**
Small Phosporous/thermite tipped grenades (amount insufficient for hulls breach, but sufficient for body armor).
Explosive Tipped ammunition that detonates on contact. Powerful enough to generate internal injuries, but not hull damage.
**Category:** Non-lethal:
**Restrict Movement:**
Any sort of sticky or expanding material should be able to lock their movements.
**Disable Senses:**
Flashbang, squid ink, Sonic/[Heat Beam Pain weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System)
**Category:** No Geneva/Hague Conventions in Space!
**Gas Them:**
Assuming not all personnel are in enclosed spacesuits, then they will be vulnerable to chemical/heat attacks. They would have to otherwise vent the section of the gas-bourne toxic/igniting agents.
You could render your personnel immune or have them sit tight from outside/another room while the opposition expires. Examples Dry Ice to starve oxygen (Excess Carbon Dioxide)/fires will burn oxygen. [Ammonia + Bleach](https://www.thoughtco.com/bleach-and-ammonia-chemical-reaction-609280) reaction produces some noxious fumes for a condensed payload.
This could be an effective killbox setup for defenders (preset defense room with gas defense).
[Answer]
## The lack of defence
Contemporary spaceships designed with thin hull and without any defence measures because there are no real threats from aliens/human enemies. They are similar to yacht (for some reason I failed to insert image here <http://12knots.ru/img/aggregator/mmk/564224430000101637_Bavaria_41_ext.jpg>):
* designed for several people
* has so thing hull that lady with stiletto heel shoes could damage it
* durable enough for circumnavigation
Space station designed to survive in a war could be similar to a warship with many measures against different threats:(another picture <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_George_V-class_battleship_(1939)#/media/File:KGV-Armor_Scheme.jpg>):
* top-level weapon to bring heavy damage on a long distance
* medium size weapon to protect from small targets which dangerous on a short distance
* armor against enemy's top guns
* additional armor protecting vital areas
* with bulkheads dividing ship to separate areas
* several thousands people on board
* airplane, anti-aircraft battery, small boats etc etc
Total armor weight for `Bismark` was 18,700 tonns which is 40% of `Titanic` tonnage. Only armor, without guns, ammo etc!
Probably your space station is more like a carier (with medium armor, medium guns, 1,000-3,000 people). Carier is war-designed so it has construction intended for survive with severe damage (bulkheads, protection against torpedoes etc).
For both battleship and carier there is no problem to repel boarding attack. Either there is no problem with using firearms except special areas like ammunition magazines.
Space station could be totally non-military like [tanker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Sirius_Star)
* no armor
* no weapons
* crew is 25 people
* Tonnage twice than warship
* hull
+ made with thicker steel than small yacht
+ can withstand a shot from hand weapons
+ will be crippled by any anti-ship weapon
In this case defence from invaders is assigned to another ships. In case battleships somewhere else you have two options:
* dozen of people could protect from invaders with light weapon (like pirates)
+ most efforts are aimed to prevent boarding
* surrender to **any** spaceship with anti-ship weapon
There are exclusions, f.e. cargo ship has sunk careless submarine, but it only confirms the rule
So options are:
* you have station prepared to war and boarding and using firearms is not an issue
* you have non-military station ergo you have no abilities and reasons to defend from strong enemy - it's task someone else
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## Ways to prevent onboarding
Anyway, situations with boarding are possible with more or less madness scenarios like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Siege).
My first point that for large spaceship the hull should be thick enough so **using firearm would not be an issue**. Like tanker vs yacht hull, big space station should have more durable hull than ISS to carry himself and to withstand loads while maneuvering.
Second point there are many hazards. Depending on its targets invaders could:
* change orientation and/or orbit of space station to disrupt its usual operation. It's easy to do with several boosters
+ it couldn't serve as space elevator
+ it couldn't get energy from its solar arrays
+ it couldn't communicate with planet
+ cancel artificial gravity
* damage the hull so seriously that people could survive only in vacuum suits
* made a small hole to go inside at unexpected place
Measures to protect against these threats are very different and out of scope to your initial question. The main points are
* don't allow to dock at all. If enemy are on the hull, you probably lose
* guys with any weapon is the last line of defence. At this line no matters how much damage the hull could get. Just **destroy them all using as powerful weapon as you has**.
[Answer]
**Let's have some fun with Chemistry!**
Create a caustic chemical, maybe some sort of binary agent might be best for storage. Design the chemical to damage the joints or faceplates of armored/hardsuits, the goal is to compromise seals and such.
Your assault works like this:
Breech the hull of the vessel you need to board, but do it carefully. That's going to send the defenders into the suits. As you advance to clear, level by level, hit the defenders suits with the solvent to cause pressure loss. the defenders suffocate. Weld some hull repair in place over your deliberate breech and you have a ship ready to re-pressurize.
Have the caustic agent neutralize itself over time, so that cleanup and repairs of the newly acquired ship is fairly easy.
This technique is going to have a limited shelf life though. It would likely only work for a space version of the Dread Pirate Roberts who leaves no survivors. One ship gets away, and samples of the caustic agent can be studied and then defended against.
Problems that are common with projectile weapons are reduced, as the solvent will be low-mass and move at fairly slow speeds. Surface tension effects actually help the solvent penetrate and lodge to the critical joints.
Your space pirates may want to get fancy with timing the breech and how much air gets out, you don't want the liquid freezing, or worse, sublimating in vacuum. That is, unless, you can use some handwavium in the formula that would prevent this.
An alternative to this approach, but keeping with the theme, pinpoint where the ship's environmental systems are. Particularly the ventilation duct work, downstream of the filters. Pop some nasty nerve agents in there via a very small hull breech with a device that maintains a seal so a pressure loss isn't noticed. Wait a bit, then simply open an airlock to vent out the nasty stuff, chuck the corpses after, and sail on with your newly acquired ship.
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Instead of having a weapon that is unable to penetrate the hull, just don't let it! Your gun is fitted with a with visible/IR cameras and real-time machine vision processing, and will only fire if it is confident it is aimed at someone or something that is capable of absorbing the kinetic energy. It even adjusts the muzzle velocity based on armor thickness. And when that someone stops being capable of absorbing the energy, it firing. As a bonus, this saves ammunition.
If gun-mounted cameras aren't sufficient, your boarding party can release a swarm of tiny camera/sensor drones to build dense, real-time 3D models. Defenders of course can have higher-quality devices permanently mounted in locations with good vantage points, and more powerful computers processing the data, which works out OK, because the defending crew probably values the ship more than the attackers, and thus will need more confidence to fire a weapon than an attacker would need.
This could lead to some interseting dynamics where different groups, or even individuals, could have different confidence thresholds set for their weapons, based on how much they value the integrity of the ship vs their own objectives. You could have hot-heads setting their thresholds lower because they're sick of the gun "jamming up" when it's "clearly pointed right at the guy".
Since the ships are so valuable, there may even be some sort of open standard (or de-facto tolerance of hacking) to allow data-sharing between opponents' systems; if the norm is for only a small percentage of fighting forcs to be killed before one side surrenders, it may be "safer" for all involved if everyone is shooting more accurately. This seems less likely though.
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[How to solve the old 'gun on a spaceship' problem?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58049/how-to-solve-the-old-gun-on-a-spaceship-problem) already addresses bunch of non-kinetic weapons, but doesn't mention rockets and torches, both of which can be used to disable and cut through opposing force like engine, hull, and crew.
One could also tow and land an enemy ship to board with gravity, or as mentioned elsewhere, spin up the ship.
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# Infrasound
How about an infrasound device? They are quite big, and so you would have to weld it onto the outside and sort of stalk the ship for a little bit while you wait for its effects to kick in. Infrasound is sound at the 1hz-20hz range. It can cause hallucinations at high decibel levels (as it turns out the resonant frequency of eyeballs is 14 hz) They can also cause uneasiness, fear, a feeling like there is a spiritual presence. Of course you would have to wait for everyone to go crazy or kill themselves somehow like in the [Dyaltov Pass Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident), which one of the more likely explanations is infrasound generated by the winds there.
[This page](https://sonicwarfare.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/sonic-warfare-installment-1/) has some information on the effects of infrasound, and a diagram of a infrasound device. "the frequency that is thought to be most dangerous to humans is between 7 and 8Hz. This is the resonant frequency of flesh and, theoretically, it can rupture internal organs if loud enough ... according to results published by NASA researcher GH Mohr, frequencies between 0Hz and 100Hz, at up to 150-155dB, produced vibrations of the chest wall, changes in respiratory rhythm, gagging sensations, headaches, coughing, visual distortion, and post-exposure fatigue. 5 Subsequent research has determined that the frequency that causes vibration of the eyeballs – and therefore distortion of vision – is around 19Hz." These are a few key things I decided to pull out.
Also, armor and earplugs are completely useless against it. "Even with industrial ear protectors, sound waves are able to enter the head via the nose and mouth which are, in turn, linked to the ears by the structure of the skull." (this quote is from the same article). As sound can't travel through space you would be perfectly fine as long as you shut it off before you board.
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## Frame Challenge - Go Nuts and Fire Away
Space ships and stations will need to be built pretty tough to survive. Micrometeorite impacts are a serious problem. Radiation shielding (for vessels outside LEO) would require even bulkier amounts of armor.
And assuming you're constructing your ships / stations in orbit, the cost penalty for being heavy goes WAY down. So everything is going to be well shielded. You probably won't pierce the hull even if you try.
But even so, atmosphere in space is a tenuous thing. Ships are going to include air tight bulkheads that can be closed in the event of a leak. Ships are going to have low pressure air piping that can supply O2 to passengers in an emergency.
So punch holes in the ship. Go nuts. Most defenders will probably already be in space suits by the time you do, but if not... well, they are going to be distracted trying to don suits when they should be fighting back!
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Forge-worms are large bugs which flutter about the hearths of forges. They rely on the high temperatures of the forge to stay active and immediately fall into torpor when their body temperature falls below 1300°C
However forges are rather recent to the world, at least compared to the forge-worms. Hence, the forge-worms would need to have a natural habitat in which to dwell: This habitat must be hot enough to keep the worms alive, as well as having a source of energy and carbon by which the habitat's ecosystem can endure. Obviously it cannot originate from human intervention. Ideally the habitat should have an atmosphere similar to that of a forge's hearth
The world is pretty much Earth-like and has all types of natural features that occur on Earth (i.e. volcanos, fossil fuels). **What natural habitat could these forge-worms dwell in?**
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Perhaps they evolved in a continuously burning natural gas field such as the [Darvaza gas crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater) in Turkmenistan (image from linked Wikipedia page).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DbYSQ.jpg)
Then when gas was piped to nearby ovens they invaded through a burn-back incident.
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**They are surface-adapted bugs originally of cthonic origin**
These critters are the descendants of organisms that live in molten lava. The dwarves were friendly to the originals, who kept returning home back into the melt. A few crawlies captured and bred in the lava plumes, each generation chosen for lower and lower temperatures, until something was born that was low-enough temperature to utilize.
Like all forms of domestication, the pets could interbreed with their wild versions, and sometimes break free and go feral. These are annoyances, untamed but able to sneak into the coal pile for a snack.
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# Forest fires
Forge-worms metamorphose through a complex life cycle. Only the adult stage requires extreme temperatures.
* Adult forge-worms emerge from their pupae in the inferno of a forest fire. They gather energy from the heat and help stoke and spread the flames. They mate and "forge" eggs in the inferno, and they enter torpor and die when the fire dies out.
* The eggs lie among the ashes, dormant, for decades, while a new forest grows. The freshly forged eggs are impenetrable; nothing can eat them. Leaves cover them and compost into dirt as the forest matures.
* After a decades-long internal timer, the eggs hatch into larvae. The larvae dig their way out of the dirt, then climb and burrow into the mature trees.
* Safe inside the trees, the larvae form pupae.
* The pupae remain in the trees for decades longer, perhaps even centuries, until finally a chance lightning strike sets the dried-out forest on fire.
* As the flames rage around them, the pupae hatch into adult forge-worms and the cycle begins anew.
The modern status of forge-worms as permanent residents of artificial forges is in some sense a perversion of nature. Forge-worms did not evolve to remain in the adult stage for very long. However, as long as there is enough heat energy to sustain them they won't die. They are actually quite helpful, because they instinctively make the forge burn more evenly and hotter, just as they would do in a natural forest fire.
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A volcano is the obvious option, but a cool fantasy answer could be that they evolved around an incredibly long-burning coal-seam fire. It's not particularly realistic as they don't burn long enough to impact evolution so notably, but I think it would be interesting.
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# Natural nuclear reactors
Your planet has a much higher rate of meteor impacts and a lot of these have a lot of uranium in them. As such, it's quite common for high temperature natural nuclear reactors to form, which will last for a few tens of thousands of years.
The forge worms would rely on these, navigating to other meteors when their current one started to be exhausted. Some of them found forges, and went to live in those instead.
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**Erratic geysers**
Their ancestors evolved to thrive in geysers, a wet environment that is subject to high pressures and temperatures. As volcanic activity slowed down in their region, they also became very drought tolerant. By the time humans came along and started making campfires these worms were already hardened to thrive under them. Campfires progressed to hearths, kilns, and forges, etc.
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On Earth, tube worms have this issue. They only grow near hydrothermal events but hydrothermal events are short-lived in the geological scale and the worms and can't move away from them. They are considerably worse of than your fore-worms which can at least flutter about the hearth rather than being firmly planted to it.
The adult tube worms basically die where they stand but they release their gametes and the resulting larvae float around and those that land in suitable areas survive. Those that don't do not. There's nothing to say that the larvae can't have an exceptional form of torpor to increase their chances of survival.
[Answer]
## Deep underground, but dug up because of the mining industry
Do you specifically need them to have been active and alive outside of forges and on (or near) the surface of the planet?
If not, then consider that they live underground, close to the planet's core. This is the most reliable source of this kind of heat, nothing on the planet's surface is going to be as consistently hot.
The worms sometimes get displaced closer to the surface due to things like volcanic activity, which "beaches them" away from the heat they need to survive. They go into a state of hibernation (which your mention of "torpor" could be referring to) and they get embedded in the nearby rock formations.
The rock is eventually dug up because of mining and subsequent smelting, and the heat of the forge brings the worms out of hibernation.
This would provide a reasonable natural habitat for them, given that the temperature limit you're setting is not reasonably found on the surface, plus it gives you the opportunity to make them pretty much only to be found in forges when you're focusing on the surface of the planet.
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I am currently working on a fantasy world, in which one city maintains a written knowledge base about all knowledge they have about the world. This knowledge base consists of dozens of tomes, each covering a specific subject (physics, biology, history, geography...).
Some of the inhabitants of the city travel across the world, to find new pieces of knowledge for the knowledge base, and occasionally return to the city to add the knowledge they found to the knowledge base, adding new pages to certain tomes, or even new tomes. Because of that, it's updated very often (about once every 10 days).
Updates can be as great as adding five new tomes about a recently-discovered continent, and as small as changing the name of the current king of a kingdom (or correcting typos).
Many people (let's say 1,500) have copies of one or more tomes of this knowledge base, and it's likely they want to keep it up-to-date. To do so, I have found two possible solutions (although there may be others, that may include magic):
1. Somewhere in the city, there is a "reference copy" of the knowledge base. In each copy of each tome of the knowledge base, there is a spell that "updates" the tome whenever the reference tome is modified, by adding pages, changing the text, etc. (a bit like our Wikipedia). When a new tome is released however, the spell doesn't "teleport" it, and the tome needs to be bought in the city. This solution will make the tomes more expensive.
2. The books don't update by themselves, and the owner of a tome has to go to the city and ask for its tome to be updated, which can happen in various ways. The old tome will probably be exchanged for a new one, and its components (paper, ink, cover) will later be reused, maybe to print new tomes for the knowledge base. This is the cheapest solution, as it allows recycling the materials from old tomes.
However I neither know if they are the best ways to do it, nor which solution I should use.
Which way should copies of the knowledge base be keept up-to-date?
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### Update
The knowledge base aims to provide a reliable source of up-to-date information about all knowledge gathered by the city.
Updating a copy of one of its tomes should (ideally) not be too difficult.
The world has antiquity- and medieval-level technology, but the city that makes the knowledge base has developed more advanced technologies, such as the printing press, and has a very wide knowledge of magic.
The paper used in the books is made from a plant, and is therefore renewable; it can be recycled into new paper. The ink comes as well from plants, and can be reused once separated from the paper, which can be done with the use of magic. Paper and ink should not be an issue, although waste should be avoided.
##### About magic
The way magic works is quite complex. To make it simple, it is based on swapping two areas of the world that have the same shape (generally small areas, such as a glass of water and air, or a sheet of paper and air), with no limitation of distance and at the speed of light, and on creating invisible tangible surfaces (that can be used, for example, to create a protection shield, to guide an arrow, etc.). With these two basic elements, almost any effect that acts on matter can be created (such as removing a page from a book, or teleporting somebody).
It is also possible for a spell to store values (like a position, a message, etc.), and two different spells can communicate with each other.
Spells can be stored in special crystals and remain active for any amount of time, thus allowing any effect to remain active indefinitely in any tome of any copy of the knowledge base.
[Answer]
## How it was done in real life
This answer explains how paper-based reference manuals were kept up to date in the olden days before electronic manuals.
So let us consider the case of the complete set of documentation for an operating system and tools. In the old days on could and did order such a complete set of documentation when acquiring a new computer installation. And it *was* kept up to date.
The documentation came in two- or three-ring binders, one or more binders for each subject -- the assembler, the linker, the Fortran compiler, the indirect commands processor, the standard library etc. etc. There was one master binder containing the index to the documentation, and listing the name of each binder with its subject matter. Overall, the complete set of documentation occupied a fairly large cabinet.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vax-vms-grey-wall.jpg)
*The "Grey Wall" of VAX/VMS documentation, at Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle, WA. Picture by user Vt320, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vax-vms-grey-wall.jpg) under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.*
Pages in each binder were *not* numbered sequentially from 1 to hundreds, but rather they were numbered by chapter and appendix: 1-1, 1-2, .., 1-27, 2-1, 2-2, ..., 2-40, 3-1, 3-2, ... 3-51, ..., A-1, A-2, ..., B-1, B-2, ... and so on. When a field change order required changes to the documentation, the customers who had active subscriptions received one or more packages containing:
* For each affected binder, a new title page, listing the new version number and update date.
* For each affected binder, a set of updated or new pages.
The customer was supposed to go to the documentation cabinet, pick up each affected binder, open the rings, replace the title page and all changed pages, and insert the new pages. The old superseded pages were either discarded or inserted at the end of the binder for reference.
This process worked for many decades. I understand that there are still some fields where paper-based reference manuals are considered desirable, and as far as I know they still apply this process.
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**Itinerant scrivener.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qpVjC.png)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrivener>
They go door to door. Often they have a route that includes steady customers. There is some rivalry between different scrivener camps. Most are independent contractors and work for one or another outfit that keeps an updated copy of the reference work and provides supplies and work guarantees. Most are literate but poor. Some differ; one is a an educated thief who uses the work to identify targets. One claims to have memorized the entirety of the Encyclopedia.
The scriveners go out and offer to update privately held Encyclopedias. The scriveners will have on their persons copies (that they have personally made) of the latest updates. In the Encyclopedia, they might update right on the old page, sanding off or painting off old words and adding new. They have new pages, some of which they have made in advance that they will sell. Some owners just want the info. Some want their Encylopedias all done in homogenous handwriting and there are scriveners who specialize in emulating what has come before.
--
I envision an interesting story. A young scrivener is invited to visit an isolated mansion. The new heir wants the Encylopedia updated. It has been a long time; his father is dead and his grandfather the former lord was an iconoclastic recluse. The scrivener finds the Encyclopedia has not been updated for decades. It will be a lot of work. Profitable work!
As he prepares, he realizes the old Encyclopedia in this mansion has some information in it that he has never seen. Some disturbing information. He is a reader, not a question asker. He goes back to headquarters and into the archives and begins to read...
[Answer]
# Use Version Control
This problem is not too dissimilar to the management of changes in Software Development, where multiple contributors are altering a collection of files and documents.
At the most basic, all you need is that central "Main" or "Reference" copy, with a version number. Any time someone makes a change to it, you increment the number. Then everyone can just look at the version number of their own copy and decide if they're willing to live with being a version or twelve behind.
But how do you know if that one change is a small typo or the inclusion of a whole new dynasty? That's where more complex Build numbers come in.
## Encyclopedia Galactica V3.14.159
Software traditionally uses four numbers for their Versions, although only three are public. These are Major, Minor, Patch and Dev.
Your Major number (the 3 above) is your large, critical, breaking changes. If someone is a Major version behind then their Encyclopedia is officially out of date, and unacceptable as a reference.
Your Minor number (the 14) is for important but not totally critical changes. Still valid for those who can't justify the expense of regular updates, but not viable for serious reference.
The Patch number (the 159) is where you put all the tiny changes. Fixing typos, rearranging pages, and the like where being behind here is not going to leave you spouting objectively wrong information.
Finally, Dev numbers are kept internal, and track the changes your scholars make to a document before releasing it to the public. And this number allows us to bring in the next concept of Branches.
## Conflicting Information
Depending on how fine-grained your documents are, there may be cases where multiple scholars wish to alter the same book. They can do this by branching off from Main, adding their information, and then merging the changes back in. This allows each distinct change to be vetted and reviewed individually, and then whomever wishes to merge second has the responsibility of incorporating the now Canon changes into their own branch before it can be accepted. You can even have scholars make Requests to Pull their work into their colleagues working copies.
The thing to remember is that version numbers always increment, and when you increment, you reset all the lower priority numbers to 0. Thus 3.14.159 can be updated to 3.14.160, or to 3.15.0, or to 4.0.0. But if two separate branches have conflicting changes, the final version will depend on the order they were merged. If the higher priority one goes first, then you'll end up with 4.1.1.
At this point, getting the versions out to your readers is purely a logistics problem. Those who want to spend all the money for the most up to date information will have an enchanted book that matches a Reference copy. For those who value their wallet more than the the exact spelling of King Whatsherface may only buy a new copy if the Minor version changes, and there'll be some poor backwaters who are buying copies secondhand that are two Major versions out of date because its better than nothing.
[Answer]
I offer you a solution I used for a similar problem in my fantasy world for my RPG table.
I'm basing this answer in the fact that your magic can move things around and "speak" with other magical spells. This is more than enough to get the effect I'm offering below.
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***Soulscribe Pedestals***
Those lectern-like pieces of furniture are made of what appears to be stone and metal braided together around a core of magical crystal, with a resting area made of wood on top.
This resting area has dedicated holding areas for an ink container, a specially enchanted quill, and a tome. A shelf with extra sheets of parchment should be set up nearby, in case new pages should be added to the tome.
Each *Soulscribe Pedestal* is linked to the Great Archive by a rite that makes it aware of the contents of every tome on the archives on their current state. When supplied with a tome, those magical lecterns can sync up the contents of the tome placed on them with the updated version on the archives by magically manipulating the pages and quill in such a manner to mimic the manual labor of a scribe. Supplying an empty tome with nothing but a title on the cover to a *Soulscribe Pedestal* would make it write out an entirely new copy of the original tome, by syncing it out with the tomes in the Great Archive.
If one isn't aware of the precise name of the book they need, they can always query the library's index by placing a tome with an empty title on top of the pedestal, signaling it to provide an updated list of every tome it has access to. Alternatively, a topic can be supplied - say, "Geography" or "Mathematics", or even something more specific like "Advanced Calculus" - causing the pedestal to write out a list of only the tomes that fit that supplied category.
Those pedestals are somewhat expensive, however - so there would be a limited number of them around on private housing, reserved for the more rich folks. Most people would visit a *Soulscribe Workshop*, where they would place their empty or outdated tomes in publicly-available *Soulscribe Pedestals* and go for a meal or a discussion with like-minded people.
Special *Soulscribe Pedestals* that work on reverse also exist - those can *read* a tome placed on them, and sync the contents of those tomes with those in the Great Archives by similar means. Those "Push-mode" *Soulscribe Pedestals* would be far rarer, of course - and reserved only for those with proper permission to edit what the Archives had in them. They are somewhat dangerous if misused, yes, but they also allow information to be sent to the Archives from *anywhere* in the world, thus creating a true network of information.
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Big, comprehensive books or collections of books are typically not going to be the ideal format for evolving knowledge at the forefront of scholarship in any field. In the real world, new knowledge is published in **journals** which have periodical issues; libraries subscribe to journals, meaning they receive a copy of each issue, and retain every issue. A library may also order back-issues of a journal if it wants to expand its collection of knowledge to a subject it didn't previously subscribe to a journal about.
This means the information is organised primarily by subject (i.e. each journal covers research in a particular subject, and fields with more active research can have more journals each covering more specific subjects in that field), and secondarily by the date the research was done. Within a single issue, there will be several articles that have little or nothing to do with each other, except for being written at about the same time. That's obviously not optimal for finding the current state of knowledge on a very specific thing, but it is optimal for distributing that knowledge to the libraries; when some information needs to be updated, nobody goes through the old texts to correct them, the new information is just published in the most recent issue of the appropriate journal. People who need to keep their knowledge at the cutting edge of that field, for whatever reason, read each issue when it's published, though probably only the few articles that are of interest to themselves.
In order to make this system more useful for readers, each article has an abstract (a short description of what new knowledge that article contributes), and there are some literature review articles which summarise the current state of knowledge in a topic with references to the relevant journal articles. When the state of knowledge in a subject reaches some level of maturity, such that it's known which findings are the most important or useful, and which findings did not withstand scrutiny, *that's* when the big comprehensive tome about that subject gets written. The result is that textbooks are published much more rarely than journal issues, and they don't contain the most recent knowledge, but the knowledge in them is stable enough that another textbook on the same subject won't need to be published for a while.
If mistakes are discovered in a textbook after publication, they can still be distributed as errata - extra pages to be inserted into the book. But there is enough of a delay between knowledge being published in journal articles and textbooks that most mistakes can be found before the textbook is written.
[Answer]
Say, do you need the data to be written specifically on books? That space-swapping thing looks like it could be turned into a sort of internet.
You could, instead of tomes, sell "terminals" and tokens. A terminal would allow you to select a specific page from the database, and then have the token be exchanged for the page (in two separate transactions of course. The tokens are merely an anti-crime measure, not a replacement for a page). When the user is done using it, they would send the page back, and have their token returned. Of course that would require many copies of pages to exist within the archive (far less than amount of people owning the terminals total, but still quite a lot of work), and the terminals can be very expensive (a magic crystal for each can be quite a lot). But the problem of keeping up to date with the center disappears, because you are always requesting the data directly from the center.
Instead of paper pages however, other materials could be used, if they are found to be cheaper or easier to work with/copy. Unlike with books, the material being thin enough to fit is not an issue, when you work with but a few pages at a time, and it being more resilient to wear, as well as capacity to be trivially recyclable and workable may be a priority. Oh, and the people who make contributions to the base could use the terminals too for instantly and safely transfering their findings.
And, of course, if the people are smart enough, they could use encoding and spells to decode tiny particles of matter falling into slots - into human readable letters. But sending entire pages may be good enough.
[Answer]
>
> The way magic works is quite complex. To make it simple, it is based on swapping two areas of the world that have the same shape
>
>
>
This looks like quantum entanglement, with a bit more magic on top of it. This makes it VERY easy to solve your problem.
When you buy a book, it comes entangled to an anti-book that is stored in the astral plane, which works as a photographic negative of the reader's own copy. Whenever something gets retconned updated in a tome, astral golems get the update from the editor and then robotically go through each and every copy of the respective anti-book in the astral library, applying the update. The books in possession of people around the world get the opposite of the change, which effectively keeps them up to date.
[Answer]
Please first read *The Catalog of Shipwrecked Books* That explains how pretty-much what you Ask was attempted by Christopher Columbus' son; how far he got with it, many of the problems he met along the way and how his pioneering work laid some of the foundations for modern bibliography and data-management.
(I'd have Posted a useful link, but SE doesn't tolerate that sort of thing.)
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[Question]
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Brewing potions have been a staple for witches for hundreds of years. These potions are cooked up within cauldrons, large pots specifically built to hold the magic from these concoctions. Older cauldrons are specifically prized, as they contain leftover mana from previous concoctions, and are able to make the resulting potion stronger. However, they have led to some danger within society. This market for potion making is unregulated, as they can be brewed by any aspiring witch, some of whom are unscrupulous. Any witch willing to make a quick buck may sell a potion that does not do as advertised. Some can be potentially dangerous, being made in an improper way, or made with ingredients that were hidden from the buyer. Customers may not know if they are purchasing the intended item, or snake oil.
To combat this, certain individuals intend to put a central guild together, which will regulate the market for potions. Customers will buy from this guild, which will create a set of standard requirements that would be used for brewing. However, there are several issues with the plan. Witches are independent creatures, and would resent any attempt to exert control over their affairs, as many of them are rivals and compete with each other. In addition, this guild is fairly new, unable to project any real force on independent witches who resist, as society is decentralized. Also, many of the supplies meant for brewing are relatively mundane, and can be easily obtained. This central government would lack control of supply or production, making any attempt to regulate this market useless.
How can this guild come together under these conditions?
[Answer]
What you describe is nothing different than regular. Take beer or wine, for example. It's relatively easy for the first wannabe brewer to make one, but to make a good one it takes skills. And customers trust more well established makers. Who trusts the newcomer Jimmy McScammy, when Merlin has a solid reputation in his art?
Moreover, even in a competitive market, players can agree on something protecting them from those wannabe, which in the long run can harm the entire market. Take the [Reinheitsgebot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot)
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> The Reinheitsgebot (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnhaɪtsɡəboːt] (About this soundlisten), literally "purity order") is a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire. The best known version of the law was adopted in Bavaria in 1516, but similar regulations predate the Bavarian order, and modern regulations also significantly differ from the 1516 Bavarian version. Although today, the Reinheitsgebot is mentioned in various texts about the history of beer, historically it was only applied in the duchy of Bavaria and from 1906 in Germany as a whole, and it had little or no impact in other countries or regions.
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> The Bavarian order of 1516 was introduced in part to prevent price competition with bakers for wheat and rye. The restriction of grains to barley was meant to ensure the availability of affordable bread, as wheat and rye were reserved for use by bakers. The rule may have also had a protectionist role, as beers from Northern Germany often contained additives that could not be grown in Bavaria.
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> Religious conservatism may have also played a role in adoption of the rule in Bavaria, to suppress the use of plants that were allegedly used in pagan rituals, such as gruit, henbane, belladonna, or wormwood.:410–411 The rule also excluded problematic methods of preserving beer, such as soot, stinging nettle and henbane.
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[Answer]
I think this should be approached from 3 angles:
* the witches;
* the consumers;
* the government.
**1. How to attract witches**
The guild can do the following to become of value for witches:
* accept apprentices and train them (this is especially valuable if the core members of the guild are powerful and well-known witches);
* give discounts on ingredients (the guild can buy in bulk quantities or it can even establish its own ingredient production);
* help with the acquisition of rare ingredients (this is a very effective method if your world has very rare ingredients that can be only found or bartered, but almost never sold);
* provide facilities and equipment for witches that need them (poor, destitute, travelling, etc.);
* provide opportunities for professional growth and exchange (assuming that every witch wants to increase her power, this can be a very big benefit);
* give members status (this is not very valuable in the beginning but as the guild grows status will get higher, too);
* create and maintain a positive image for witches as a class;
* damage control when witches are accused of something (this and the previous point may prevent witch hunts).
In addition, the guild can buy a specified number of potions every month to provide witches with a stable income. This can be a very effective method of recruiting poor or young witches that do not have a reputation of their own.
Depending on your setting, there can be more benefits that a guild, even a small one, can provide to witches. The most important part is making benefits more attractive than full freedom and independence. Most people are willing to compromise if they see tangible gains.
**2. How to attract consumers**
The price of potions does not really matter. Potions can be cheaper or more expensive than the average market price. What makes guild-sold potions attractive to consumers is that their *effects are guaranteed*.
The guild should guarantee the quality and all effects of any potion sold by it or any of its members. The guild should also have means to deal with unsatisfied customers: Return the money, replace potions, provide potions to treat unannounced side-effects, etc. The guild should also guarantee that witches who produced low-quality potions will be sanctioned.
The guild also can introduce a system of witch qualification exams. This will increase consumer confidence and help them to find witches with qualifications most suitable to customer needs.
The guild also can be a place where consumers with unusual needs can leave a recruitment notice. As the guild grows bigger, increases membership, and establishes social networks, the effectiveness of this kind of notices will greatly increase.
**3. The government**
From the very beginning, the guild should think about its place within the existing system of power distribution. It does not matter how the guild plans to position itself in relation to government (fully independent, cooperating, antagonising, or something else). The main benefit of the guild is the collective power of its members.
One witch can be easily prosecuted unless she/he is very powerful (or have powerful backers). Only when witches come together, they will have the power to defend themselves. The guild helps to achieve this.
It is also easier for the government to deal with the guild than with individual witches, especially if the government wants to have a productive relationship with them.
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The guild can start using its own standards from the moment of its establishment. Initially, new members can be allowed some freedom when it comes to brewing methods and standards. However, potions that do not meet the requirements will not be bought as a part of the witch-assistance programme (see 1.). Non-standard potions should also be assessed individually (for a fee) and bought below market price.
As the guild grows and gains reputation, the standards should be enforced more. Non-standard potions will no longer be bought. Although, guild stores may have a section where these potions can be sold (with the disclaimer).
Eventually, the guild can completely refuse to deal with non-standard potions. It will also have members who were trained by the guild members and who are accustomed to following standards.
This standardisation process may take a long time. It may take dozens or even hundreds of years if witches live very long lives, training takes decades, and witches are very rare. If new witches can be trained fast, cheap, and in sufficient numbers, it will take less time.
[Answer]
What you need is a signature spell. A spell that gives an object a (practically) unforgeable mark unique to the caster. Once you have that, have the guild master mass oroduce labels. Only guild members can label their potions with it.
The guild should then enforce pricing and quality. Anyone who foes not meet standards loses labelling rights.
People will prefer to buy the labelled potions because it's usually worth it to pay 10% more on a potion if you can be sure it will do what it is supposed to do rather than, say, grow a penis on your forehead.
Also introduce in the market some unlabelled potions that make you grow a penis on your forehead. Have them be sold in the kind of store that disappears after a day leaving just a wall where a façade once was. Also sell these cheap to snake oil mongers. In this way you profit from gullible cheapskates while increasing the value of your main, labelled product.
[Answer]
The new guild uses a centralized facility that produces potions on an industrial scale. This gives:
* Lower priced potions because it costs less for bulk purchases of supplies and it also costs less for potion brewing on a large scale (e.g. larger cauldrons, less witches to supervise the process, etc.) Also, apprenticeships for new witches let them practice their craft by brewing these potions in bulk under the tutelage of the master brewer and provides the guild with a lower cost workforce. These apprenticed witches, having been trained to use the processes and quality standards of the guild, also serve to disseminate these standards even if they decide to move to independent practice later.
* Consistent good quality because one expert master brewer monitors all production to ensure that the potions being created are up to the required quality standard. It may not be as good as the best specialty witches' potions but it's good enough and you know what you're getting every time.
* Reliable availability of potions since having large batches of potions on hand means that any order can be satisfied immediately instead of having to wait for the local witch to get to your order whenever they feel like it.
These benefits will ensure many customers purchasing from the guild and, eventually, establish the guild as a supplier that can be trusted. The standards the guild uses will, of course, be open to all so that any independent witch that wants to sell potions of the same type will need to be at least as high quality or their potions will be rejected by customers. Over time, the guild can revise these standards upwards, which effectively regulates the market without exerting direct control over independent witches.
The independent witches can be sold on this as well. Who wants to be pestered by the locals constantly for commonplace potions that muck up your cauldron and require hours and hours of cleaning and repurification when you'd really rather be working on your *magnum opus* potion instead? The guild can work with local witches to resell guild potions for the kinds the local witch would rather not do themselves (offering "a small fraternal discount to them to let them profit" or, more baldly, a bribe to support the guild) and let them focus on their specialties instead, making it a win-win situation for everyone.
[Answer]
### Mutual Back Scratching
A possibility is that a guild can come together because each witch is an independent person.
A witch might have a rival in the magical arts, but even they could admit when somebody is better at something than they are. As long as their own field of superiority is acknowledged of course. A rivalry also does not have to be hostile -- it could be two witches spurning each other on to be the best they can be like some anime protagonist.
One day, two witches make a deal. Witch Hazel is better at potions that transmute things -- Just ask her about her Desert Transmogrification Elixir someday. Witch White is better at restorative potions and elixirs. Sure, they are capable of each other's potions, but why bother when it will not advance their craft? But they are rivals, and as such they involve a neutral third party specifically so they do not sleight each other -- by accident or on purpose.
At this point, it's a guild of two with a third running interference on requests so as to get them to the right witch. People that use this service notice that their potions are of a better quality. Not only do they get the better witch for the job, but their cauldrons are also better suited for those potions.
Perhaps next year, Witch Ivy with her penchant for potent plant potions approaches the budding collective, tired with getting requests for basic healing potions when she'd rather work on potions that aid in plant growth.
And so it begins ...
### The Premise
The idea overall is that how it starts may be different than how it ends up. In the beginning, it's a deal of convenience -- give witches the work that best aligns with their particular specialties for better results. It might take a bit of extra time to get results due to the extra step, but the results will be well with it.
There isn't control over their affairs in so many words. They are taking requests that they want to do -- things that interest them or they are good at. Also keeps witches from stepping on each other's toes in some ways possibly keeping destructive rivalries down. Maybe.
As the budding guild grows, likely by word of mouth, more witches may want in on this if only to stop being bothered by requests that they don't want to do by have to if they want to eat.
Depending on the nature of the world, it might be possible for the guild house to sell some of the less powerful potions to the people -- again so the witches themselves won't be bothered by petty requests while they pursue their projects. The neutral party gets a small cut to keep the place running, but otherwise makes sure each witch gets their rightful share. Failure to do so may invite creative revenges.
This is predicated on witches having area of specialty and not like a general education like Hogwarts where they learn a lot of random things.
As a side benefit, if the neutral part is aware of the Cauldron Effect, they may be able to give a head's up to witches when it looks like their cauldrons are reaching a contamination threshold.
[Answer]
I am unsure how familiar you are with farmer cooperatives (coops). These were quite popular in socialist countries and persist to this day. Some were/are in non-socialist countries as well, for example Italian Valfrutta. To me it seems the easiest way to do it, but I believe these are more modern invention than middle age guilds, so it might not fit. To me, the main apparent difference is that customer buys from coop and not from individual farmers, while you buy from a guild member - so, coop could be thought like a "guild store" (note that I am not too familiar with either guilds or coops, there could be other even larger differences between the two).
So, this "guild" is buying witches' stock and selling them on with markup - after quality control of course. You get all potions that are supposed to cure warts. Grab a sample from each witch's brew. Mix all potions, then test the resulting potion. Any issues = you test witches' samples to see who screwed up (or you do it in 2 steps by taking two samples per witch, mixing one and testing sample mix. Less ruined potion in case something went wrong, more hassle to balance individual witch quantities for testing batch, as opposed to simply dumping everything together). The one that screwed up needs to pay for all ruined potion and is possibly kicked out of guild. Or burned. New non-established witch gets her potions tested before mixing and possibly ruining other potion. If you can't test potions without actually using them, guild would "employ" expendable folks and "volunteer" them to do the testing. You don't actually need to test ALL potions, every now and then works well enough to keep witches on their toes.
Guild gets profits from selling with markup.
Customers gain by getting QC and by having a single stop shopping.
New witches get higher sales because they don't need to get established and liked before someone would buy their potions, plus all other side benefits they might get in such guild (eg training in new potion kinds, renting some rarely used tools instead of buying them and so on). So they join straight away.
Powerful witches that start this guild limit upstart competition. Everyone would remember "these 3 are the top witches that started the guild, I need super strength potion so I will buy it from them directly". Numbers 4-10? Irrelevant, facing a very difficult battle to get recognized as among the top for some potions.
[Answer]
Dont leave it to the witches, but to the consumers.
In the old days guilds were often local and they exerted power over their "domain". For example the cloth market in my city was a guild that was reknown for it's quality, so much so that its sails and other cloth was prized if it had received a special seal.
The power of guilds has varied but can be immense. A simple local guild would demand everyone in their trade to be a member and pay contributions/guild taxes. These contributions would be used to pay for guild things like hiring people to check the quality of wares, checking if people followed the local rules like not being allowed to have both their shop and a stall open but also for someone to check incoming merchants. Anyone not of the guild had to pay a fee to be allowed to sell their wares in the city. These wares could be quality checked, and disobeying these rules could be disastrous. The guild would naturally give a monthly contribution to the local watch or whatever security they had. This ensured that offending merchants could get a visit from the watch, which could result in anything from a fine to confiscation of (a portion of) their goods to public shaming, banishment or jail time. Naturally such offenses could be messaged to other guilds nearby to ensure anyone not of the guild could get in a lot of trouble.
Witches are individuals, but it is the consumers who are screwed when they buy a potion from a witch and get screwed. So it is the consumers and possibly the local form of government that could band together and force the witches into guilds. After all no one wants to buy a bad potion, especially not the mayor or a rich merchant as it means both losing reputation and having to deal with the effects of a bad potion.
Some witches might join early on to mess with their rivals. If Zarah the witch is selling less than Melanie the witch because Melanie delutes her potions so she can sell more at a time then Zarah might want that quality check to deal with her. So she joins the guild and uses it to get at Melanie... only its hard to stop a guild.
That is how it's set up. Your guild knows that witches might not voluntarily join, but if they can get the citizenry and local government to create and maintain the guilds they can get the regulation they want.
[Answer]
This seems like a fairly simple question of economics... ok, simple for economics at least.
Your Potion Guild is trying to place themselves as the primary supplier of useful potions: healing, mana and stamina potions at least, maybe some more interesting utility potions like invisibility or ability buffs. They're using modern alchemical techniques to produce potions that, while not necessarily of peak potency, are at least consistent and safe. They found that good alchemical hygiene practices - like cleaning your tools not just physically but magically - result not just in more consistent results but much higher potion purity, vastly reducing the side effects and toxicity of their potions.
In other words they've got a good product, they just need to get the production costs down to the point where they can make a reasonable profit.
Depending on how alchemy actually works in your setting the mass production of potions may be as simple as scaling up the process. Can you run off a thousand doses in a huge vat or must each potion be crafted in a small cauldron? Do you have to infuse magic into the brew, and if so can teams of alchemists provide a steady stream or does it have to be a single person? How much of the process can be handled by apprentices and how much requires the skills of a master alchemist?
I'm going to assume that you've got all that covered and move on to the fun stuff: building demand.
This moves a little out of economics and more into marketing. You've got a good product, you just need to make people aware of it. Sure, you can sell it in markets and so forth, rent a shop in the merchant district, all that fun stuff. But that's far too slow.
During the initial phases you'll need to capture the attention of your target market as quickly and as solidly as possible. You need a brand, something that stands out amongst the crowd of inferior products. You need to get that brand in front of your potential purchasers and show them how your product is going to improve their existence. And hey, that's not even a lie!
You'll want to invest in distinctive, single-use potion containers that can't just be refilled with inferior product. Something that is partially destroyed on use would be fantastic, especially if it's *cheap* and easy to stamp a colorful logo on. These containers will be the symbol of your product wherever they're seen, standing out from the haphazard collection of bottles, jars and pouches other potions come in.
Getting them in front of the target market could be a simple as handing out some testers to the adventuring guild, promising them a small discount on the potions when they buy in bulk. Once the guild sees how good your product is they're going to want those potions anyway.
But let me pitch you a classic marketing ploy: endorsements! Go out and find the most powerful, most charismatic adventurers in the area and promise them discounts, preferential treatment and outright payment (as a last resort of course) if they'll openly carry your potions on their person. They get a good deal on life-preserving potions, you get even greater brand recognition. And you have potent adventurers who are now keen on preserving your business against overt aggression from disgruntled witches. Bonus!
As production ramps up, enter into some supply deals with the local guards, the nobility and eventually the army. The higher you can reach the more product you can move, and the higher you profits become. And when you're supplying product to the top layers of society you can use that to encourage more sales at the mid and lower levels. In much the same way as endorsements will have lower-ranked adventurers flocking to buy your product, a simple "as used by Lord Bob's elite troops" sign will do wonders for your sales. Trust me.
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None of the above is even revolutionary these days, and there are a ton of other things that a half-baked marketing exec would throw in for a product launch. The fact that you have an actually good product would have half of the marketing professionals of today begging to work with you.
In a high fantasy environment however a lot of this is new. There should already be examples of most of it - except maybe the celebrity endorsements - in the day-to-day operation of large merchant houses. All it takes is a little vision... and the prospect of making a lot of profit will invoke a lot of visions in any merchant worth the title.
While the economic stuff is important to solidifying your guild's position, having powerful protection is going to be even more important in the early days. Building relationships with people and groups who can help protect you from retaliation is a must. Get the local adventurers on-side, then the guards, then the military. Let them decide for themselves that your business is too important to them for anyone else to interfere. Hell, bribe some officials if you have to. Build some less public relationships with the seedy side as well, just in case. It's hard to hire assassins to destroy the source of their favorite potions after all... and having some specialist negotiators to 'dissuade' the competition might come in handy.
[Answer]
In the economy you've set up, there will always be (some) desire for cheap un-regulated potions or cauldrons.
Maybe this guild can start "white market" and force those unregulated deals into the "black market" of brew making.
Some people are just going to want to know what they are buying, and should be willing to pay a small membership fee or premium for the guild. This will give them sway they can use to carry out their agenda. The system could be simple - have a 3rd party witch observe a brew, take a log, and attach the log with a guild stamp to the purchasing ticket. (This would bring up some tension about "my precious recipe" its the same for packaged foods today! It won't include process, order or amount of ingredients - so their craft is still protected while the consumer (*can*) know if they are taking a risk.)
This way, no witches have to move, they can *still* compete with each other, and there is no need to regulate materials. IF there is an economic pull in the market for these verifications, and IF it builds a positive reputation - eventually no one (with scruples) will buy unregulated potions. *Also* a great way to track suppliers. With the validation system you could sell your potions anywhere and still build a reputation. If you were a new witch, you could sell your master's potions (for a higher price, but a higher reputation) and sell your own for a discount (*they might even have the same ingredients*). Everyone wins.
How it all turns out is up to your narrative.
[Answer]
You don't go after the old, powerful witches to bring them into the guild. You start fresh.
You gather young witches into your guild collective by offering benefits like collective bargaining power, resource distribution, and buying their potions for later sale. Your new guild spends a lot of time taking the mundane out of the supernatural. Supply chain management, marketing, sales, etc.
The young witches get more time to work on their craft. They get steady materials and income. The quality of materials goes up due to dedicated gatherers. Potion quality increases quickly as they spend more time making them and less time wandering the countryside for ingredients.
The old individualistic witches eventually join or die off and most young witches that would replace them join the guild. The guild then provides a singular regulated marketplace.
[Answer]
Coming at it from another tack to most of the other answers, and depending on the vibe you want to give; the guild happens to control a large supply of an important reagent for the potions. *Many* of the supplies are readily available, but the guild controls most of the market for the phlebotinum. It might mean that guild potions are more stable, or more effective, or taste better, but whatever it does means that the guild has a very large carrot. Witches who join the guild benefit from guild rates on this material, but for anyone else it's harder to come by or they have to make do with lower quality brews.
The guild can then take a somewhat strong-arm approach - "If you want our phlebotinum, you have to toe the line".
[Answer]
The problem is understanding which question to answer. Do you just want to justify your centralized government? Or do you genuinely want a solution for the quality problem?
Assuming the latter: the guild does not have to monopolize the market by force. As long as they are providing consistently better quality, customers will choose them.
Assuming the former: the power hungry wannabe rulers just hire demagogues to demonize the previously mentioned non-violent solution, and the unsophisticated population believes them.
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[Question]
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If a group of people live in a closed loop environment, with all energy coming from a reactor. What crops would you grow if you only care about keeping people fed for the absolute minimum amount of power consumed?
[Answer]
UV is a poor energy source for agriculture, with enough energy per photon to easily damage living organisms. If you have a source of kilowatts of UV and want to grow crops, you need to convert it to kilowatts of longer-wave light, which can be done quite efficiently with a variety of phosphors. This is in fact how fluorescent lights and most white LEDs work.
Then, once you have light tailored to the plants needs (likely pink or purple in appearance): plants using the C4 pathway are somewhat more efficient at photosynthesis. These include maize, sugar cane, and sorghum, among numerous others: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C4_plants>
You will of course produce large amounts of cellulose as well. With the help of the right microorganisms, you should be able to convert that into carbohydrates with more food value for humans or substances of use in your chemical industry, use it to produce plastics and fibrous materials, or just compost it to produce more growth medium for plants. Likely a combination of these.
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It's going to be hard to get more efficient than algae. We're happy (some of us, at least) to put spirulina powder in smoothies, and so forth, so we already eat it.
Algae will be probably the simplest source of nutrients, taking the least energy per gram to grow up.
Unfortunately, I've no idea if it's nutritionally balanced, but I suspect it could be engineered to be. It'll also be able to use any waste heat to speed production, and be possible to grow in a sphere around the light source, maximizing growing surface area.
[Answer]
[Microbial electrosynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_electrosynthesis) is more energy-efficient than photosynthesis. Engineer microbes to produce nutrients and use electricity from your reactor to power the process.
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Most important question to properly answer it is: for how long?
For whatever reason you chose to concentrate on power consumption. This is fine and I can see at least several reasons for doing so, all perfectly legitimate, but I believe you failed to consider several factors, most important of which is that proper diet is needed to keep humans in more or less healthy condition. And it's not constrained to just physical health. For example, if you'd limit your people to corn you'd [eventually end up with serotonin deficiency and pellagra, which some studies link to Aztec cannibalism, for example.](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/111127/39211)
So, depending on the time you plan your group to spend in the closed environment, you have some options, but since vegan diet is very hard to get right without really wide food variety available, you may have to revise your assumptions.
If we're talking about 6 months tops then soybeans or mentioned corn. Soybeans are really good in photosynthesis department, but need to be properly fermented (which takes energy). Corn is also a good choice. But you have to add supplements to it, or introduce more plants, especially vegetables and nuts or oily seeds; though not necessarily a lot.
If you are talking long-term, then without either supplements (vitamins, fats and minerals) or really varied foodstuffs (grains, beans, vegetables, fruits and/or - unfortunately - animals), your group will not survive long.
This means you have to either invest seriously in the area for food production or, which is a better way, introduce plants with much better photosynthesis efficiency (be it breakthrough in cross-pollination or selective breeding or genetic engineering), because then you can get 10 times or 100 times higher yields from area, which you can use for diversified heavily crops or still have room for animals (should you choose so).
Obviously upside of any farming area in closed loop environment is a good way to boost air scrubbing of CO2 and water vapour, so this is a good way to offset energy expenditure there. Also, this whole area may be an excellent place to have for improving all-round wellbeing of the crew. Humans do not do well long-term in enclosed spaces, so having an area that can double as recreational is a benefit.
[Answer]
## Ideally Mushrooms
That or a genetically modified analog, as you need to give better details on the level of technology you have available and the amount of space you can afford. If this is a colony ship for example, space, weight and power are your currencies, while for a space station, the space is most valuable.
But I will assume a closes cycle explorer starship, in which case mushrooms would be your primary choice. They grow with little sunlight, can be modified to decompose crew waste and can be grown in artificial mediums. Only problem is that they kind of suck at making oxygen, if you care about that.
## Otherwise, Soylent Green
If you **do** care about oxygen, then algae, reprocessed into edible bars are most efficient. They'd taste pretty alright and you are making oxygen while you do it, so you'd fit food and life support into a single system.
Do remember that I assume you have relatively advanced genetic modification, or otherwise find the perfect kind of edible mushrooms and seaweeds to feed your crew, which might be hard.
## Growing It
For mushrooms, a hydroponic artificial medium combination, possibly along walls of a farming level of the ship, would use reprocessed waste as fertilizer. Otherwise, algae would be grown in well-lit vats of water, with carbon dioxide being bubbled through. If you want to maximize the shielding efficiency, then you'd make the walls of your space ship serve as the water tanks, filled with algae or otherwise, but do note that it would make cleaning them a pain in the rear end.
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A fictional nomadic group lives in vardos much like the Romani people.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nm7Iq.jpg)
Could such a nomadic group build a giant library on wheels like a giant vardo capable of carrying 50,000 books? This giant library must be pulled by horses.
Create a design of a library on wheels capable of carrying 50,000 books that can be pulled by horses. How many horses would be necessary to pull it?
Assume that one book is 25 cm tall, 15 cm wide, and 5 cm. thick. and weighs 5 pounds. They are displayed in bookshelves containing 140 books each and 1.5 kilograms each (without books).
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The best way to do it would be to split among multiple vehicles, each of reasonable size and weight for a horse team to pull all day. That does not change the total number of horses, but it does keep the teams to a reasonable size. For example, one could replace a large vehicle with a 125-mule team with 16 vehicles, each with 8 mules.
The vehicles could be designed with one side dropping down to form a stage The books would be on wheeled bookcases that are packed densely during travel, but pulled out onto the stage for access and display at stops.
At a stop, the vehicles would form a fixed pattern, with the catalog vehicles at the entrance, and maps to help people find the books they wanted.
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It would depend on the tribe and their capabilities.
However I think your scale is simply absurd.
50,000 books is unheard of in such a context. In fact a whole library might not even hold that.
You have to understand the whole context of books in pre-modern times.
(Now I'm aware of different practices, and certainly medieval Europe did not hold many books compared to "Dar Al Hikma" in Baghdad and so on.)
Knowledge would (mostly) not be passed down from books. Only highly abstract ideas and art are given such privileges. And you have to take into consideration that in order to develop any notable art and philosophy, and start translating other works (and all the other prerequisites to large libraries) you have to be a stable state with a lot of free time and a strong inclination to read and write and translate... etc.
People did not just think: I'll go down to the local ancient temple and write down a full description of the thing just for the fun of it.
These prerequisites are all missing from a nomadic tribe, and trying to haul around that many books is absurd. Simple logistics.
You carry the most important stuff only. So why carry around a crappy copy of a second rate "novel"? It's just too much trouble.
Now back to the way people used to do things. A master taught an apprentice who in turn would pass down that knowledge. Oddly enough, even today we highly value technical hands-on teaching, and certainly a school that teaches you the theoretical principles of making cars is nothing like a school that teaches those principles *and* also puts you in a workshop and tells you to build that darn thing.
So more books doesn't necessarily equal a more educated or knowledgable people. An average first-world citizen with access to millions of books is no more capable of making a simple radio than a citizen of Athena in 100 BC.
And we also know that certain ancient tribes (like Arabic nomadic tribes) had excellent memory. And when I say excellent, I mean the ability to perfectly recite a 100-verse poem with absolute accuracy down to smallest element.
So people did have better memories when it came to the things that matter like art or history.
Also I do remember something similar in Europe.
I think Caesar killed this group of Shamans or something that had all the history of the tribe and then all their secrets were lost to us, but that was a long time ago.
Lastly the available pool of books and the entire viewpoint on "publishing" was nothing like today.
Do you think that people of the ancient world had thousands of choices and that you had hundreds of genres and all that modern stuff?
People only bothered with important and "good" (read: useful) works.
You didn't sit down and write a crappy YA novel.
It just takes too much time. And even if you finish one copy then you have to spend even more time to write down a second copy.
So people focused on the important books.
Now most of this is general rules of thumb, because we only need the larger context here to come to the conclusion that you need to change something.
Anyway I really think you need to scale it down. Something like 1000 books seems a lot more manageable.
And this is all in regard to the given information. If you did figure out all those things and have strong and reasonable reasons why this is so then I apologize.
I hate to be the guy that just comes around to argue a point that you figured out already.
But if not, better change something.
[Answer]
OK, so you want a horsecart for 125 tons of books. The shelves are lost in the rounding, which suggests that your figures are too low. But for a ballpark, I'm even going to ignore the difference between short tons, long tons, and metric tons ...
A large historical example were [20-mule teams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team) hauling two connected wagons with 36 tons total. This suggests roughly 10 mules (or 9 mules and 1 horse) per 20 tons of load. Being optimistic, say the wagon and shelves are as heavy again as the books. That means a 125-mule team ...
* The example used 19th century wagons and wheels with metal rims. They were traveling on a specific desert route. Wooden wheels in a temperate climate could get bogged down in mud or just soft soil.
* Coordinating 125 animals sounds like a challenge, too. How much weight does the rope or chain add?
But the Romans managed to transport several large obelisks from Egypt to Rome. The [Lateran Obelisk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateran_Obelisk) was 450 tons before a part broke off. So (a) loads in your weight class can be transported on the ground and (b) no, it isn't very practical.
[Answer]
If your tribe really wants to move a library of 50,000 books around then their best bet is to create [miniature books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_book). Miniature versions of religious books have been around for several centuries; they were both portable and concealable (at a time when possessing the wrong book could get you killed). Obviously they cost more to produce than normal size books, and need a magnifier to read, but for a nomadic people this would be a better trade-off than full-size books.
If a typical book in this library were around 5cm x 3cm x 2cm it would weigh about 40 grams. So 50,000 books would weigh about 2 tons. Much more manageable.
[Answer]
## Not with a single wagon no
For scale this is what *half* a room with 50,000 books looks like.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hQQtl.jpg)
This is what a library with 200,000 books looks like, Trinity College Library Ireland, it is 20 rows deep, you want a quarter of that so the first 5 rows.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PT1dd.jpg)
A single [ox can pull](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58d68e502994ca9ba729256b/t/5a32abeac83025b790eaa4ef/1513270274815/Estimating+Ox-Drawn+Implement+Draft+TechGuide.pdf) a cart weighing about 5000lbs over uneven ground all day long.
A single [draft horse](https://horsefaqs.com/how-much-weight-can-a-horse-pull-on-wheels/) can manage [around](https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&context=bulletin) 2000lbs
Assuming the books are packed as tightly as possible and not set up for reading, you are hauling about ~50000lbs at the lowest estimate. that is ~25000lbs of books (assuming the purposefully make the books as light and compact a possible) and ~25000lbs of wagon to support the books (since the wagons have to be water tight they end up being almost twice as heavy than a normal ore wagon, which weigh around [7800 lbs to haul 20000lbs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team).
so you need 10 oxen or 25 horses. the problem is you get diminishing returns by adding more animals beyond a certain point. Once you get to around 20 animals the additional pulling power is negligible. Note will also need well made iron chains and iron wheel fittings for this much weight, which may be difficult for a nomadic people to make. Large teams are also extremely unwieldy, difficult to steer, and take a long time to harness and unharness.
So you can't manage it with a single wagon with horses. You might be able to with two wagons with horses (or one wagon of oxen) assuming it is not a library but packed books, they have to be unpacked when you reach a destination, likely taking several days.
But you can't build a wooden wagon that strong so you have to split it up into smaller loads. the limit on wooden wagons is around 20000lbs of cargo, and that is with solid oak, lots of iron, and hard packed roads.
now if you are going to split it up anyway just split it up into easy to handle 4 horse teams that gives you around 7 wagons. But you are going to need at least 4-5 wagons to haul the food needed to feed so many horses, or you are going to need to do what Dial did for hauling borax and set up feed/water stations every few miles to feed the teams. A horse team will eat roughly a tenth the weight of what they are hauling in feed per day.
**If you want an actually library with shelves it is impossible, you are adding 2-3 times as much weight if not more per wagon, which is too much for a single wagon and adds up to almost a dozen more wagons split up (which also require feeding).**
[Answer]
Here's a bit of a pun: don't reinvent the wheel. :D
>
> In the tenth century… the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when traveling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
>
>
>
<http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2014/04/book-hoarding-10th-century-style.html>
Happy discovering.
[Answer]
The answer has to be yes. OP has been sufficiently vague that it can't be anything else: "library" might be recreational (for the people owning it or people they visit), or it might be cultural (holy books they daren't lose) or it might be critical to survival. Xe's also been vague about timescale and speed of movement.
Interpreting the question loosely, it would be entirely plausible for nomads to be in possession of a university-grade library which stayed three years in a town and then moved on, with the objective being to visit every century or so in order to make sure that the trainee doctors and technologists had access to original works rather than relying on well-thumbed transcripts. During each migration they could rely on help from at least their destination, and possibly from the people they were leaving who would obviously want them to come back eventually.
And OP's question doesn't specify how many wheels, whether it's a single cart or a convoy, and whether books have to be immediately accessible or only sought out by a trained cadre.
[Answer]
Can they physically do this? Yes. The question would be WHY are they doing this. If they have a contract with some emperor to take his library to his summer home or a god has told them to take his library to a new location, then it’s easy-peasy, they get enough wagons and mules and away they go.
Without a really good reason, they wouldn’t be doing this. And the good reason needs to be a clear profit or existential threat (aka telling a god to piss off is likely to result in a lot of lightening strikes and/or volcanic eruptions). Tradition or love of knowledge isn’t going to cut it.
[Answer]
Even ignoring the weight and reason answers brought up by others working with horses is an inherently dirty business (personal experience speaking here). Moving however many books could be done but actually being able to use them as a library when camped would quickly ruin whatever value the materials had due to the simple inability to get clean enough.
[Answer]
What is a book? In antiquity, a single papyrus scroll or was an essay or part of a series that made up a book. A stone tablet was a book. China and Japan used paper scrolls, the Art of war was written on bamboo staves linked with wire and string. An essay of one avers and a reverse would, in the Alexandrian Library be considered one book!
To minimize the amount needed to be reserved for books, make sure the books become an integral part of the caravan! The caravan itself is the library! I can store tons of text on the sides of all the carts and wagons, the fencing they carry for the cattle is written upon just as much as the inside and outside of tents and even the skin of their animals and members! No spot that is not decorated with one or another piece of poetry or essay. All the plates together might carry cookbooks and so on.
But the numbers need to be cut down! An early medieval library in Europe was usually just about the size of a large cupboard, a prestigious one would be a whole room containing some hundred books. Thousands were exceptional places like Rome.
[Answer]
Of course a nomadic group could build a library on wheels pulled by horses, even if you somehow restricted the group to "Romany" caravans as in your picture.
If you let your nomads get real and use wheeled platforms such as Genghis Khan's Mongols had, their task becomes about nine or ten times easier.
[Answer]
Under different conditions than on earth mabey.
If it's another world then gravity can be less reducing weight and allowing larger "hourse" to evolve able to pull more each.
The atmosphere could also be extremely dense to the point of providing significant bouncy reducing the weight and making it easy to add lift to even have the wagon turn into an air ship.
Life's chemistry could also be different allowing for stronger lighter "wood" and animal with stronger muscles and carbon based "bones".
Carbon bonds can allow for far stronger materials than steal if arranged correctly.
Under different conditions life might evolve to make stronger materials out of carbon or other elements.
] |
[Question]
[
So, my vampires are somewhat different. Here's a short summary, though it might be a lot to take in:
Vampires are created from humans by malfunctioning robotic headcrab masks. Vampires' original purpose was to be perfect soldiers, and so they possess biological immortality, perfect regeneration (no scars, regrow limbs) and peak-human physical characteristics. However, they have to eat a lot (though a lot less compared to what they can do) and can't be in the sunlight for too long without becoming significantly weakened and also risking super cancer, thanks to the designers who scrapped melanin (making vampires look albino pale) because it was "bloat" and made the synthesis of Vitamin D harder. Garlic and garlic bread works against vampires because their noses are hypersensitive.
The weak-to-sunlight thing doesn't matter for soldiers in skintight leather suits (Don't ask!), but there's this poor rich aristocrat girl (16) who just saw her parents and herself getting murdered and only survived because the blood and viscera sprayed everywhere, including the mask (tacky prop at the time).
**Edit**: The aforementioned mask is capable of locomotion (think of a really scary bug). It seeks out human targets and latches onto their face. Then, it wraps its legs around the head and with the help of hundreds of needles, injects nanomachines directly into the brain. These machines are responsible for turning the human into a vampire. The process finishes during nighttime and can't be reverted.
Once finished, the mask detaches and crawls away, seeking out new candidates.
And just to be clear, the masks are ancient technology if their perverted creator and being mistaken for a tacky prop wasn't a telling sign.
What is she supposed to do when Van Hellsing comes into town? "Oh don't look at me like that, I'm just your average aristocrat orphan who miraculously survived being stabbed in the chest (53 times) with a hunting knife and since then, is wearing a sombrero whenever going outside."
Sure, you probably feel sorry for a nice young lady who just lost her entire family and was non-consensually turned into Bella Swan; Hellsing doesn't.
---
So, aristocracy seems to be the most targeted group. A vampire usually can only rely on themselves, and we're in the Edwardian era. Also, there's Hellsing and his lackeys, who know what to look for and are above the law and money.
**How can an aristocrat, who became a vampire against their will, disguise themselves when walking among humans without risking being caught?**
[Answer]
## Go Clubbing
She's an aristocrat and the only surviving scion of an aristocratic family. It's probably safe to say that she's pretty well-off.
So she can have whatever eccentricities she wants. If she wants to sleep all day and party in the evening, she can do that, and she doesn't need to go out in public in daytime because she's tired of people recognizing her with pity in their eyes or the paparazzi hounding her when the light's good.
Makeup deals with pallor, and if you're going to dance clubs, heavy makeup seems apropos.
[Answer]
**Fake Her Own Death**
If she's the sole survivor of an attack and became a vampire against her will, that carries a significant about of trauma with it. Enough trauma that a suicide would be believable. Her best shot at dodging the vampire hunter is to admit that she's a vampire to everyone in her town, declare that she's killing herself out of grief, and then promptly locking herself in her mansion and then lighting the whole thing on fire in broad daylight.
How she escapes dying from that is her problem, although I can think of numerous ways including secret passages, wells, or body doubles. Hellsing might be suspicious, sure, but vampire hunters have better things to do than going after a 16-year-old who's probably dead in the form of other vampires who *definitely* aren't dead.
At this point, the aristocrat enacts stage two of her plan. She flees to the largest city she can find, hoping to get lost there, and uses the remains of her family's fortune to do so. It's probably a good idea to use untraceable forms of money, like cash or gold, melted down, for this. Then, using makeup, she disguises herself by darkening her skin and gives herself a wicked burn scar across half her face, which she conceals in a hood. Now she's safe and untraceable, and she has an excuse for wearing a hood all the time.
[Answer]
I don't have any suggestions for diet, regeneration, or pallor. However, your joke about always wearing a sombrero isn't far off. Feminine fashion of the era would actually shield a vampire from the sun quite well. Large sun-hats were all the rage, and showing too much skin was still frowned upon.
Example from a 1911 *Punch* cartoon:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wZZHe.jpg)
Sources:
* [Edwardian Era Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwardian_era#Fashion)
* [1900s fashion Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900s_in_Western_fashion)
* [A very comprehensive article from Bellatory](https://bellatory.com/fashion-industry/FashionHistoryEdwardianFashionTrends1890s1914 "Edwardian Fashion Trends")
[Answer]
## Just continue life as normal.
Back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, England was still semi-feudal. As a result, you had a huge amount of nobility who didn't really do anything except sit around.
Since paparazzi was still a thing back then, a lot of these nobles were recluses; they had big estates which they practically never left, having their servants take care of things like grocery shopping. **The upshot is that a young noblewoman who never left her estate would not be particularly unusual.**
[Answer]
**Claim illness**
It appears that [Solar Urticaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_urticaria), a condition which causes severe rashes upon exposure to sunlight, was first discovered in 1904, which means that this was a known, if new, condition to have during the time period in which your story was set.
This means that, if one were to claim that the sun had an ill impact on their health, it's plausible that this is a story that could hold up to interrogation.
Being generally pale fits with general prejudicial assumptions about people who are ill, or have a 'condition,' and so wouldn't stand out if you could sell the first bit.
Being ill also excuses you from most social obligations, and generally at the time it would not at all be amiss that someone who was suffering from some chronic 'condition' would spend most of their time indoors, and come out only rarely at odd hours.
If there is a literal Vampire Hunter looking specifically for an aversion to sunlight, individuals claiming this specific condition would be an obvious thing to look for, however, you could *probably* sell a vague and unspecified illness as a reason for being a social recluse without raising to many eyebrows.
[Answer]
Make the mask removable. Sure her metabolism, strength and speed all revert to human-level when she is not wearing it, and she can't digest blood without its help, but as long as she wears it for a few hours every day, she can survive for intervals without it.
Also, make it the mask which is sensitive to sunlight. Direct exposure to UV disrupts the delicate mechanism which then takes days to repair itself. When a mask is exposed to UV light, the vampire looses their abilities and will probably starve to death before it recovers, but they themselves can be exposed to sunlight without negative consequence.
With those changes to your definition of vampirism, your survivor can follow @Jdunlop's answer and pass for a regular, annoying human teenager.
[Answer]
**Form a society.**
Basically, if you have a lot of vampires, they are going to go where food is. And most of the food will be in populated cities. Which means they might group up and start talking about what's best for survival. You say that a vampire can only rely on themselves. I say, that doesn't actually jive with the Edwardian Era. Even IF a lone vampire is unaware of it, I would think the smart ones had already done this, and it would be a help to a lone vamp, whether they knew it or not!
If it were me, the first, and stupidist thing I would do is this:
**Control Fashion**
In the Edwardian era people wore a lot of clothes ANYWAY. It wouldn't take much to tweak that. I would be looking for fashion influencers (fashion "plates" had become a thing by this time) to either turn, pay off, or enchant. Fashion is more than clothes--it's also skin and hair care. If pale is fashionable for men and women (which, coming off of the Victorian age it WAS) it wouldn't take much to push that up to 11. Since your helmets seem to be targeting the aristocracy anyway, they are, in fact ALREADY going for some of the major influencers of the day. If everyone is using pale-faced make up and avoiding the sun, well, it's hard to tell the difference between the real and the simply fashionable.
**Romanticize Vampires/Illness**
I have one word for you: tuberculosis.
Just before the Edwardian Era, it was [this disease](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029/) that defined romance and fashion. There is a TON of info on how this influenced fashion and beauty. Being pale, looking consumptive, uh, for some reason, this was a positive. So look into that (there's a lot of material out there on this phenomenon) and apply it to what you are doing.
**Create a Nightlife**
Cities already have more of it than the country so...directly or indirectly, encourage this sort of thing.
**Look After Your Own**
There's Van Hellsing, and then there's you, the Vampire Collector. You've been assigned to track the helmets (trapping them if possible, because the more of you there are the more likely the PR will be bad) and find newbies who you either kill (because they aren't dealing with it well and are causing a fuss) or who you teach and hand over to a city.
There is a TON more that I would do, but...just looking at the way the world worked at the time. (I know your world is... uh...different because the tech level is far beyond Edwardian, so I don't know how much this would apply, but...yep).
[Answer]
**Run an import business based around live animals**
This could be exotic pets, or livestock, or ... well, exotic livestock. Bush meat. Anything your super-soldier has a taste for.
If you need the owner of the business to hide from the sun, well, make them *slightly fierce* creatures. Perhaps your alternate world has gryphons (ten inches tall, but wicked claws), phœnices (fiery temper) or cats (you know what those are, we have them here, for real). Thus the keeper has to wear a lot of ... protective ... clothing.
Possibly very tight, *shiny* protective clothing.
That squeaks.
And needs polishing regularly.
If anyone comes too inquisitively into the area, *quarantine* becomes a potential excuse for not coming too close.
] |
[Question]
[
A small city, barely even one, that built everything at the side of cliffs to be protected from the strong winds above.
Is something like it plausible? I can't seem to find examples of it outside of fantasy.
[Answer]
Yes, there actually are a few examples, the topmost I remember are:
* [***Matera, Italy***](https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/matera-italy/index.html): a city carved directly into the rock
* [***Derinkuyu Underground city, Turkey***](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city) completely underground multi-level city carved into the rock
[Answer]
The **Anasazi cliff dwellings** are the best New World ones.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KBD3T.jpg)
<https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/social-studies-142-mg-r1-grades-6-12/anasazi-cliff-dwellings-at-mesa-verde-national-park/>
**Petra** is a cool old world one.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4org5.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCoyRrylVrg>
This is good in that it shows you a lot of the different buildings carved into the rock. I love those stairs.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCoyRrylVrg>
[Answer]
As pointed by other answers, there are much known examples, sometimes even huge ones. There are actually a lot of them all over the world, but I just wanted to add an example that perfectly fits your description and which I visited, Roque Saint-Cristophe. At the time of its destruction it was "A small city, barely even one", really well protected at the side of the cliff.
Reproduction of how the city was at its destruction (source: <http://envievoyages.blogspot.com>):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JqBe6.jpg)
To give a better idea of the scale: (source: Oups79 — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 1.0, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1102461>)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bY5YM.jpg)
It's been inhabited from prehistoric times to 1588 (when the king besieged and totally annihilated the city which completely filled the natural cave in the cliff)
The [English Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Saint-Christophe) is only a stub, you'll find more pictures in the [French one](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Saint-Christophe)
[Answer]
A ravine implies that it was created by erosion, do you mean a cliff? Strong winds would likely bring weather of some kind, depending on the climate in your area/world. The Anasazi and Petra are great examples, but note that they are in arid climates where you don't have to worry about rain eroding your foundations and washing your city away. Other considerations: density/hardness of rock (are your settlers using natural crevices or do they need to carve into the surface to make new rooms/buildings?), light (as windows would only be on the exterior walls, any buildings would likely only be one room deep unless you're building storage/cellar-type rooms).
[Answer]
For another example, this is [Vardzia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vardzia), in [Georgia](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vardzia/@41.3822287,43.2849392,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xa3f04b72bcb61f1c!8m2!3d41.3810511!4d43.284247):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3pQt.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FsW4H.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wcyvh.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
Specifically, if deployed on a town. The buildings, animals (flora and fauna) would be completely untouched, but not a single human would survive the blow.
Secondly, if this is possible, what gene, DNA, and/or disease, would the weapon target in order to specifically target humans?
If it's not possible to wipe out humans without affecting the ecosystem, what gene could be targeted to do the maximum damage to humans and minimal damage to surrounding environment? How would environment be impacted?
[Answer]
Prion diseases, specifically Transmissible Spongiform Encephalitis (TSE).
Prions are a protein that, as near as we can tell, all mammals produce. These proteins are not broken down during digestion, so contaminated food is a popular vector.
Creatures typically create their own variants of the Prion Protein (PrP), so Prion diseases are typically not zoonotic (they do not cross species barriers). However, cattle do have a zoonotic form with humans, in Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE, Mad Cow Disease).
It takes humans nearly 20 years to be symptomatic, but once symptoms begin, progression is rapid (months) and always fatal. Prion diseases are neurodegenerative disorders, which will cause behavioral changes, rapid cognitive decline, and intense pain.
Prion diseases work by an animal taking in a malstructured PrP that, through some mechanism that isn't definitively identified yet, slowly changes normal PrPs to the malstructured form. Since normal PrPs are necessary for these creatures to live, the immune system does not respond to the malformed PrP.
The most common form of transmission of Prion diseases is cannibalism. Since humans don't generally eat each other, this is incredibly rare. However, improperly buried corpses can contaminate water supplies and crops. Additionally, PrPs are very resilient in the open air -- An intentional delivery system would be to just spray it directly on crops.
The malformed PrPs can appear spontaneously in animals, so people don't need to be directly exposed in order to get Prion diseases, but spontaneous infection is rare, and there is no known mechanism to intentionally create a spontaneously malformed PrP. Plants have been known to take up animal PrPs, so you can't simply wash your fruits and vegetables, as the infectious part is already inside your food.
The only plausible (though unlikely) way to infect the entire world would be orbital chemical weapons caches that accidentally deorbit, spreading large quantities of malformed PrPs throughout the entire atmosphere and eventually depositing them on every field -- or some other similar global contamination mechanism. It would take a decade before the first people become symptomatic.
Animal-based vectors are out... i.e., you wouldn't be able to weaponize mosquitos to carry it from person to person the way malaria is carried, because humans exist in all biomes. The only other animal that shares all biomes with humans are rats, and since humans no longer have fleas like we did back in the days when rats carried the plague throughout europe, a weaponized Prion disease wouldn't be transmissible that way, either.
Global TSE infection would have the most gentle impact on the environment of any human die off event. There won't be planes crashing, etc., as symptoms appear slowly and are not immediately debilitating. Power plants and dangerous reactors will be shut down in controlled manners. Residual pollution will slowly leak into water supplies as storage containers break down, but this is a decades-long process rather than an immediate event.
Pets and farm animals will be released and hunted by natural predators in a more drawn out manner... Pigs will be the most successful invasive species.
As far as the die off itself... Some people will start getting more violent as the pain and cognitive decline drives them insane. There won't be roving bands of violent half rotten zombies; they'll just take their frustration out on the people closest to them, suddenly start getting very weak (their brains won't be sending strong signals to their muscles), then over the course of a couple days, lay in bed (or in an alley, or wherever) and eventually stop breathing. The die off will take a very long time in human timescales, but all humans will be dead within 25 years of releasing the weaponized PrP into the upper atmosphere.
[Answer]
Viruses are highly species-specific, i.e. a human virus will only kill humans. So a biological weapon will do the job. The best virus to use is beyond my knowledge, and I am a bit concerned a terrorist would read this. If we stick to sci-fi convention, then zombie virus is the most obvious choice. But realistically, even the deadliest viruses leave some survivors who happen to be immune.
It is not possible to "to wipe out humans without affecting ecosystem". We are part of the ecosystem. Accidents at factories and power plants will generate a ton of immediate environmental damage. Nuclear station meltdowns, oil spills, fires, chemical factories exploding, etc. Dam breaks will wipe everything downstream. Rain will wash trash and debris into rivers and oceans.
Farming industry will have longer effects: lots of animals will die, creating temporary feeding ground for scavengers, and then starvation and death once no more animals are available. Other animals will escape, probably briefly consuming all plants in immediate area.
Our pets (as long as they can get out) will be an interesting addition to wildlife.
But in 10-20 years, nature will recover and take over. Are you willing to wait that long?
[Answer]
Targeted robotic micro cluster munitions.
Some humans might be resistant to a biological weapon, or be able to be isolated before infection sets in. Few humans will be resistant to a micro shaped charge to the head...
Designed as hoppers, such devices could be sized such that they wouldn't leave notable damage to any part of the surrounding environment.
For slightly more alignment and targeting effort they could employ a contained "bolt gun", and each munition could be reusable.
If employed using a non- learning AI, then there is effectively zero target drift as could be found in a biological weapon.
After initial deployment the munitions could remain in standby mode to catch any straggling basement dwellers, or remotely disabled to allow the region to be occupied.
They could also be programmed to only activate on "safe" targets to avoid collateral damage. No killing people driving cars on the highway or anyone at home with a stove on kind of thing.
[Answer]
For the question as stated, it is not necessary to use a bioweapon; [Slaughterbots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA) programmed to consider *all* humans "the bad guys" would do, too.
In case you cannot see the video:
The concept is a swarm of AI-controlled drones, each equipped with a shaped charge designed to penetrate a human skull.
The drones are more maneuverable than a human hand, so once the recognize a human skull, they fly near it and explode the charge.
Are these slaughterbots realistic? Sort of:
* Physical countermeasures are possible - just deny them entry using nets.
* Counter-countermeasures are possible, too: shaped charges can be designed to cut nets.
* It is pretty realistic that drones can evade hands, baseball bats, or other attempts to shoot them down. They could be shot, but they are a small moving target, so a drone on attack course would be extremely difficult to stop.
* The payload (shaped charge) is scarily realistic: after all, you need the equivalent of just a single pistol shot. The shaped charge is just a way to build a pistol shot that does not need a pistol with trigger, barrel, or grip, which is easy if the shooting platform is a fire-once-and-forget thing anyway. This is the core element that makes the video so scary: You can kill anybody with just 20 grams of explosive (I bet you can reduce that further).
* Current-day AI is not *that* smart. Expect drones to attack things that only look vaguely like a human head, and occasinally attack something random that just happens to trigger the "right" paths in their neural network programming. A Slaughterbot-infested area would still be too dangerous to enter.
* For the question as stated, any Slaughterbots deployed in the area will eventually run out of energy and become inert. If a some power source is available, the danger can persist until the power dies.
* The bots could be programmed to deposit their charge and a trigger when the battery runs low. This would pepper the area with anti-personnel mines, which can prolong the thread until the explosive degrades; this will take years, decades, or possibly longer.
[Answer]
# Face recognition drones
You can already find some pretty crazy simulations of swarms of bird sized drones, air dropped, that will just run to your head and detonate a directional explosive charge. add some bigger drones for door or window breaking, and you get a perfectly plausible mass killing weapon. Crazy expensive, but with minimal structure and nature damage. You can even set it up to recognize facial patterns to target specific range of people (the ethical one would be to not kill children, the unethical that come to mind is focusing a special ethnicity or group of people), or even specific people, like politic opponents, registered criminals, or people still using facebook. Any database with faces will do.
the limits of the weapon will be bunkers or any better defended place, but you can still adapt with big mama drones and stuff like that. firearms will do very little against your drones if they have correct flying patterns. A helmet won't protect you from the explosive charge from the drone (a slug ammo will go right throught a helmet) but it can protect your face to be recognized, so it comes to a recognition warfare (full humanoid body detection counter the helmet), to defend against this recognition you'll try to get out of the pattern, etc.. Also some countering will happen with jamming comms between drones and the "motherships" that coordinate the attack, but it won't stop much.
All in all, you should evaluate the kill cost to 100 dollars per head (single use drones are quite cheap), maybe 2000 dollars for a door opening, adding maybe 1M$ for highly amoral software dev and you will also need some delivery system. But then you can kill 95% of a city population in a night.
That's f\*cked up, by the way.
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**This is likely going to be a disease**
1. Human-only disease. A highly virulent and highly lethal disease which affects only humans can devastate the entire world before humans can do anything to react to it. Incubation period should be long enough that normal quarantine methods are not going to be very effective. The downside here is that there inevitably be a large number of survivors that would isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and once everyone affected would die, the survivors will just start over.
2. A disease that is fatal to humans only. Imagine a disease that infects all mammals, but is fatal to humans only. Without having a cure, a world in which every animal presents mortal danger would be very hard and perhaps not survivable for humans. If disease's [Natural reservoir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir) is very large, it just can't be eliminated, and pockets of human survivors would be doomed as well.
3. Nanobots. Today, the world "nanobots" is very generic and almost synonymous with "magic". Anything that is scientifically doable, can be performed by nanobots. So imagine zillions of nanobots infecting all living things on Earth, checking their DNA and mercilessly killing them if it has human composition.
All mass destruction methods that don't have DNA tuning are not going to be selective enough to avoid large collateral damage among animals. And I also assume that dying off of the farm animals and pets is acceptable.
P.S. Note about the tech level. Options #1 and #2 can be implemented tomorrow, if researchers stumble on the right pathogen. Medical science would unlikely be able to counter it in a short to medium term, unless it makes a similarly lucky stumble on a vaccine. Option #3 requires advanced tech. In that scenario, it may be likely that humanity would have a readily available technology to counter the threat from nanobots.
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Technically no, a weapon of mass destrcution (WMD) has to devastate the scenery and everything in it, a mass *casualty* weapon that only kills humans is pretty easy though. This is going to be a biological weapon, [Smallpox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox) is a good candidate as are [Ebola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease) and [Marburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus), they may infect other animals but are only really lethal to humans.
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Unless the bioweapon was released simultaneously, I don't think it would be effective in wiping out the humans. If a city was targetted, humans would study the effects and look for ways to survive and counter the weapon.
A biological weapon that targeted the human reproductive cycle might be more effective. If it was highly contagious and initially had no side effects, or very few, but prevented the pregnancy from coming to term, might infect a large percentage of the population before anyone was aware of it. If it scared the uterus of an infected woman that became pregnant, then they would not be able to get pregnant later, if the humans worked out a cure. In a generation or two, you could wipe the humans from the planet.
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Depending on how scifious you're willing to get, another possibility is a swarm of highly reproductive, deadly venomous locust-like creatures, genetically engineered to only be attracted to, and enraged by human pheromones - perhaps humans are all they can eat too, so they will die off soon after their job is complete. (Unless they evolve to eat other creatures too)
Of course the problem is containing them. But if, say, they can't cross the sea, you could use them against an island.
If you wanted more control, they could be little A.I. flying robots instead of biological insects...
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Set in the near future, the interior of the spaceship is coated with thin layers of Teflon approximately 10mm average thickness on top of titanium alloy which in case you are wondering it is weakly magnetic. I need the crews to be able to walk around the catladders and platforms instead of floating everywhere in a very spacious area, no nets, safety harness/ropes, FTL, wrap, artificial gravity and ET allowed. Is there any durable and affordable footwear to allow the crews to walk around the spaceship effortlessly instead of free fall?
[Answer]
**Velcro**
Velcro is easy to use insofar as you an put the 'fluffy' side of the velcro on almost any surface, and then just adhere the 'hook' side of the velcro to the underside of your shoes. Let's say you're on a ladder. Your hands can still grip the rungs covered in the fluffy part, but your shoes adhere to it, making purchase easier.
Ideally, you'd also wear velcro gloves, so you could launch from one side of the ship to the other and control your arrival at the next bulkhead with your hands and swing your feet into position.
The other advantage to this kind of footwear is that you don't even need to make it especially; you could just tape the velcro onto the bottom of some standard sneakers, and even replace it if it starts to wear.
Although it doesn't take advantage of the magnetic properties, this is actually the most practical because the holding forces of velcro make it quite useful for this kind of environment while still giving people the ability to break the hold to move about. You should also be able to use it as a good hold point for cargo and specific personal items like tablets and other devices you'd normally leave on a desk beside you in full gravity, meaning that the solution is versatile beyond astronaut mobility; it's more or less a gravity replacement for your personal items and in some cases cargo as well, if you use it correctly.
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You don't actually need any footwear to move in micro gravity.
Hands are the perfect tools to grab onto ladder rungs and with a little training, our toes can hold onto them fine enough. In micro gravity humans don't have to walk upright, they can pull themselves along handholds and ladders in all directions.
The ISS is a fine example of how a single hand hold (or foot hold) can anchor an astronaut just fine and leave both hands free to work with.
As long as there are no sharp edges, you don't need any footwear at all. For reasons of sanitation thin socks and gloves are more than enough. To make grabbing rungs with your feet easier, the socks should be coated in a non-slip substance and at least the big toe should be seperated (like a mitten for feet). Seperating each toe would probably be more practical for the astronaut, though.
Imagine a latex glove for feet: it adapts to the form of the foot, is non-slippy and keps the walls of your space ship clean.
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I am not sure that holding the feet somewhere would be of any help for moving in microgravity.
Our body is used to either walk or swim. Walking for a biped is basically a continue series of controlled falls: the body leans forward, using gravity and feet traction to move and then the other foot to start te cycle again.
Taking out gravity from this process would make it more difficult to walk and control movement. With no gravity to act on the body, the torso would have a hard time following the movement of the legs. One would have to basically lay parallel to the floor and move like climbing a ladder.
Floating in microgravity would be a preferred way to move, thanks to its resemblance with swimming.
[Answer]
**Gel window cling polymer slime.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hn9UU.jpg)
<https://desertlamp.com/happy-halloween-gel-stickers/>
These things are popular and fun. They are made of hard tacky polymer goo. They will adhere indefinitely to a window. If you are making toys, you can adjust the tackiness to make something like the [tumbling men](https://www.orientaltrading.com/mini-sticky-tumbling-men-a2-12_732.fltr?sku=12%2F732&BP=PS544&ms=search&source=google&cm_mmc=GooglePLA-_-1338193093-_-53413218214-_-12%2F732&cm_mmca1=OTC%2BPLAs&cm_mmca2=GooglePLAs&cm_mmca3=PS544&cm_mmca4=FS39&cm_mmca5=Shopping&cm_mmca6=PLAs&cm_mmc10=Shopping&cm_mmca11=12%2F732&cm_mmca12=Mini-Sticky-Tumbling-Men-48ct&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIq9G-qMeL4QIVhAOGCh1orw2EEAQYAiABEgJ99vD_BwE) - also polymer slime but gooeyer such that they stick then gradually peel away.
The polymer sticks to itself better than to smooth surfaces like glass (or certainly teflon). Polymer slime shoes would give you some traction but not so much the shoe comes off of you.
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**Ballet slippers.**
That 10mm layer of teflon has similar thickness and properties to [Marley](https://www.rubberflooringinc.com/dance-flooring/marley-dance-floor.html#!filter=903), a vinyl floor covering used in nearly all serious ballet studios and performance spaces. Also good for other forms of dance in bare feet or soft shoes (or hard shoes with soft coverings aka pointe shoes).
Ballet slippers are designed to be durable, comfortable, and to protect the foot from friction (lack of gravity doesn't means there isn't friction as a foot twists while pushing off from a surface) and other concerns.
More importantly, they are designed not to fall apart in ways that leave little pieces lying around (or floating around, as the case may be). Little bits of stuff are dangerous for dancing.
The standard ballet slipper is made of soft leather or canvas (canvas wears out faster but might be okay in low-gravity; leather can last for years) with a cloth lining. There are elastic straps over the top so the shoe is always perfectly secure. The bottom of the shoe has leather soles, either one long one or two smaller ones at ball and heel.
If you need magnets, they can go into split sole (the kind with two pieces of leather on the bottom) shoes. Use flat, thin, flexible magnets under or within the covering for the ball of the foot.
If you need velcro or another sticky substance, it can also go on the leather soles of the slippers.
Ballet slippers are light, compress for storage, are not that expensive (unless you are outfitting a serious dancer), and are widely available commercially in a variety of styles and a huge range of sizes. Colors are mostly pink and black with some tan/brown and white available, but I'm sure could be any color with a large special order.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNQmF.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2hD6z.png)
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Gecko Feet.
>
> Named one of the top five science breakthroughs of 2012 by CNN Money,
> Geckskin™ is so powerful that an index-card sized piece can hold 700
> pounds on a smooth surface, such as glass, yet can be easily released,
> and leaves no residue.
>
>
> Geckskin™ offers tantalizing possibilities for synthetic devices that
> can easily attach and detach everyday objects such as televisions or
> computers to walls, as well as medical, industrial, clothing, and home
> applications.
>
>
>
<https://geckskin.umass.edu/>
Further,
>
> Unlike traditional pressure-sensitive adhesives, which rely on
> viscoelasticity for adhering to surfaces, Geckskin™ relies on a
> concept known as draping adhesion. Draping adhesion is created with
> materials that can drape to create conformal contact with a surface
> while still maintaining high, elastic stiffness in directions where
> forces will be applied. This design enables adhesive loads to be more
> evenly distributed across the pad surface, while also allowing for a
> rapid and low-energy transition between attachment and detachment.
>
>
> Geckskin™ is composed of stiff fabrics—such as carbon fiber or
> Kevlar—with soft elastomers, such as polyurethane or
> polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). It uses commodity materials, not
> nanotechnology. The key innovation of Geckskin™ was the integration of
> a soft elastomer (the pad) with a stiff fabric (the skin), allowing
> the pad to drape over a surface to maximize contact. Further, as in
> natural gecko feet, the skin is woven into a synthetic tendon,
> yielding a design that plays a key role in maintaining stiffness and
> rotational freedom. The end result is an adhesive device that is
> powerful, easily removed, and leaves no residue.
>
>
>
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## Suction devices
The first thing that you think when reading this is suction-cups of some sort. They are equally if not worse than velcro.
This is not what I mean.
Imagine having some sort of shoes or gloves that have a duct-system built into them. Like a vacuum cleaner. This way a singular fan or air-pump can be used to create different levels of suction depending on area of usage. Or one might even have individual suction systems for each shoe/glove or piece of attire that needs "Gas-based artificial gravity".
This can be configured to increase or decrease suction when one lifts a foot or similar via sensors.
This solution is feasible although hard to accomplish realistically. Usage in vacuum or low air-density will be severely hampered since it depends on the density of the gas to function as intended.
This system could also theoretically be used in low-zero gravity as a form of transportation if one reverses the airflow to blow instead of suck.
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**Polymagnetic soles**
In microgravity you don't need a strong magnet and [shaped field](https://www.arnoldmagnetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Flux-Density-Enhancement-using-Shaped-Field-Magnetics-Martinek-and-Constantinides-REPM-2014-ppr.pdf) sheet magnets exist, so just a flat sheet of [shaped field magnet](http://www.polymagnet.com/polymagnets/) (aka [polymagnets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_magnet)) comparable in shape and thickness to the soles of thin shoes. Sandwich it between a a bonded cloth layer for durability. Something like a pair of tall dojo shoes in design will let you walk around comfortably all day with a little practice. You can even shaped the magnetic pattern to keep the force comfortably distributed.
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[
In an alternate timeline, the [1867 Alaska Purchase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase) does not happen (the British do not fight in the Crimean War and instead aid Russia financially). Russia still controls Alaska in 1904 when [war breaks out with Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War). Japan uses its superior navy to easily occupy sparsely-populated Alaska, and forces Russia to cede it in exchange for peace.
Fast-forward to December 1941. As tensions mount in the Pacific, Japan [strikes Pearl Harbor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor) in an attempt to intimidate America. Instead, the USA joins the Allies and declares war on Japan; crucially, this means that Japan is now at war with Canada, whom they border through Alaska.
Assuming that Japan's capabilities are the same as in our timeline (except for Alaskan resources that were available in 1941, so no oil), could they have moved a sufficient number of troops and equipment into Alaska, and invade North America through the Yukon? Or would they lack the manpower and resources to do this *and* fight in China *and* invade South-East Asia *and* repel the US Navy in the Pacific? They would have some ports in Alaska to stage a naval invasion from, if they could overpower the American navy and air force.
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Frankly if the Japanese of this timeline tried to go overland they wouldn't even reach the US before being defeated.
During WW2 the Canadian army enlisted 730,000; the air force 260,000; and the navy 115,000 personnel. Over half of these people never left Canada and they varied wildly in quality and training, but Canada had the manpower to meet a Japanese offensive from Alaska. With a potentially hostile Japan on the border, this timelines Canada would likely see even more soldiers enlisted or conscripted and better training.
One critical disadvantage for Japan is that during WW2 Canada due to its size and location was a [major training center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Canada_during_World_War_II#Mobilization_and_deployment) for pilots.
>
> Canada was the primary location of the British Commonwealth Air
> Training Plan, the largest air force training program in history.
> 131,553 air force personnel, including 49,808 pilots, were trained at
> airbases in Canada from October 1940 to March 1945. More than half
> of the BCAT graduates were Canadians who went on to serve with the
> RCAF and Royal Air Force (RAF). One out of the six RAF Bomber Command
> groups flying in Europe was Canadian.
>
>
>
Much of this training happened in the prairies.
**Going through the Yukon and into the Prairies**
Now as others have said, the terrain between Alaska and the populated part of Canada is hellish to put it nicely. Even more than Russia, Canada could afford to lose the land, drawing the Japanese further in and away from their supply lines. From Anchorage Alaska to Edmonton, Alberta (the northernmost city in Alberta and essential for a Japanese invasion that doesn't hug the coast), it is 1,911.6 miles using modern roads. That is 36 hours in good weather using cars of today. Back then 99% of the way is wet rocky tundra, thick forests, swamps and rivers. To get around that area people used rivers to get close to where they needed to go, and then built a short, light railway or more likely a small dirt road, or they [flew in by bush plane](http://www.explorenorth.com/yukon/whitehorse-history.html).
In 1940, there were maybe a hundred villages and towns in the Yukon, Northern British Columbia and Alberta, most of these were Indian reservations, work camps, and fishing villages, nothing that would support more than a few hundred people. The Canadian forces on the other hand would have a steady stream of supplies and soldiers coming by rail to Edmonton from across Canada and the US, then they'd be driven north before being put into boats to go up river. The Japanese would find every kilometer they took harder than the last.
Initially garrison forces that know the terrain could set up defense at the numerous rivers that cover the land. Trying to move across ice covered rivers while under fire and in bitterly cold weather, would be bad for the Japanese. [December temperatures](https://www.accuweather.com/en/ca/whitehorse/y1a/december-weather/51876) in the Yukon typically range from -10 to -21 Celsius.
Even once they get into Alberta it doesn't get better. Alberta has the same temperature range as the Yukon, few roads at that time especially up north, and the Japanese would be going through Boreal forests for about 300 or 400 miles before reaching the prairies and civilization. That's thick pine forests, swamps, bogs, and because its winter, ice, hip deep snow and no roads.
Like in the Yukon the defenders would be closer to their supply lines, many would have grown up in terrain like this, and they could retreat far more easily using small paths and roads known to the locals. They would also be close enough for the several thousand pilots training in Canada to attack while the Japanese have zero air force.
If the Japanese somehow reach the nearest major city of Edmonton, they will be fighting in either wet prairies if in the spring, or hot, dusty prairies if it's the summer with no supply lines. Whereas the Allied army would be well supplied by a highway and railway from the south, with another major rail line to the east and west. Having at least several months of knowing exactly where the Japanese are going to, the Canadian and US forces will have the chance to fortify the entire way.
The Yukon to Alberta to the US route would see the Japanese forces whittled away initially by light Canadian forces using dogsleds, cold, and treacherous terrain. After that while at their weakest they'd be hit with a sledgehammer of Canadian and American forces backed up by hundreds if not thousands of planes that control the entire sky.
**Going Down the Coast**
If the Japanese avoided that and tried to roll up the West Coast, it's still a death trap, but even worse.
The terrain is no better, the thick forests and rivers would slow them down, and instead of swamps they have to go through narrow strips of coastline between the Rockies and the Pacific. This leaves them wide open for the combined US and Canadian fleet (yes Canada at one point had a fleet, it was mostly destroyers and anti-sub ships but it was there and well trained) working out of Seattle and Vancouver to pummel them as they slowly made their way through these natural choke points.
Again there is the air force flying out of Vancouver and the aircraft carriers to dominate the sky. While the Japanese air force 'may' be able to support its own side from Alaska they would have farther to fly so would have less fuel and time to contest the sky.
During all of this, Canadian and American forces could be sent in by boat to fortify and defend the coastal villages, and behind the Japanese lines to cut off whatever supply train they developed. With the American/Canadian control of the sky and sea, the Japanese couldn't stop it. Any stragglers would be captured, attempts to reinforce the Japanese army would be met by aircraft and battleships supporting the Allied soldiers. While the Japanese bash their heads against the defenses in front of them they'd have to defend their rear, without any chance of resupply.
They wouldn't come within 500 kilometers of Vancouver.
**Naval Invasion**
A naval invasion into Vancouver or Seattle, would see the Japanese forces fighting the larger joint naval and air force of the Americans and Canadians. If they did manage to land, they are fighting in urban terrain against tens of thousands of Canadian and US forces.
The results would make the [Dieppe Raid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid) look like a well thought out plan.
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No.
They wouldn't be able to do it *today* with more roads in far better shape than there were in 1941. A few minor air raids to take out some roads and bridges and cause the odd avalanche, and a modern army today would be stalled in Alaska and the Yukon.
In 1941? There wasn't a road. The Alaska Highway, which would connect Alaska to the rest of the continent, only began in 1942 and was only passable (barely) in 1943, and relied on pontoon and log bridges early on. A 100 mile stretch in 1943 became impassable due to permafrost melt and they had to put in a corduroy road (that section caused problem up until the 1990s). The Alaskan side was only paved in the 1960s, the Canadian side only finally paved in 1981.
Postwar, the only additional connection beside the Alcan is a road from Dawson that crosses the border at Little Gold and connects with the Alcan at Tetlin Junction. Drive a few miles west to Tok and you turn right to go to Fairbanks, left to Anchorage. And that's it.
Forget trying to figure out if they had enough troops to spare from other theaters to do it. You could put the entire Japanese army in Alaska and they couldn't do it. Canadian and US defenders wouldn't even have to fight; they could send up some observation aircraft and watch the idiots try to make their way east and south. It would be a disaster that would make Napoleon and Hitler's invasions of Russia look like feats of strategic genius. Send a few bombing raids up to make life difficult every few weeks, and the Allies would have months, more likely a year or more, to prepare a welcome for any survivors that stumbled out of the woods desperate for shelter and food. The biggest problem would be what to do with all the bodies.
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**Could the IJA have moved a large land force to Alaska?**
Sure. The Imperial Japanese Navy clearly had the transport capability. But they could not have done it in one lift (or two, or three). It would have taken months to build up forces...at the cost of fewer forces in China.
**Would that land force have been powerful** enough to seriously challenge the Canadian Army and Royal Canadian Air Force?
No. Not a chance.
There was no Alaska Highway then. IJA troops would have to march on foot through the trackless, cold, wet woods of northern British Columbia...with all their supplies and ammunition on their backs. Little artillery would come with them. The distances would make portable radio problematic for coordinating effective air support. When they emerged to fight (let's say at Prince Rupert, the best port for resupply), they would face Canadian troops with prepared defensive positions, tanks, plentiful artillery and air support, and secure supply lines.
Even if taken by surprise, the Canadians could reinforce and resupply by rail faster than the Japanese could by sea. It's likely that the Canadian and US navies could embargo Alaska completely (as they later did with IJA forces in China), cutting off the IJA Task Force from resupply. Within a few weeks, when their food and ammunition run out, the entire IJA force would be prisoners on trains heading east to build their own POW camps on the lonely prairie.
Let's try a different method: Say the IJA cut an artillery road while they marched, and laid signal wire. Now they had artillery and some air support...but utterly sacrificed surprise and slowed themselves to a crawl. The IJA Task Force would be pounded by B-17s with short flight times and full bomb loads day and night for weeks before they reach open ground...where they would again encounter heavily-dug-in Canadian defenses (negating that artillery they worked so hard to bring).
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I think there is some distance perception issues here...while in Vancouver I had an American tourist ask me how to day trip to Alaska. I was confused, so he showed me a map of the US that shows Canada as this thin little strip at the top end of the US with Alaska attached to it. In reality, the distance from Juneau to California is around the same as the distance from Hawaii to California...and if you tried to use a land route from Alaska, it's significantly further.
Alaska (and northern canada) is developed far more recently...in the 1940's, most oil infrastructure did not exist (only infrastructure that really existed was to support gold mining operations). The Japanese would be doing this exploration and drilling themselves.
Most of the Yukon, especially in WWII, was heavily isolated and lacked roads...and many of those roads are based on ice cycles and are only open a small segment of the year (Ice road information here <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_road> it's usable when frozen but when temperatures rise large trucks tend to break through. Ice Road Trucker tv show demonstrates this well). Northern BC and Alberta are dense boreal forest and nearly impassible to anyone but seasoned guides. There is no land route straight south along the coast and you must cross into the Rocky mountains before turning south. It's a pretty drive in the summer on today's highways at least...a pretty 44 hour @ 120km/hour drive.
Juneau actually has no road route to it and they would have to land elsewhere. The alaska highway <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway> that would connect to northern canada was a constantly changing entity that was complete around 1946ish, but was largely gravel and in a state of flux (avalanches are a constant here). This march would have made the Germans struggles in Russia look like a beach party (Berlin to Moscow is 70% of the distance Juneau to Vancouver is via land routes, without taking into account the multiple summit crossings required to get through the Rocky mountains) .
>
> Assuming that Japan's capabilities are the same as in our timeline (except for Alaskan resources that were available in 1941, so no oil), could they have moved a sufficient number of troops and equipment into Alaska, and invade North America through the Yukon?
>
>
>
No. It'd be difficult with today's infrastructure let alone 1940's. The Japanese would exhaust their resources long before getting to the US from that direction
Just an add-on...the Alaska Highway was an american funded project and would not have existed if America did not control Alaska. There would not have been any existing roadways for the Japanese to use here.
More added to this point:
>
> could they have moved a sufficient number of troops and equipment into Alaska, and invade North America through the Yukon?
>
>
>
Vancouver had a decent amount of industry, however it should be pointed out that losing Vancouver and most of it's western territories was hardly a blow to Canadian industry, let alone America. Japan would be facing the full extent of the American military industrial complex on it's home soil. To cripple America, Japan would have to fight it's way across the continent to the Eastern industrial heartland before really impacting America's (and Canada's) ability to react.
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Unless obtaining Alaska was valuable enough for them to focus more on their army than their navy pre-WWII, probably not. Even if they did, since their naval buildup already wasn't enough to beat the American's navy, they likely would have have been cripplingly blockaded even sooner than if they didn't have Alaska.
Prior to WWII, there were two conflicting doctrines within Japanese expansion plans: [Hokushin-ron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokushin-ron), or northern expansion, and [Nanshin-ron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanshin-ron), southern expansion. The army favored northern expansion into Russia and Mongolia, since armies are like cats in that they dislike oceans. The navy favored southern expansion, since boats generally don't perform well on land. The capability of the army's plan was tested during several border skirmishes against the Soviets near the river [Khalkhin Gol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol) in Manchuria, which resulted in defeats for the Japanese army. In case you were wondering: yes, [these battles included camels](http://www.armchairgeneral.com/rkkaww2/battles/khalkhin_gol/Khalkhin_cut1.pdf).
Because of the defeats against the more numerous but (presumably)inferior Soviet troops, faith in the army wavered and southern expansion and a focus on the navy became the dominate Japanese military policy leading up to WWII. If the Japanese army wasn't expected to be able to expand from their controlled area just a couple hundred miles from the mainland, I doubt they would have expected to be able to expand in an area several thousand miles across the American-filled ocean, and then further down a thousand miles of tree-filled coast to reach anything worth occupying.
Furthermore, even if they had been willing to start marching their army from Alaska, they'd need to feed and supply them. Even when focusing on naval expansion, [their ability to even supply their home islands](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/24085/by-mid-1945-was-japan-capable-of-maintaining-the-war-even-in-the-absence-of-fur) was crippled by the American navy.
[Answer]
# Remember the Butterfly Effect
It is difficult to image an alternate history where the Alaska Purchase did not take place and nothing else changes ...
* Would Russia have built an add-on project to the [Trans-Siberian Railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway) which connects their Bering Sea ports to the border?
* Japan would have been in control of Alaska for 37 years. Would *they* have built a railway? How would forces and investments be split between Manchuria and Alaska?
* Once upon a time, the US seriously worried about war with the UK. Remember, the Brits did burn Washington, not the Japanese. What if the US had allied themselves with the Japanese around the 1910 timeframe to "neutralize Canada as a royalist base?"
* Even without a railway, with a hostile Japan on a wilderness land border, Canadian forces would look different.
Would places like Juneau be *established* bases to rival Rabaul in the original timeline?
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Other than logistical impossibilities and huge disparities in available manpower, your campaign also seems to have little realistic military value to the Japanese.
Assuming minimal butterflying, Japan in 1941 has much of its troops spread out thin over many Asian countries and territories in the Pacific ocean. The Chinese aren't giving up and the Sino-Japanese war basically will slowly turn into a WW1-ish stalemate. The Australians and the US Pacific fleet are still in play. The main plan of the Japanese, convincing the US that a war would be excessively costly, fails and the Americans are out for blood. With bases in Alaska and given 100% priority, Japanese forces would probably be able to control the sea off the American West coast and establish local naval superiority, sure, but why? Even if they manage to somehow eliminate a good chunk of 1941 US airpower and [naval power](https://ww2-weapons.com/us-navy-in-late-1941/), they'd still have to contend with a growing industrial power that will pump out massive numbers of war materiel in a few years. And US naval command will likely transfer the US Atlantic fleet to the Pacific if their homeland was perceived to be in danger, further compromising the Japanese position.
It's also obviously impossible for Japan to conquer the West coast with land forces. The Americans have the advantage of fighting on their own soil & could easily muster an army to repel any hopeful Japanese invasion land force - if they even let them build up forces. They cannot maintain their position forever and their other fronts (territories actually worth fighting over) will be considerably weakened for no purpose.
Japan could never 'defeat' the US in the conventional sense (this is obvious if you simply look at the figures - manpower, industry etc.). The Japanese knew very well they couldn't win a protracted war with the US and trying to control the West coast runs completely contrary to the only way of winning the war - a quick and violent sucker punch on American forces far away from the mainland aimed at demoralising the US and discouraging them from taking up arms in the first place.
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The Aargh are a humanoid alien race a couple solar systems away. Their home planet is quite earth-like (oxygen atmosphere, a lot of water, traditional organic chemistry even if a few proteins are different to earth), and in the habitable zone of their solar system. They have colonized several planets and moons in their own system, and have started to branch out to uninhabited solar systems.
They haven't found another sentient species yet, however, nor discovered traces of one. This, they want to change. They deliberately send out scientific discovery missions to solar systems with at least one planet in the habitable zone. Since they are very careful and do not want to provoke a hostile first contact (especially when they don't know the technological level of their potential adversary) they stop several times along the way to check if they can't find a hint of sentient life on the other planet.
One of those planets is earth, in the year of 2020 (with current technology levels).
**Question: How far away do the Aargh have to be to get unmistakable proof of sentient / intelligent life on earth?**
Can they distinguish that from their home planet some 10 lightyears away by running a spectral analysis on our atmosphere and discover that there are X gases that should not be that prevalent in a non-technological but habitable planet? If so - which gases or changes in gas concentration?
Or do they need to be close enough to receive the radio / electromagnetic emissions that our technology radiates into space? If so, how far away is that if they want to make sure that it is deliberate and not some sort of strange natural radiation?
Or can they detect the light from earth's night side from further away?
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Not really an answer but a fun fact: There is a thin layer of high-power transmissions in the [longwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave) and various other AM and FM bands, around 100 LY away and a few dozen LY 'thick'.
In the early twentieth century most long range communication was done through massive transmittters and equally massive antennas. Directional broadcasting was still high-tech so many of these transmitters just blasted full power in all directions.
For example between 1934 and 1939 one american AM radio station broadcast at a stunning [500 kilowatt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLW#500,000_watt_%22superpower%22_operation) and some [miltary transmitters](https://www.rfcafe.com/references/radio-news/powerful-radio-transmitter-radio-television-news-february-1954.htm) could pump out a solid megawatt of radio power.
But as soon as high-capacity undersea cables and satellite links became available the popularity of these transmitters dropped off a cliff and from somewhere in the mid-1960s earth is a lot 'quieter'.
So if your aliens stop to check in this shell they'll probably receive 1930's radio loud and clear\* but only a few years later on the same source... goes quiet.
*Omnious John Williams score swells.*
\* this is assuming that a civilisation who have fairly casual FTL also have a *very* senistive radio receiver.
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There's a few ways this can be done, but all of them require the aliens to have very high-precision high-accuracy equipment:
* **Light**: You were on the right track with E&M emissions. We've been radiating 'noticeable' amounts of it for less than a hundred years. That being said, with our own equipment if we noticed such light on a foreign body we would most likely assume it to be an error with the equipment that we just have to deal with (or just the effect of our sun's solar radiation).
* **Our probes**: Voyager 1 and 2 may in some point in the future exit our solar system completely. If this alien race somehow spots these tiny machines and don't mistake them for comets, they may have confirmation that something is going on in our solar system. This would be a very conclusive piece of evidence, but definitely the hardest to identify.
* **Monitoring gas levels**: Again, you were on the right track with this. We can estimate the gas content of planets not only in our solar system but in others as well. Perhaps they can do the same. Just knowing the gas content isn't enough though. Thanks to human-caused climate change, one can monitor gas levels in our atmosphere over time. If they notice how rapidly CO2 levels are increasing versus other gases, they may deduce that some life-form is doing some heavy pollution on our planet. They would have to do this over 50 years or so at least for them to deduce anything concrete though. That is assuming that polluting one's planet is a trademark of intelligent species in every planet.
Although the human race has come very far very quickly, our solar system as a whole isn't a 'busy' place because of us. We have no megastructures that modify entire planets significantly, we aren't testing massive weapons in gas giants - arguably, we aren't doing anything massive outside of our tiny planet. So, if all three of the points I listed are confirmed, that still might not be enough for your aliens to deduce that there's any intelligent life on Earth - at best, they may become a little suspicious.
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A civilization doing exoplanet analysis using a level of technology similar to our own would be able to detect CFC's in our atmosphere. CFC's do not occur naturally, so their presence would be a strong confirmation of industrial activity.
We have detected exoplanets up to 2500 light years away, so that would be the current practical distance limit.
[Detecting industrial pollution in the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3025)
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We believe that in the next 50 years or so, we'll be able to resolve continents on extrasolar planets through a variety of new telescope technology (the bulk of which is just putting those telescopes into space, [and stitching together imagery from multiple ones that sit at great distances to each other](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis)).
If this were used on us, they would definitely see artificial lighting at night, and in patterns that suggest widespread technology. It would not be a slam dunk, mind you, but I'd be convinced... those forest fires are in the same place, night after night, for months on end? They don't cause discoloration during daytime? Hard to imagine what else it might be.
So they don't have to leave their solar system necessarily.
If they are looking directly at our planet, they might detect various broadcast radio signals. There are also at least a few dozen nuclear detonations they could spot (if they're looking for them), but these last at most a second or two before the signal's gone, and would have to be on the nearside of our planet.
If they fail to do all these things, then they have to enter our solar system itself, probably to within the orbit of Jupiter, and will be able to both visibly detect surface indications or find the remaining radio transmissions that we still broadcast.
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They can easily see our cities from the orbit of Mars. They *might* be able todetect our radio noise from the orbit of Pluto. Basically, once their scout ship is in our Solar System they *will* notice something's strange with Earth. From 10 ly away, not so much and not so easily.
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I'm going to have to challenge this question a bit, or at least most of the other answers.
When people ask these kinds of things, we are automatically assuming the alien technology and cultures are paralleling our own, in that they see in what we call the visible spectrum, they use what we call radio frequencies, that they form cities, they live above ground and not in the water or in tunnels, breathe oxygen, aren't deathly allergic to nitrogen, are also deathly "allergic" to high levels of radiation, and so much more.
Granted, there will probably be a high level of this parallelism, but it's not necessarily 100% true.
Even if they are looking for some of these things, will they be able to understand them? All of the radio and TV broadcasts are encoded in a way that we understand (or at least our engineers). That doesn't mean an alien race will be able to figure out that these are radio and TV broadcasts, and that they have some meaning to it. If they know to look for this type of radiation, all they'll likely see if a bunch of noise. They won't even be able to likely pinpoint a source more closely than a continent, until they get relatively close. They might be able to determine the general location, since the signal appears and disappears according to the rotation of the earth, but that's about it. What that point is, I don't know, since I'm not a radio frequency buff.
Also, our definitions of sentient life might be significantly different. They might be a hive mind and decide that anything different isn't sentient. They might decide that anything living on the land surface can't be sentient, by their definition. Maybe a dolphin is sentient and anything that enslaves them and makes them jump through hoops for entertainment can't be sentient. Or anything that breathes mere oxygen can't sentient due to not having the right metabolism to have the brainpower to be sentient. There's probably thousands of differing reasons why an alien species wouldn't consider us sentient. I mean, what sentient being would destroy their own environment with trash and chemicals when they can't even vacate the world before it destroys them back?
Then there's technology itself. Maybe they don't use it as we do. Maybe because we use technology, instead of pure brainpower to reshape reality around ourselves, we aren't sentient. Maybe they've harnessed protons for their power and communication, and our electron emissions are not even noticed? Maybe they communicate only in light/color or pheromones, instead of aurally.
As humans that are fairly open about how we communicate and use technology, we like to think that every other species would work like this. Due to them being aliens, as in "not from this world", they are by definition not going to be us and highly likely they won't think like us, regardless what Star Trek, Star Wars, or even FarScape show us. They are far more likely to be something like Predator or Aliens, even if they aren't hostile. We don't/can't communicate with them, only assume some basic thought patterns from their behaviors and decor. They may be so alien that what they consider to be a handshake or the most polite greeting is considered to be horrifying and disgusting to us.
What I'm trying to say is that we can't rely on technological nuances for a species to recognize us as sentient. They may realize technology of our's exists and therefore realize we exist because of it, but not that we are sentient because we have technology.
An alien culture might only recognize individuals who are kind and helping others to be sentient, while those who are greedy and self-serving or violent to not be sentient. Maybe they consider your pet to be sentient, since it's loving and kind. (Ok, so cats are probably not going to count here. :-) )
Again, what I'm trying to say here is that we might get judged to be sentient based on how we act, instead of what we know. Is a gorilla sentient because it uses a stick to break open a coconut to get to the milk and flesh inside, or is it sentient because it learned sign language, or is it sentient because it prevented a predator from killing a defenseless baby? What are the requirements for humans to believe another species is sentient? How homo-centric is that?
I realize I'm probably going way beyond that the OP is asking, since they are asking more as a story or plot point, but it might be interesting to explore some of the questions I've asked, rather than rehashing the same old plots of "We've detected life on this planet 1 parsec that way, and it has a colony, so they must be humanoid sentient creatures like us." Maybe what I've asked is exactly what the OP wants or what the OP already has questions about. Maybe I'm just showing how OCD I am. If the latter is true, sorry about that. Truly.
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**Something around 50 light years away**
We spread bobble around us of radiowaves transmissions. In theory we've stared using radios in late XIX century, I don't think that those were strong enough to be heard from space, another thing when we stared using it to connect to vessels on orbit.
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If they are monitoring X and Gamma radiation they will probably (depending on the orientation of the Earth at the relevant times) notice some pulses from [atmospheric nuclear explosions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing#Nuclear_testing_by_country). Hopefully they will also notice that these stopped after about 1990.
You might also want to read "[Contact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel))" by Carl Sagan, which explores this question in some detail. He identifies the first sufficiently powerful TV broadcast to be the [1936 Olympics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television_in_Germany) in Nazi Germany. Audio and Morse transmissions were being made back in the 1910s, but whether your aliens could pick those up will depend on the power used, the sensitivity of the alien radio detectors, and the details of noise and propagation in the interstellar medium; its quite possible that the Nazi Olympic broadcast was the first one sufficiently powerful to be detectable over interstellar distances.
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Can arrows with glass heads be effective and optimally implemented in an early medieval war setting?
I'd imagine it could be cheaper and [faster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfMN3BVISmQ) to produce than metal heads, since the shape of the head doesn't matter, and the entire point of a glass head is the fact that it explodes in a cloud of glass upon impact with armor and does well on flesh too.
Therefore it doesn't really matter if it's actual glass, any crystal would work. all it takes is a piece of glass/crystal and a stone
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2zzLj.jpg)
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In principle, glass arrowheads would be highly effective, at least against unarmoured opponents. According to [this study](https://www.forensicmed.co.uk/wounds/sharp-force-trauma/glass-wounds/), glass shards need to travel in excess of ~15 m/s to deeply penetrate flesh, and the [greenman longbows](http://www.greenmanlongbows.co.uk/SPEED%20TESTING%20Measuring%20the%20arrow%20speed%20of%20bows%20and%20longbows%20using%20a%20chronometer.htm) site rates longbows as propelling arrows with a velocity of around 170 feet per second, or around 52 m/s. Glass arrowheads can - with some practice - be formed in the same manner as flint (or other stone) arrowheads, by [knapping](http://sensiblesurvival.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/making-glass-arrowheads-part-1.html).
The question then is not whether glass arrowheads are effective, but whether glass is economically viable as a material. Glass was manufactured and used in ancient times, as well as in the medieval period, but not typically for arrowheads. There are two possible reasons for this: the skill of knapping stone (or glass) arrowheads was not widely known, or glass was too expensive to be used in such a disposable fashion (at least relative to iron). Information presented [here](https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/collections/show/95) suggests that glass was very expensive to produce.
So in the questioner's world, use of glass (or a crystalline rock that can be similarly knapped) for arrowheads would depend on it being common enough a material that it would be used in preference to e.g. flint or iron.
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Glass arrow heads are effective and deadly if made well. These are the issues that I would consider for a medieval war scenario...
* It takes much more skill and time to create good knapped arrow heads than it does to make metal ones.
* Metal is more durable than glass so that arrows are more likely to be usable again after they are retrieved
* Metal arrowheads are much more effective at punching through armor. Glass arrow heads would do very poorly and the damage from broken glass would be negligible.
I think that lack of access to metal would be the only plausible reason for armies to use glass heads.
I make wooden self bows for a living and have made arrow heads from glass and obsidian. I'm not an expert on knapping but I know a fair bit from experience and research.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oXWxj.jpg)
<http://raregoldnuggets.com/?p=5497>
Sure you could have glass arrowheads. Obsidian is volcanic glass and makes fine arrowheads. The Amerinds did this for millennia.
Would someone make arrowheads out of glass if they knew about metal? Absolutely they would if metal were scarce and valuable and they had plenty of glass and were good at making arrowheads. Save the metal for your kitchen knives and armor and shoot the cheap glass on your arrows that you may or may not get back. It makes sense!
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One important aspect is the huge durability problem that such weapons would pose, besides being less economically viable than metal arrowheads.
You have to take into consideration that medieval campaigns would often last months, if not years, most of which was spent traveling.
In that respect, the last thing you'd want is brittle arrowheads that will break at the slightest shock and probably even damage each other as the marching bowmen knock the arrows around in their quills while marching.
I can't even start to imagine the logistical nightmare it would be.
For a one-off mission however, like an assassination where you'll get the chance to shoot only one arrow at your target anyway, such an arrow might be interesting against unprotected, high-value target. You could even imagine a hollow glass arrowhead designed like a vial containing a poison, that breaks up and releases the poison upon penetration.
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Is a glass arrowhead possible? [Yes](https://youtu.be/k1xvCH6Lu6c). Using modern glass, an arrow has nearly the same penetration as a modern steel broadhead arrow, when measured using gel powder.
However, in our world, this is not very practical. [Forest glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_glass#Medieval_Europe) was the main type of glass made in Europe in the medieval ages, it was low quality, prone to chipping and cracking. Transporting, storing and marching with glass arrowheads would damage them, making them less useful than metal ones.
The other problem is making them. Glass making was expensive. Cheaper to use bog iron, melt down old metal items, or dig iron out of the ground than go through the trouble to make glass.
If people were low on metals, they would turn to natural glass like obsidian and flint. They're cheaper, easier to make, and not as fragile as the man-made glass of the time.
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My heroine (accidentally) travels through time and finds herself in a medieval setting (a forest in e.g. 1100). The only things that time traveled with her, are her clothes. At first she gets lost in these woods but then she encounters a medieval merchant. They both speak the same language/understand each other and she can explain that she's doesn't know where she is and that she's lost. The merchant decides to help her and so their journey starts.
The heroine wears a simple blue cotton dress with a pattern of (white) daisies on it. Would a medieval merchant (who has no knowledge on how clothes are made) notice that this machine made dress with a detailed pattern is made by a technology that doesn't exist in that time period?
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**He Would Know, but Not Understand**
Your heroine would instantly be assumed to be some type of foreigner, just from her speech. Even if they both spoke Russian or French or what have you, the linguistic drift of 900 years would, at best, give her weird word-usage and a crazy accent.
Her dress wouldn't be something the merchant would look at and go "oh that's for-sure made by machines" because there simply wasn't anything that COULD "artificially" make that dress in 1100. However you can get some pretty bright blues and whites using medieval/ancient dyes. (despite what HBO would have you believe pre-industrial life was very-much-not all drab colors) Color FIXING was something of a problem, so your merchant would either assume that A: The dress was new (as repeated washing would fade most colors) or B: her far-away land had a blue dye which could be fixed to the fabric. A is probably more likely, and on top of that he would assume based on the color that she/her family was either involved in the dye-making process or wealthy enough to afford a "first dip" cloth. (ancient/medieval dyers would make a vat of clothing dye, and dip bolts of fabric in it. As this dye becomes less intense after each bolt, the "first dip" bolts were more expensive and had the most vibrant color.)
The pattern of the cloth would be wild as far as the guy's concerned. I don't know off-hand of a culture that could make patterns like it. Weave individual colored threads into patterned cloth? Yes. Dye bolts with simple stripes/geometric patters? Yes. Dye specific identical repeating complex patters onto a single pre-made bolt? No. You might find "painted" cloth, but that's not really the same thing and your merchant is going to know the difference right-off. Doubly so if he's from an area where cotton is common. What he'd make of THAT is anyone's guess, apart from assuming your heroine was both from crazily far away and rich. Maybe supernatural. Maybe both.
As to the fabric itself... depends. In some places cotton would be rare and expensive, other places it would be the common cloth of the peasantry. Either way though the detail work (regularity of stitching, the cloth itself) would likely be better than anything this merchant has ever seen. Also (though your question specifies he doesn't) he'll almost certainly know at least something about making fabric. Even if he doesn't sell cloth himself, weaving cloth is something more-or-less every woman on the planet whose society HAD cloth did, unless she was ridiculously high up the social ladder. This guy's wife probably makes/knows how to make fabric. Or his sister, or mother, or whoever brought him up as a child. ("she weaved cloth" was a common epithet on Roman womens' tombstones from peasant-equivalent to Senator's wife, for instance, and it was a high honor because fabric was important and REALLY time-consuming to make.) So through cultural osmosis he'd have a good idea that our heroine's dress is something far out of the common way, even if cotton was the standard fabric of his region. (by cultural osmosis I mean he'll know something about cloth the way that, say, an American millennial knows something about how microsoft word works. Even if they're a musician who never used Word in their life, they'd be able to write a document and tell you it's a program that shows the keystrokes you make and can change colors and font type etc. because its such a common thing in their world.)
The cut of the dress would be a puzzlement to your merchant. Your heroine would be wearing one layer, probably exposing arms/lower legs/collarbone and potentially much more. She'd also be alone. I cannot think of a single culture where that combination wouldn't be seen as a Very Bad Thing. Strangely-dressed-woman wandering alone is bad enough, but most places would also think she was, charitably, dressed like a hooker. That is.... unlikely to end well. Or maybe fleeing an attack if she's been wandering around for a while. But that's story-driven so I won't comment further!
All this together would be a shock to any merchant on the face of the planet in 1100. Would he notice it was made with abilities beyond the known capabilities of his immediate area? Almost certainly. If he's some petty born-and-lives-in-the-boondocks type of merchant he might think that Royals could get something similar. (For example, some merchant from middle-of-nowhere Armenia might assume they could make a dress like this in Constantinople.) A merchant from a major city might think that some OTHER major civilization might be able to do it. (Nothing like this can be made in the Byzantine Empire, but I heard that far-away-in-the-east they have amazing silks so perhaps they can also do crazy things with cotton.) But given her appearance (alone, randomly, with a weird barely-comprehensible accent)the merchant might think she's some kind of supernatural being.
**TL/DR:** He would know the dress was wildly out of the common way, would not assume it was machine-made, and believe it was outrageously expensive. However he might not automatically assume it was supernatural/beyond the capabilities of his civilization/anyone on the planet at the time.
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### He will say: "Oh you're obviously from far away we don't have clothing that nice"
There will be a lot of variation in the response depending on exact time period and location, which hasnt been given exactly. Appearing in 1200ad in Rome, China, Australia, America, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, etc will all have wildly different outcomes. Even the precise year could radically change things.
However in general, the concept of "someone from far away" was known throughout much of human history, and your heroine will be classed as such - especially as she talks funny to their ears. As a general concept; "Far away some things are different" was also common knowledge at the time even for the lowest educated.
Textile printing and weaving patterns date back several centuries, so it really depends on exactly when and where. Techniques for stamping or stenciling paint onto fabric were done in medieval times, and hand-painted dresses did exist for royalty going back to antiquity. I don't think someone in medieval times will class the dress as proof of time travel simply because that's so unlikely - "some craftsman put a lot of effort into this using a technique I don't understand" is a much more likely explanation.
They will think its weird she's out in the the forest in her sunday best.
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Your first version of the question asked about the response shell get. I'm including these as a postscript because depending on exact time and place you could get some crazily different responses. The kind of responses would include:
* "Cover up you immoral such-and-such". Basically Slut-shaming. If the dress shows some cleavage it could be offensive to some eyes. Length could also be an issue. Depends on exact location and time for how modestly woman were expected to dress.
* Alternatively, a revealing (by the days standards) dress may gather unwanted advances or even forceful advances, which she will then be victim-blamed for. This is an awkward topic to write to a modern audience so you may want to brush over it.
* Some cultures in this time period weren't so modest:
+ If she went back to 1200ad central Australia she'd be so overdressed she'd be laughed at.
+ Mid African and Oceania in this time period would also think shes overdressed or about right.
+ After googling native American female clothing pre white settlers, I reckon she'd do fine in America too. Theres lots of visible shins and necks and forearms.
* She'd be interrogated on how her outfit was made. She wont know ("Some sweatshop in bangladesh I think?" - She can't say that!) Her apparent lack of pride in incredible outfit will be jaw dropping.
* If she appeared lower class to their judgement (eg certain skin colours had certain classifications in some societies), she'd be asked where she stole her outfit from.
* A lone woman wearing the dress of royalty? In some areas there's a risk she'd be kidnapped, raped, and claimed as a bride.
* She could be accused of being a spy from some distant enemy they know of but have never personally met. Without TV or print those on the home front know little of the details of the conflict. "We're at war with the... spanish... and I don't know what they look like, but you look different and were sneaking around spying... you must be spanish!"
* She has a very real chance of having the clothing stolen off her due to its value.
+ See [Coat of many colours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_many_colors) for a biblical story in which multi-coloured fabric was considered so valuable that its gifting to one child basically broke up a family. Those values are still applicable in some medieval societies.
+ In which case the reaction to a woman in the woods who has had her dress stolen and is sneaking around in only a modern bra and undies will be much more interesting, those innovations are more notable including elastics, plastic tensioners on straps, underwire, gusseting, metal clasps, padding, and depending on bra choice maybe even velcro, lace, and zips. People will want to study her undergarments, (which she probably won't understand until its too late as her default response will be "oh these aren't even my best, they were just from Kmart".)
+ Undies in some medieval societies is classified as "pants" as it goes between the legs, and thus its "men's clothing". Women wore petticoats. So theoretically it could go full Joan of arc but that's unlikely to actually happen unless she angers powerful people.
+ but "What happens to a woman wearing only modern underwear in medieval society" is another question so I'm assuming her dress is the only thing visible.
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## The 1100's are one of the easiest Historical periods not to stand out
The cuts of many modern dresses, and those of 1100 are actually quite similar. You are far enough back that you don't have all the big embellishments you see in the late medieval period, but not so far back that a well fitted dress would seem abnormal. 1100 also saw similar to modern levels of modesty where woman could expose a certain amount of skin without it being seen as offensive.
The floral patterns themselves, would not be at all out of place. By 1100, pattern embroidery and painting were already becoming a popular fashion choices in much of Europe; so, to see it done in a new way might be "neat" but not surprising to the merchant.
The Thread count would probably be the most impressive thing here. Medieval cloth was very rarely as finely woven as modern clothing, and any merchant would know that such a high thread count was a sign of a material that took a long time to make.
**1100 VS Today**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vOzSY.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EBdTm.png)
## Ultimately, it all comes down to what kind of blue we are talking about
Dark blue came from one of the cheapest dyes available and was common among peasants whereas bright blue was one of the most expensive dyes and would have only been worn by the very wealthy.
**For a dark blue dress:** There is an old saying that time can be traded for quality. By this I mean that a peasant who finds the time to make herself a high quality dress certainly could. Seeing the high quality of waving and patterning, but use of a cheap dye, the merchant would probably assume she was a talented seamstress or perhaps a childless housewife with too much time on her hands. This scenario would also fit a modern cut dress much better, since peasant dresses were typically only about knee length and lacked ornate trims.
**For a bright blue dress:** There would be no doubt that this woman was nobility (probably lower nobility though since the dress still lacks certain high-status features). In the medieval period, rich people would have had many nice things that a poorer merchant would rarely actually see up close. So unless he was specifically a luxury goods merchant, it would probably be his first time seeing "fine clothing" up close. Having maybe seem noble women in similar styles from far away, his mind would just fill in the gaps and determine that this is just what nobility clothing looks like when you actually get up close enough to see it well.
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**The merchant will protect her and profit from it.**
They speak the same language. This is not trivial. Otherwise what are his motives? I picture the merchant as a Jew and your protagonist is too. On sight he has no idea what she is but she can see he is Jewish and so addresses him in Yiddish. That is why he is immediately motivated to help her. You need to look out for your own.
He will consider the dress unbelievably fancy but he is good at keeping cards close to the vest. When she speaks Yiddish he will know she is not a lost noble which was his first guess. He will address her as a daughter or niece and tell her "that is an amazing cloth for the dirty road. Let me give you some clothes that can get dirty.". Which he does, and folds up the dress and puts it away. Later he asks permission and then sells the dress to a rich family for a lot of money which he shares with your protagonist.
I could imagine this might come back to haunt him when a social rival sees the noble girl in the daisy dress and has her father's people track down the merchant to get another one. Maybe he sees this coming and immediately sets about commissioning similar dresses based on a scrap he took from an inside hem of the daisy dress. It would be fun to have the men on horseback catch them and have the merchant unexpectedly produce several additional dresses for sale.
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The Jewish angle would be interesting for a time travel scenario and if it has been done I have not read or seen it. The gentile populace at large might not look too closely at your protagonist. The Jewish subculture she falls in with will look very closely at her, but before she is anything else she is a Jew, and the scrutiny will come from that context.
A fiction like this would be a wonderful exploration of the world of the medieval Jews; not just anyone could write such a thing. You would need to know a lot or have a lot of resources to make it good.
[Answer]
In a comment, you mention:
>
> The fact that it is blue and has white daisies is more important for my story. So I don't want it to attract more attention than: "Oh you're obviously from far away we don't have clothing that nice" (Thank you Ash for the quote). But I also don't want the heroin to be (coincidentally) in a medieval play just before the time travel (explaining an outfit that doesn't attract attention).
>
>
>
Since you don't want to attract a lot of attention, you'll want the dress to be *very* conservative by modern standards. High neckline, long skirts, definitely *not* open in back and slit practically to the hips.
Just being "blue" is possibly going to attract some attention; although [woad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria) [dye](https://localcolordyes.com/dyeing/) might not have been unknown, other dies, if known at all, would be known to be very expensive. There's a reason it's called "*royal* blue". (Worse, some colors might even be *illegal* for non-royalty. If your heroine runs into a merchant first, however, she probably has a decent chance that the merchant won't be inclined to hand her over to the local lord, and may give her more appropriate clothing.)
I totally understand why you "don't want the heroin to be (coincidentally) in a medieval play"; you'd need to do some hand-waving to make that plausible.
However, if you're willing to tip the scales in your heroine's favor in a way that's less implausible, you might have her wear a [cyanotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype)-[printed](https://www.google.com/search?q=cyanotype+dress&tbm=isch) dress. Cyanotype can be used on fabric (and cotton, specifically) to produce white patterns on a rich azure fabric, which can satisfy your requirement that the dress is blue with white daisies, and unlike modern, full-color prints which would be quite amazing to medieval people, cyanotype is much more approachable to your target time period. (The necessary alchemy may not be known, but the *physical* process is well within reach of the peasants of the day and not unlike wax printing, which your merchant may know about.) Moreover, if your heroine happens to have made the dress herself, she might even know enough to reproduce the process, which would probably be valuable to the merchant. (She'd have to have some pretty solid knowledge of chemistry for this, though.)
Being foreign is probably sufficient for your audience to accept the *style* of the dress. If your heroine knows about cyanotype, she can probably explain away the printing as being "special dyes from my homeland". Her garb, just from the quality and the blue dye, is clearly expensive, but perhaps not (literal) "king's ransom" expensive. Another plus is that cyanotype may not be as stable as more traditional modern dyes, which would make such a garment less "magical".
As for reaction, the merchant will probably assume she is someone important and/or wealthy, and her general state of health (and lack of calluses) will tend to support this, as will any evidence of education, especially if she happens to be able to *read* any of the period scripts (but this is unlikely unless she knows Latin). On the other hand, her knowledge of basic mathematics, and Arabic numbers (which started spreading through Europe right around the time you specify), may be valuable to a merchant.
Of course, as others have noted, you're going to have a whole other problem when someone sees what she's wearing *under* the dress.
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Maybe you should look up the story "Hypocaust & Bathysphere" by Rebecca Ore for ideas about how medieval people might react to time travelers and their clothing.
[http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40457[1]](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40457%5B1%5D)
[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/228230/science-fiction-short-story-where-medieval-villagers-were-used-to-time-travelers[2]](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/228230/science-fiction-short-story-where-medieval-villagers-were-used-to-time-travelers%5B2%5D)
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I would like to have electric light bulbs. One should be at least as good as a candle.
What we have:
* The technology level is generally early 1300s
* But we can create copper wire
* We have a sufficiently large AC or DC power source.
* We can also tweak biology a little bit
* Abnormally good mineral deposits of whatever we want.
What we *don't* have:
* The ability to create vacuum bulbs
* Very fancy glasswork of some other form
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can create electric light (or at least long-lasting, self contained non-open-flame light)?
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The key here is *"•Abnormally good mineral deposits of whatever we want."*
What you want is a large deposit of [Silicon Carbide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide) (e.g. [moissanite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite)) in reasonably large/pure crystals. If decent crystals are not available, find a supply of [Argon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon), and use the [Lely method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lely_method) to grow them - while this requires high heat, you should be able to use your copper wire to make an induction furnace, and to find a deposit of Graphite from which to craft your crucible.
You take a crystal of Silicon Carbide, about 1mm3, and attach it between two wires. Apply electricity.
Congratulations, you have just created a primitive [Light-emitting diode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Discoveries_and_early_devices)!
By doping the Silicon Carbide with Nitrogen, Boron, and Aluminium, you can adjust the colour of the LED, for a soft white glow. Unfortunately, pure Aluminium will require you to develop further processing methods
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Developing a durable incandescent filament takes decades of patient and expensive effort. But you can get an [arc light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp) working on almost the first try.
Since you lack the technology to distill separate gases from the atmosphere, your arc must burn in air. This limits you to the carbon arc lamp. The good news is that these can easily be produced in any historical age where electricity is available.
From the Wiki article: *In a carbon arc lamp, the electrodes are carbon rods in free air. To ignite the lamp, the rods are touched together, thus allowing a relatively low voltage to strike the arc. The rods are then slowly drawn apart, and electric current heats and maintains an arc across the gap. The tips of the carbon rods are heated and the carbon vaporizes. The carbon vapor in the arc is highly luminous, which is what produces the bright light. The rods are slowly burnt away in use, and the distance between them needs to be regularly adjusted in order to maintain the arc.*
Arc lamps produced in our world tended to be large and mainly suitable for lighting public spaces. Some research and development would be required to make efficient lamps sized for illuminating a private room.
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1. Make a glass "tube" of decent size.
2. Make a glass "disk" with 2 holes in it.
3. Make 2 copper wires probably 1 to 2 inches long.
4. Tie a bamboo fiber between the ends of the copper wires and seal it with a tiny drop of glass.
5. Thread the wires through the holes (one each, but not all the way) and seal the disk to one end of the tube.
6. Make a "cloth" piston with diameter "a little bit" bigger then the inner diameter of the tube. (Probably wet a piece of cloth and wring it as tight as possible and let it dry as is)
7. Push the piston all the way in and seal the holes with fire.
8. Pull the piston out (not all the way) and seal the neck before the piston end.
Voila! You have a "vacuum" (surprisingly) light bulb.
But of course, it's going to take some skills to seal the neck while the piston is at the mouth (not yours XP) and NOT breaking the glass or burn the cloth or something.
Hope this fits your standard!
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Put two filaments in the glass bulb. Wired separately. One filament is magnesium. The other filament is tungsten and will provide the light. First, apply a huge voltage to the magnesium filament causing it to burn and consume all of the oxygen in the bulb. Second, apply just enough voltage to the tungsten so it glows. DONE.
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Find a deposit of fine clay made of tourmaline (I can't seem to find its mineral name quickly). Chemically deposit a thin layer of silver (thin enough to see light through) on two sheets of flat glass. Put a very thin layer of the tourmaline clay between the two silver layers, then apply a voltage to the metal layers. At around 100+ volts, the tourmaline will begin to emit light that will be visible from both sides of the glass sandwich.
It may take a few tries to get a working electroluminescent panel this way, but eventually you'll have a dim, blue-green light that draws very little power and can operate literally for decades continuously. You will need an alchemist who can silver a glass mirror, however.
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Why do you say no vacuum? There's a very simple vacuum pump that can be made with 1300s tech:
Make your bulb, attach a glass pipe that is more than 1m in length. Fill the whole thing with mercury. Let the mercury drain down the pipe. This will leave a vacuum in the tube. Melt the tube together. Presto, vacuum tube.
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**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/108952/edit).
Closed 5 years ago.
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Phoenixes are sentient - willing allies, rather than beasts to be used. The size of a mature phoenix is comparable to a [teratorn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratornis). They can do the usual resurrection thing, but a phoenix fresh out of the egg would be very small and vulnerable: as vulnerable as a campfire - you can stomp it out, you can pour a bucket of water over it, etc., killing the phoenix permanently. Putting out the fire of a full-grown phoenix by magic is not within the power scope of humans. Growing from baby phoenix to full size takes some time - days, if sufficient fuel is provided, longer if fuel is limited.
Technology available to men is cold weapons (swords, longbows) + limited magic. By limited, I mean a building can be enchanted to be fireproof, but that would be expensive, and the enchantment would need to be maintained - like weatherproofing a house in RL.
One side has about 20 phoenixes, the other side has none. [Google says](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xqiaq/average_size_of_medieval_armies/) the size of an army would be 7000-15000 soldiers. Letting a phoenix actually die (clarification: I mean, die permanently) is out of the question for the side using them - they are sort of holy. However, that's the side that is going to win the war, and I don't want the presence of the phoenixes to be underwhelming. If possible, I want them to be the gamebreaker that allows victory.
**So where can the phoenixes be useful?**
I had some thoughts of my own:
* Reconnaissance. Anything the phoenixes can see from the air, they can report back.
* Psychological warfare. Good luck keeping your horses and your peasants from bolting, when a formation of 20 phoenixes (350 square meters of flame) is flying at you. (Estimate taken from teratorn's estimated wing area.)
* Scorched earth. Wheat fields should burn rather well. And phoenixes can burn a lot of them, quite far from the marching army.
All of this, however, feels a little underwhelming. What am I missing? What else can the phoenixes do? **How can they be a game-breaker?**
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# Logistics - cut off the enemies supply lines
Your front fighters might very well be able to hold off a phoenix or two and you don't want to send it all of them at once - if the enemy has a secret weapon that you know nothing about your army would completely lose their will to fight if their holy symbols are killed all at once - but the enemy supply lines might not be that secure.
You already mentioned that fields can be burned, but you could also use them to attack carts that are supposed to bring food, medicine, weapons, ... Use your phoenixes as a way to lay waste to the supply lines from afar, or to simply keep the guards in check while your normal fighters try to attack them.
# Suppress easily reachable locations with a constant rain of fire
You can also use them to suppress the enemy. Sure, your house might be fireproof. But if there is a near-constant rain of fire puring down from the sky every couple hours because the enemy has sent one or two of them, it will be hard to leave your house without getting grilled.
# Boost the morale further than you imagined
Other than that you could use them to boost your troops morale by simply letting them create fire in the air while the tropps are marching. Knowing that there are a couple large, (somewhat) friendly and *holy* birds above you that can rain down fire on the enemy will give your soldiers a stronger will to fight - while your enemies see not only a wall of spears/swords/shields coming towards them, but also an agile aerial squad that can grill you the moment you don't look at them because those spears/swords distract you.
That these beasts can resurrect makes it even more of a psychological factor. Allow your phoenixes only to fly where they would fall down into friendly, easily defendable terrain with your troops already present. The enemy would not only have to be lucky to kill the bird, they would also have to knowingly march into a death trap to *really* kill it - allowing you to kill them more easily and erode their morale, as each "kill" means only a loss of energy on the enemies side and no lose on your side. In fact the soldiers defending the resurrecting phoenix would probably feel honored to help their holy symbol, which raises the troops morale *again*.
# Lower the enemies morale
You know what awaits prisoners of war on your side? The grill.
Publicly execute enemies with your holy phoenixes.
This might not be the moral thing to do, but it will certainly help morale. The enemy won't like this, but a public offering to the gods on your side will probably be well-received.
# Conclusion
Apart from sneakily destroying the supply lines and raining down a constant stream of fire if the targets are easy targets, psychology is your best friend - and it is a massive friend with a creature like this.
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You've got the right of your phoenixes off the battlefield - they're strategically quite powerful, able to torch supply lines, spy from the air, and more.
*On* the battlefield, though, they get to fill a role that's historically very glamorous.
Specifically, they make truly superb **heavy cavalry.** Or, thanks to their size, a whole brigade of knights.
Like heavy cavalry, they can completely devastate a unit of soldiers. They'd swoop instead of charge, of course, but they could boil an entire unit alive in their armour. However, like heavy cavalry they're also vulnerable to prepared infantry- a thicket of pikes will sting for sure.
Unlike heavy cavalry, they're very manoeuvrable (since they can of course fly). They never have to engage if they don't want to. They may or may not be more vulnerable to archers - they obviously can't wear armour and the heat will only do so much to burn away arrows. They're also not themselves vulnerable to heavy cavalry- indeed, a brigade of knights caught in the open is easy prey for even a single phoenix.
A phoenix can also influence a battle more indirectly with fire - lighting fires upwind of the enemy will limit their options drastically in the right conditions.
This then gives us their glamorous battlefield role (when present). When on the field, a phoenix can:
* Spot the enemy formation from above
* Force enemy knights to hide behind archer cover, freeing your own knights to flank with impunity
* Outflank pikemen, forcing them to move to defend against the phoenix or become disastrously vulnerable
* Light fires on the fly to curtail the ability of the enemy to manoeuvre and force them from defensive positions
* When the opportunity arises, swoop in and incinerate vast swathes of the enemy (which is to say what happens if the enemy fails to respect its presence)
With these advantages, even a single phoenix is an extremely powerful force multiplier - and mostly without committing to a fight itself, since most of the time the threat of leaving an army exposed to it is enough to gain the upper hand. Two is a massive advantage able to push the enemy around easily (checking their cavalry basically pins them right down). More is completely unfair.
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## Night time diversion
They could use phoenixes as diversion to raid the enemy camp during night time.
Night fall coming, phoenixes will leave your camp and get around the enemy camp at a very long range. In the same time your whole army would have to break camp and hide nearby...
Then, around 3 am, Phoenixes slowly come back to the enemy camp in straight lines from the opposite direction your army is actually hidden (let’s say North if your army is South). Glowing in the night, at least one of the enemy sentinel will see them from far away and will assumes that the whole army is coming for them from the North in a surprise attack. Scouts will be sent to the camp and will find it empty, confirming this theory...
While every man is now facing your phoenixes approaching North, all your soldiers can now sneak into the enemy camp from the South and savagely take them in the back, killing officers and every thinking head of the enemy army that stayed rear lines... A true slaughter recipe!
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I think the answer of Secespitus captures a lot of the potential uses for the phoenixes.
One rather specific thing I would like to add is that the phoenixes might serve as a **counter against archery**:
You can try to shoot arrows at a phoenix but it doesn't actually do anything, since in close range the phoenix fire is so hot it just completely burns the arrows and the arrow tip alone doesn't do enough (or, you know, just melts).
Using this feature offensively with most/all of your phoenixes at once means that your army is suddenly almost immune to large scale attacks from archers. You can charge an enemy frontline (or even fortress) without having to deal with arrows fired at you. At the same time, once you dig in the enemy has no choice but to charge at you, since they can barely harm you from a distance.
This way they should easily qualify as a game-breaker in the war, especially when this tactic of using them wasn't known before.
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### You could consider using the phoenixes as mobile strategists and section commanders.
These birds basically can't die and are revered by an entire nation right?
That presumably means that they each have several dozen lifetimes of memories and are presumably extremely competent in multiple skills and domains. That sounds like the definition of an officer to me.
Medieval battles aren't won by the side that kills most enemies in fair fighting, they're won by the side that doesn't run away first. Most deaths are in the part of the battle where one side breaks and the other side cuts them down whilst they're running.
Your phoenixes could easily hover around your side of the battlefield looking for places where discipline is breaking, and turn up there being all holy and glowing. If they're smart enough, there's no reason why they couldn't take local command of that part of the battlefield.
I think they could very easily turn the tide of battle if they fly from weak point to weak point and just sort of hang around being holy and on fire behind troops that are losing heart.
Having the enemy general personally turn up in front of you is pretty scary. Now what about if the enemy general is also on fire?
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If you want the two sides to be of equal strength, you only use the phoenixes as a last resort. If they are holy, your people would frown on weaponizing them anyhow.
I mean you could use them as weapons, but that's not very interesting, is it? However, they can win you the war from a logistics point of view. For example during protracted warfare, sudden hard winters are known to happen. Your side can use them as space heaters while the enemy soldiers freeze to death in their camps.
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I can't find a good way to use phoenixes in battle that wouldn't have a major loophole, but you can
# Use the phoenixes for superior communication and attack coordination.
### Relevant phoenix abilities
The phoenixes can:
* observe enemy from above,
* carry messages quickly,
* deliver cheap fuel for fire signalization,
* immediately start big fires in remote places (like mountain tops, or just tree tops).
Obviously, the fire communication works best in the night-time. It's generally good idea to use phoenixes as a cheap source of light and heat, allowing more night activities.
### Basic use
If you manage to lure your enemy into a hard, hilly terrain (or maybe the whole area around can be like this), these abilities will give you immense advantage. You will be able to:
* ambush any smaller party diverted from the main forces, as well as
* prepare and coordinate flanking attacks making full use of the
terrain.
Additional use for night ambushes: use phoenixes to lit extra fires in or next to the enemy camp to lit the scene for the attackers. Be careful to avoid arrows. They will try hard to shoot the phoenixes the next time if they see the chance.
### Further exploitation
If you make fire signal a distinctive feature off all your
ambush attacks, you can later use it for:
* evoking panic in the enemy soldiers (by firing a phoenix randomly here and there; compare to the sniper fire),
* making some attacks even more unexpected and sneaky by *not* firing anything.
### Extensions
To get more epicness, prepare a better fire show for the final battle, like lighting all mountain tops around.
To add more possibilities, make some phoenixes have a differently colored fire and use that for signalling.
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**Hammer**
These phoenix are to be the turning point of the battle, then there's nothing more glorious then the last minute charge.
Set the scene with the army working as the anvil, an impenetrable wall of man and steel that will hold the enemies in place as the blazing birds comes charging from the sides of behind.
Now, the trick is to make all this look really epic.
You have said there's magic to fireproof a house, what about fireproofing a ship?
Settle the battle on the beach, let the enemy have their backs to the ocean, they will think themselves safe and focus on the army in front of them.
Have the small fleet of fireproofed ships approach, the enemy will probably move their own boats to incertcept an then with the sun going down and the enemy army confident on their victory the phoenix erupts from the ships and charges.
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It depends on their intelligence levels.
If they have animal levels, their use is minimal but if they are intelligent, their use is immense because they can fly.
An intelligent flyer is a scout, messenger, spy, saboteur or just a bomber.
Animal levels you don't get much beyond a mascot or messenger pigeon.
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How much weight can they carry? Have them grab a magical explosive in their talons (or even one in each foot), and you've just invented a magical bombing run.
If your Phoenixes are the sort who can teleport in a blaze of fire (or, alternatively, shift to an fire/energy form for high speed movement without any of that pesky mass holding them back) then you potentially have the ability to deliver precision strikes behind enemy lines - flare directly into/on top of the enemy's command tent, drop a bomb, flare out again. Game Over.
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@Secespitus listed most of what I was thinking. There are a options that I thought of.
**First**, using what Secespitus said, having phoenixes on your side makes everything the enemy does more expensive. Any using without a pike or archer defense is dead. The command staff in the back? Without a bunch of their soldiers providing cover: dead. Reserves that aren't constantly on guard against air attack: dead. Supplies that arn't guarded by pikes or archers: incinerated. Supply train: heavily guarded or dead. Everything needs to be guarded.
**Second**, scouting in force. If they see an enemy unit that is not on guard, kill it. They still need to report back on troop movements but the reports will be shorter. Anything that they didn't kill is likely moving slowly due to being on guard.
These two things make the morale of attackers much lower. They are never safe.
**Third**, feint with the phoenixes. If the enemy is defending against the phoenixes then, unless they vastly outnumber you, they leave themselves open to your troops (and vice versa).
**Forth**, carry bags of rocks to rain down on any troops that are otherwise defended against the phoenixes. This can soften them up for either your own troops or create an opening for the phoenixes to attack. The "bag" for the rocks would have to survive the fire but that's just an engineering problem.
**Fifth**, softening up enemies. Burn their crops. Burn their towns. Make them spend troops guarding their infrastructure. Most medieval kingdoms did not have standing armies because they are expensive. They are either paying mercenaries or they are pulling people from the farms. They can only do that for a short period. You can ruin an enemy over time this way.
**Sixth**, (this depends on if the phoenixes come back from the dead, per legend) terrorist "suicide" bombers. Go to the enemy capital, find high value targets and blow themselves up. If this is the first response to troops crossing your border, other rulers will be less likely to begin a war.
The fifth and sixth uses will make other rulers less willing to begin a conflict with you.
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I know you said that a phoenix dying would be politically unfeasible, but phoenixs could be an *amazing* suicide weapon. Have them start a fire that burns an enemy village to the ground, and even if they die, they will be reborn.
This all depends on the details of your scenario of course.
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The phoenixes aren't used as weapons, that would be sacrilege. Instead, they allow a wing of their own army to weather the treacherous, barren, and cold mountains they have to pass to sneak behind and surround the enemy's main forces. Without the phoenixes, this route would impossible to pass with an army; it would freeze or starve or get lost.
The phoenixes provide warmth at night to stop the army from freezing without the need for sparse wood. During they day, they hunt for food among the ragged terrain to sustain the army. While they hunt, they also spot the occasional enemy guard posts that dot the pass, so the army can easily avoid them.
After surviving the pass, the phoenix wing arrives at the main battle to surround the enemy forces. The enemy had assumed their rear was safe, and left it unguarded. After all, no state had successfully passed and army through the mountains until now. The victory is decisive as the army tears through their enemy from both sides.
[Answer]
## You haven't stated what you think a phoenix can do
You haven't specified at all what a Phoenix is capable off. Are they super hot, like as hot as a live volcano? If so just having them standing around will causes people within 200 feet to just boil and burn to death. Do they have firebreath? You have mentioned very explicitly some qualities of your Phoenixes like that they can somehow burn down a house, but you haven't mentioned anything else. Since you are making things up for your flavor, make up other qualities and see what you have?
Basically ask yourself: How hot are they? Can they project this heat in anyway? Can they talk or communicate? How tough are they? How strong are they? How fast are they? Etc. After this brainstorm you should have all your answers.
Because otherwise I am going to assume that they are just a big walking bonfire. If they are just a bonfire then they will do nothing in a battle. Their only usefulness would be... nothing? Even in reconnaissance, if they cant talk then what use is them flying around very obviously and brightly? If your phoenix cant even communicate what it sees then no scouting, and no transporting anything without burning it to ash either. It's is basically just pretty.
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I want a lake which contains a crater of active volcano at the bottom, which the volcano has a lava lake and the lava is still red hot in liquid state, just like lava lake above water on Earth. Is that possible?
[Answer]
## It's possible.
**Summary**:
* At sufficiently high pressure, the water will **not** boil as it normally does inside earth's oceans.
* Heat loss through convection can be stopped by naturally occurring phenomena (salt concentration gradient in natural or man-made solar ponds stops convection).
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Lava has a temperature of about [700-1250°C](http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/how-hot-lava). Water's critical point though is about [374°C](http://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-engineering/materials-nuclear-engineering/properties-of-water/critical-point-of-water/). Meaning that water coming into contact with the lava lake will become a very hot (~1000°C) [supercritical fluid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmaJVxafesU), if the pressure down there is sufficiently high.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZEgLG.png)
Assuming the supercritical fluid is dense enough, it will not float to the top of the (water) lake. Which would mean that the lava will not be cooled through convection and will remain a red hot fluid indefinitely.
Hotter water staying at the bottom of a "lake" is actually something that is used for [storage of solar energy](http://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Solar_pond).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/evpml.png)
It's kept at the bottom by having a higher concentration in salts.
Apart from salts you'll need [strong pressure](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/WindTunnel/Activities/fluid_pressure.html) at the bottom of the water lake, meaning that gravity needs to be very high or have a very deep lake or have your planet surrounded by very thick atmosphere:
Ptotal = Patmosphere + ( r \* g \* h )
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Images posted under fair use.
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Lava in its liquid state is always red hot. The red hot is actually caused by blackbody radiation and is a side effect of *any* object hot enough to melt rocks.
However, objects that hot cause water to spontaneously boil, which cools the outermost shell to a sub-red-hot level.
For an example of what it really looks like, [turn to Youtube](https://youtu.be/xsJn8izcKtg?t=1m10s)!
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Problem is it would immediately boil the water which would then be replaced with more water. You would be constantly transferring heat to the oceans which would be harmful if unchecked. I believe this is to some degree overcome by Mid Atlantic smoking stacks because water boils at a far higher temperature under pressure but even there only as high as 400°C
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You could cap your lava with a generous bubble of pressurized gas which at depth was more dense than water. [Xenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon) could work.
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.
>
>
>
Xenon is also a phenomenal insulator, with one of the lowest heat capacities of any gas. Other noble gases are used for double and triple pane windows because they are cheaper. The insulating property of this deep bubble would reduce heat transfer from lava to water.
If the xenon adjacent to the lava gets hot enough from the lava then its density will decrease lower than water to the point where it can float in water. If this happens you would lose bubbles of hot xenon to the overlying water. But the cool thing (so to speak): as the bubbles ascend, they cool in the water and when cool enough, they will stop ascending and drop back down. So this deep pool of xenon would have a lavalamplike fountain of rising and falling bubbles over it.
ADDENDUM: Better than xenon: [**radon**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon).
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_(data_page)>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ptIAE.jpg)
Benefits
1: Radon is denser so bubble does not need to be as deep underwater.
2: Radon has even less thermal conductivity than xenon.
3: Speaking to @Donald Hobson: radon like xenon will be lost to the overlying water. But radon could outgas from the volcano, replenishing the bubble. Radon is a decay product of uranium and other heavy elements and is generated in the earth crust; buildup of radon in basements and other structures can occur and so buildup of radon over a conduit through the crust (the volcano) is very plausible. In fact one would predict this should actually happen and radon should be present around volcanos.
4. Is it too much to propose that the radon bubble might flicker with light? But it might! There will likely be a charge difference between the lava and the overlying ocean, but these are separated by the radon bubble. Periodically, charge buildup could cause electricity to arc across the bubble. This would make the radon glow; it is after all a cousin of neon and all the noble gases glow when charged to plasma. I could not find a picture of glowing radon, but found that it is predicted to a deep violet.
<https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1vrzls/what_color_would_radon_glow_when_excited/>
5. In addition the pressurized radon gas will itself glow because of radioactivity. Radon at 1 atm is colorless gas but as it gets denser, the increased radioactivity produces a yellowish glow. Of course here the liquid lava will glow too, but the yellow glow will be apparent in the bubbles shooting up and falling back; the glow will become more pronounced as the bubbles cool and fall.
So: a yellow glowing highly radioactive bubble of radon, flickering violet with internal lightning, fountaining up and falling back, overlying a pool of molten lava.
That should do.
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I think we are here talking about [subaqueous volcano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaqueous_volcano) and not [submarine volcano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_volcano).In the subaqueous volcano page, there is an example given which could interest you : the [White Horse Bluff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse_Bluff), a volcano which was under a lake, about half a million years ago. And according to the article, your lava lake wouldn't really exists : instead of a calm, red lake, there would be two phases. First, the water will quite fast solidify the surface of your lava lake. Second, it will erode it, and infiltrate the still molten interior of lava, causing violent explosions and exposing more lava.
You would really need very hot and very fluid lava to get a phenomenon of convection, since the water cool your lava pretty fast !
[Answer]
Red hot liquid lava needs high temperature.
Liquid water under high temperature would need high pressure.
In such conditions, water would be changed in a [supercritical fluid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid), where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist.
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[Question]
[
I am building a nocturnal humanoid race for my science-fantasy setting. They are slight, quick, sneaky and very good at being unobtrusive. They are pretty much the [goblins of my setting](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurGoblinsAreDifferent); though not as small as goblins are often depicted or viewed as vermin.
With truth being stranger than fiction, I'd like this race to have realistic skin, eye and hair pigmentation for a nocturnal race.
Given that [black is actually poor nighttime camouflage](https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-special-forces-wear-black-cammies-during-night-missions), just copying the [Drow's](http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Drow) obsidian black skin is out.
My initial idea for this race was for their skin color to be a molted swirl of colors that similar was to [camouflage-pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camouflage); even if plausible that would still leave hair an eye color in question.
So should the pigmentation for a nocturnal race be?
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Just read a book on that called "[Animal Weapons](https://books.google.com/books?id=j9ygBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18)." Turns out there's no one best night camo because all nighttimes don't have the same quality of darkness and the ground and background change as well.
They did experiments with [mice](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1373508?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) initially trying to figure out why mice in the same environs came in two different shades, dark and silver. Dark shows up on a white background e.g. sand while silver does not. Silver shows up on black background e.g. soil. Silver shines more in moonlight, and so on.
Sad thing was, they were partially funded by the DoD looking for nighttime camo patterns for deployment to Afghanistan. Trying to save a buck, they rejected the researcher's conclusion to have several different patterns and went with just [one pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Camouflage_Pattern) to rule them all...until the Special Forces guys came back and punched somebody because their "camo" made them stand out like they had lit flares strapped to the helmets.
So, your Nocturnals would optimally have some kind of chameleon like pigmentation control mechanism so they could alter both tone and pattern as the quality of the dark and the backgrounds changed.
Heres the footnotes for the military camouflage.
* Task Force Devil Combined Arms Assessment Team (Devil
CAAT), “The Modern Warrior’s Combat Load, Dismounted Opera-
tions in Afghanistan, April–May 2003,” U.S. Army Center for Army
Lessons Learned (2013).
* Dugas, K. J. Zupkofska, A. DiChiara, and F. M. Kramer, “Uni-
versal Camouflage for the Future Warrior,” U.S. Army Research,
Development, and Engineering Command, Natick Soldier Center,
Natick, MA 01760 (2004); K. Rock, L.L. Lesher, C. Stewardson, K.
Isherwood, and L. Hepfinger, “Photosimulation Camouflage Detec-
tion Test,” U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and
Engineering Center, Natick, MA (2009), NATICK/TR-09/021L.
* “New Army Uniform Doesn’t Measure Up,” Mili-
tary.com, April 5, 2007; Matthew Cox, “UCP Fares Poorly in Army
Camo Test,” Army Times, September 15, 2009.
* U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Warfighter Support: DOD
Should Improve Development of Camouflage Uniforms and En-
hance Collaboration Among the Services,” Report to Congressional
Requesters, September 2012.
[Answer]
## You can choose almost any colours you want1
One would intuitively say that a nocturnal being should have dark colouration of the fur/skin; however, if you look at some of the species at Wikipedia's [list of nocturnal animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nocturnal_animals), then you will notice that while most of them have a darker colouration, several of them does not and, surprisingly, they may even have fairly white parts of their fur.
**Choose colour based on environment**
The major trend seems to be that the fur is matching the general colouration of their habitat, meaning that they won't stand out from the background neither at night nor at day. Exactly which colours they might have in order to not stand out highly depends on what they are trying to hide from and where they are active. E.g., tree living animals tend to have colours matching that of the bark or the underside of the foliage of their trees, ground living animals often have colours matching that of the light under bushes or near patches of bare dirt (quite few animals are green to match grass or leaves). Then, again, exactly which colours that "becomes a match" for the area they live in depends on the eyesight and colour vision of their predator or prey. As example, the wiki page on [nocturnality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality#Predation) points out that the reason some lions prefer to hunt at night is because their prey have fairly poor night vision.
**And based on whom they interact with**
[Most mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#In_other_animal_species) seems to have [dichromatic vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichromacy); that is, they have only two distinct colour receptors which allows them to distinguish ca 10000 different colours (whereas our [trichromatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy) vision allows us to see ca 10 million different colours). Birds, reptiles and amphibians may have [tetra-](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy) or [pentachromatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentachromacy) vision, giving ca 10 respectively 100 times more colours than we can see.
The [evolution of colour vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision) suggests that the reason why most mammals are dichromatic is simply because the first mammalian ancestors were likely were nocturnal and burrowing and therefore did not need to see more colours to survive. Dichromatic vision is described to correspond [red-green blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Protanopia), which can explain why [red foxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Fox_%28Vulpes_vulpes%29_-British_Wildlife_Centre-8.jpg) does not stand out against the background for their prey - they simply [look greenish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ConeMosaics.jpg) to the animals they hunt, even though they are clearly red for anyone with trichromatic vision.
### So in order to choose colours, you need to think about their lifestyle
Will your species hunt or avoid being hunted by something in particular? If so, what will that creature be able to see and what does the environment look like. If you want them to hunt or avoid an average mammal type of animal, then they get a wider range of colours available. If you, on the other hand, want them to avoid other humanoids with normal colour vision, then you need to make them generally dark with colours that matches their environment.
A quite good way to start finding good colours which matches environments (based on human trichromatic vision) is from the [list of military camouflage patterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_clothing_camouflage_patterns). However, if you look specifically for night colours, then you will notice that there is only the [desert night camouflage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Night_Camouflage) listed as night time camouflage. The dedicated page for the desert night camouflage gives the explanation that the camouflage was developed for the night vision devices at that time, those clothes becomes obsolete with current night vision devices. There simply are no dedicated night camouflage clothes nowadays; the military instead use the standard uniforms at night as they still meld with the background and the current improvement is better IR shielding to hide the soldiers. The take-home message here is to *select colours which matches the daytime background*, as it will be matching the night time background too2.
### What about the colour of their eyes?
Well, again, that depends. They will likely not have a particularly white [sclera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sclera), or they will likely have very large irises. Humans are not unique with a white sclera, but most of the other animals which share that trait have an iris which covers most of the visible part of the eye. Regardless if the colour of their eyes comes from the sclera or iris, it is most likely that their eyes are brown, yellow or orange (as those are the most common animal colours); however, you can still choose whichever colour you feel is cool as the eyes likely are adapted to night time and, thus, will have so large pupils that they cover most of the visible part of their eyes while in darkness. They might have essentially only pupils too, but unless they can reduce the pupil size during daytime, then they will be highly troubled (or even entirely blinded) by bright light and likely not be out in the open during daytime.
**Should their eyes glow if shone upon?**
One thing you might want to consider is if they have [tapetum lucidum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapetum_lucidum) in their eyes. The tapetum lucidum is a layer in the eyes, located behind the retina. It is highly reflective and is used to improve night vision by reflecting the light which hits the eyes; as the reflection causes the light hits the retina twice, it effectively doubles the available light for the eye. This is also the reason why animals seems to have glowing eyes if you shine a light at them during low light conditions. As an interesting bonus, the tapetum lucidum is different in various animals and therefore give their eyes different colour of the glow effect. Wikipedia lists colours of the glow as
>
> White eyeshine occurs in many fish, especially walleye; blue eyeshine occurs in many mammals such as horses; green eyeshine occurs in mammals such as cats, dogs, and raccoons; and red eyeshine occurs in coyote, rodents, opossums and birds"
>
>
>
The addition of the tapetum lucidum is not really neccesary, you can give other reasons for their good night vision, but it would give an explanation to it and it would give them a cool glow from light sources (which, of course, might be a drawback for them as it can be used to spot them at night).
## In short
You can give a range of colours, as the explanation for a specific colour/pattern is highly depending on whom they need to be hiding from.
* If they live on a savannah or in other open areas, then they are likely grey, light brown or beige.
* If they live in forests, then they are likely darker brown, black, darker grey or green.
* If they live in arctic climate, then they are likely white.
* Shapes and patterns might be included if extra camouflage is needed (or if you find it cool).
* Any colour which their prey (or potential predator) cannot see can be worn even if it, to us humans, is a mismatch to the colour of their environment.
* Conversely, they might have other bizarre colouration or patterns if it helps them hide from enemies which can see more wavelengths than we humans can (e.g., IR and/or UV).
---
1: There are limitations based on which exact range of wavelengths they need to be hidden in. As example, if they need to remain hidden in IR or UV range (for whatever reason - they might need to hide from [rocs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roc_%28mythology%29), which likely can see in the UV range since they are birds), then none of the colours we can see matter, what matters is whether they can absorb/reflect IR or UV. A good example of this is found on Wikipedia, if you look at the figure in lower right corner [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Commonly_used_sub-division_scheme), then you can see that the colours of the person in normal light doesn't really matter if one uses IR.
2: Again, if you have any creatures that can detect IR, then you will need to have a colour/material which can camouflage heat, which usually does not influence which colours it has in the visual range.
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It is not like environment changes it's color during nights. Even lions are nocturnal, and stealthy. I would say that similar color to their habitat with possibly bumpy and hairy skin. Not necessarily bumpy, if they move in a forest where the trees are quite straight. To be fast they would not crawl.
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Let's have a brief look at what (human) vision actually is.
The eye receives enormous amounts of nerve signals. To actually "see" something, almost all of what is received is truncated. Shapes are isolated from "noise", mostly by contrast, but also by comparison with what the person knows. Exploiting this knowledge, we should find something that has a very poor chance of being recognizable.
Since we are talking nocturnal, you should want darkish colours.
You would also benefit from conceiling the shape, which is particularly important and helpful, since a humanoid shape is something the human brain can identify very easily.
So, a darkish, grey-brown tiger or leopard pattern would probably work very well.
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From a purely generic camouflage perspective, dark-ish colors like deep greens, browns and greys are best. The real key is the lack of a recognizable pattern. Most predator and prey animals have certain patterns almost hard-coded in. If you see the pattern of 4 legs, 2 horns in a roundish shape, well, that's what you chase. If that pattern gets broken up, with parts of the animal blending with the background, the animal has a harder time discerning what it's looking for.
Humans also use a lot of pattern recognition. I do know that my fluffy black dog in the house is easier not to step on in a dark house, but our tortoiseshell cat nearly gets stepped on , sat on, and otherwise squished on an almost daily basis.
Anyway, pattern breakup is as important as color selection in visually driven animals.
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Are these humanoids furry or relatively hairless (like modern humans?). How intelligent are they? How long have they been confined to a specific habitat?
Most intelligent animals have a broad range of environments they are smart enough to adapt to. This would preclude a single optimal color scheme unless the environment is very monotonous across a very large area. The more intelligent the animal, the more likely they are to use materials to camouflage themselves (some lower order animals like insects and fish can also do this). So if they are tool using and can concoct pigmented ointments, they will probably rely more on external camo than natural pigmentation, even more so if they wear clothing and armor.
It seems to be common to have a patterned fur coat than bare skin, and the variety of colors in a fur coat is much broader than what skin pigmentation can achieve, at least in earth mammals. I also suspect that a mottled pattern of skin pigmentation is actually a NEGATIVE trait in mammals, as it signals disease like rashes or infections. So if you want tiger stripes or the like, your race will need to be furry.
Many patterns seen in animals, especially prey species, are not designed to make the animal itself hard to see, but make it confusing to predators when the prey are IN A GROUP. Fish, zebra, etc have this trait. Or the pattern is designed to make estimating the size or exact shape difficult to allow for a last minute escape due to a mistimed attack. This is especially prevalent in open areas where you can't really hide.
But your race seem to be predators. So look towards the big cats for inspiration, perhaps wolves. Prey animals seem to have instinctive reactions towards outlines and specific shapes, so the camo pattern of predators is often designed to break up their profile or blend in while stationary. But they may have visible areas in BACK, so they can be seen by other predators in their group. So your race could have a differential pattern that is hard to see in front, but more obvious from the back. Bright stripes set in contrast to darker areas is great when blending into sunlight streaming through trees, not so much for nighttime.
But it seems like you want a skinned, not furred, race. In this case I'd suggest a brown or grey skin pigmentation that is then augmented with camo paint. Drab earthy colors are pretty much universally good for camouflage and are easily created with skin pigmentation. An olive green could also work, especially if the favored area for this race include lots of evergreen trees with branches close the ground or year round dense green undergrowth. Too dark a tone and you are a negative image when the moon is full. Too light a tone and you "glow" in strong moonlight. They can augment their natural skin tone with leaves, grasses, etc attached to their bodies like ghillie suits and paint their faces and limbs with contrasting colors to break up their outline. Humans are VERY good at recognizing faces, even amidst other patterns, so you definitely want to paint the face if these guys are hunting other humanoids.
[Answer]
# Ginger tabby
It's a tried and tested colouration for a nocturnal predator, showing up strongly in the resulting gene pool. The tabby patterning helps to break up the outline against a background. As has already been mentioned, most nocturnal prey don't have colour vision so the fact ginger shows up strongly to us doesn't mean that's true of dichromatic creatures.
Just try not to make them too cute or the whole "vermin" thing isn't going to work out.
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Your race should probably be simillar to panthers, or have dark-grey skin, large cat-like eyes, adapted to dark, and very dark and dry hairs.
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Pigments have evolutionary power, most animals are coloured because their color is usefull in some way. So actually a nocturnal animal would have any color that is usefull to a nocturnal animal (and we have all varietis of notcurnal animals, some are colored, some are colorless), also keep in mind that producing colors requires some energy.
**Utility of a color in animal kingdom:**
* Hide from natural predators
* Seduce a partner
* Should warn eventual attackers
* Protect from radiation ( skin)
* Metabolize radiation ( leaves)
* Heath dissipation/conservation
**Downsides of color**
* Certain predators will find you better
* May be expensive for metabolism to produce the pigment
* Actually the metabolism of the pigment may malfunction causing sickness
Animals that have hiding skin usually have other ways to find partners.
Animals that have very visible skin with drawings usually have other ways to escape predators.
You have to find a animal with similiar position in our animal reign and then give that color to your humanoid. Nocturnal predators? There are plenty of nocturnal predators example in our world, most owls, some mammals, a lot of insects, we have White, Black, Brown, Colored animals.
Give them **whatever color you prefer**, they live in a forest? than a hide similiar to the one of deers is nice. Do they live in a swamp? Maybe a grey hide.
Or keep the color as last detail, maybe you will find usefull in your plot having a color later, so you keep the "color detail dangling as long as needed".
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As the question implies a link between stealth and pigmentation, first I would take a step back and ask why. I see three main reasons you might have in mind:
* Because it's fantasy, and if there's no scientific reason against it you want them to look cool, and make it easy for everyone to remember that these are the stealthy ones.
* Because in your world, they evolved to be well adapted to stealth.
* Because the pigmentation they evolved for other reasons helped them, so they took to a stealthy approach.
The first one is pretty much completely artistic license so I won't delve in to it.
The second: They evolved to be well adapted to stealth. That needs thinking through because it's likely to involve much more than just their pigmentation. What was the evolutionary driver for stealth?
**To avoid predators?**
*What predators?*
Do these predators have highly developed senses as you would expect? If so, does your species have all the other attributes to avoid detection? Because a certain colouring alone isn't enough.
*What happened to the other intelligent races?*
The question suggests that as in most fantasy, this is one of a number of intelligent races. If so, why is this one more stealthy than the others? How did they avoid these predators? If it's geographical, why was this race not simply forced to migrate?
**To be better predators?**
* What is their prey?
* Why did they need to evolve for stealth when they are intelligent?
* Why did the other races *not* need to evolve along similar lines?
* Are they physically well adapted for hunting in other ways as well?
The third reason, they evolved this pigmentation for other unspecified reasons, but found it made them well suited to stealth.
* How long have the races of your world been able to make clothing, dye and body paint?
* Do the races of your world not have varying skin colours?
* Does the colour of their skin really give them any significant advantage over another race in this regard?
All things considered I come back to reason one, *artistic license*.
I don't see any convincing evolutionary reason why an intelligent nocturnal race would develop a specific pigmentation. An entire race could only be considered "sneaky" and "stealth" in comparison with others. I imagine it being more of a social response. Goblins are often depicted as diminutive creatures in a violent environment. They adopt this sly sneaky approach being physically outmatched. It's easy to imagine that they would be quite different if surrounded only by weaker creatures who they could bully.
[Answer]
As a sidenote, one thing that is important to remember is that it is not just pigmentation that affects nocturnal camouflage, but also *shape* and *shine*.
For example, bare human skin has a shine that can give it away even under ambient light, which is why soldiers' camouflage paint is designed not only to break up the shape of the face (when applied [disruptively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_coloration)), but also to matt the skin so that any shine does not give away the shape of the face.
Essentially, what it'd say you are looking for is two principles:
1. It is consistent with the surrounding environment;
2. It is not consistent with itself.
So I'd say an important question would be "*what is the nocturnal environment of this race?*"
[Answer]
First, WHAT is looking for them?
Their skin will be what it is because of predators, so you must examine what hunts them in the environment. What we see and how we see is different than, say, a jungle cat. And if they are hiding from prey, you'll have to look at the visual system of the prey as well.
In general, skin with a "fade" rather than distinct edges is ideal, rather than one solid color. Look to nature, especially small reptiles.
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The current setting i'm working on plays in an alternate timeline to our own in the late 1920's, with one of the key differences being that the helicopter had already been invented in the late 1880's through a number of convenient (basically hand-waved) breakthroughs in technology, essentially predating the first, recognized, motorized airplane flights of our world by nearly two decades. Even though calling these first helicopters "rudimentary" would be a compliment, they still were able to hover and fly very short distances, bouncing over the surface of the earth like the first motorized flight-attempts of our own world, and would grow to resemble rotorcraft like the [Flettner Fl 282](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_Fl_282) in the coming decades.
My question would be, if these helicopters had already existed decades before the invention of the fixed-wing aircraft, would they still have been invented?
[Answer]
# Fixed-wing aircraft would be invented by the 50s at the latest, likely in the 30s
The other answers have covered the ways in which an airplane is superior to a helicopter. But we only know this **with hindsight**, having invented both.
We must ask ourselves: what would encourage the aviation industry to abandon the local maximum (helicopter) in favor of seeking a global maximum *if they didn't know for sure* that there was a better option out there?
The answer is: missiles.
Amateur historians of war talk a lot about the tank rewriting the rules of warfare in WWII, but in the sky and the seas, the rules were changed again by the rapid developments of rocketry. Compared to cannons, a missile has far greater range and destructive potential. Post-war air and naval development revolved entirely around leveraging or defending from this new weapon.
A helicopter-focused airforce would find itself blown out of the sky by even [unguided WWI era rockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Prieur_rocket), never mind guided missiles. The ability to hover, while operationally useful, would be a death sentence on the battlefield. Combat between rocket-armed copters would be fast and brutal, encouraging engineers to develop maneuverable craft able to bring rockets to bear against enemy air power, while being safe themselves.
# Your first planes would be rocket interceptors
Your alternate timeline branches off too late to prevent the invention of [kites and gliders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Kites). So it would be a form factor known to your engineers. OTL, liquid-fuel rocket planes were conceptualized as early as [1902](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-powered_aircraft), and developed [primarily](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereznyak-Isayev_BI-1) [by the Axis powers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet) during WWII. They were essentially a glider with a big rocket attached: the pilot would blitz through enemy formations on one or two attack runs, moving too fast to react to, and then glide home when the fuel ran out.
In our timeline they remained marginal due to their drawbacks compared to conventional airplanes (due to high rate of fuel consumption, the Komet's range was 80km and the Ohka's was half that) and were made obsolete by the invention of the jet engine.
But facing helicopter forces (the Flettner had a measly 170km range compared to the 820km range of a MiG-3 or 2,100 km range of a P-38), rocket interceptors would be much more effective, and their speed would make them untouchable. Even armed with cannons, they could close distance too quickly for a helicopter air wing to react, blast them at close range, and retreat before they could be retaliated against (although it's hard to say whether anything would survive the attack to strike back). The retreating rocket planes would simply outrace or evade any fire coming their way (the Komet's maximum velocity was in excess of 1000km/h, carrying it out of a rocket's practical range in under 60 seconds).
Of course, engineers would quickly follow the same logic as in our timeline, and develop jets as a far better engine type to put on these new "powered gliders", leading to a Cold War period that looks very similar to ours, with jet aircraft as the primary combat type.
# Silly Wunderwaffle opportunity: Airships and parasite craft
Since the rocket planes would still have short range, and be untested technology besides, your story's armed forces might be tempted to combine them with something more familiar to them. OTL, all major powers experimented with [parasite aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project) during the war, putting small planes on big planes to extend their range. The Japanese even put [rocket planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY-7_Ohka) on [conventional planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_G4M#G4M2). So there is an opportunity for you to field [large rotary aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_V-12) with a few parasite fighters slung under the body (the V-12 could have taken off with the weight of up to 10 fully loaded Komets, and even late 50s designs like the [Mil-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-6) would have been able to carry two or three).
This "helicarrier" would act much like aircraft carriers do in naval engagements, launching its air wing in an over-the-horizon strike on an enemy formation while remaining at a safe distance from retaliation. If the helicopter carried sufficient fuel, it would even be possible to refuel the interceptors for multiple sorties.
Since helicopters are slow and have relatively low flight ceilings, another type of aircraft becomes viable (for countries with large helium reserves): the venerable [airship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin). OTL, they were vulnerable to patrolling fighters, but even 1917 airship designs could fly at 2x the altitude of the 1942 Flettner. In addition to taking over the high-altitude bomber role normally done by strategic bombers, airships could also be used as a [carrier platform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-class_airship#23r) for these parasite rocket planes.
However, as in OTL, these would merely be a stopgap measure until it became clear that the exceptional operational range of jet planes renders the parasite concept unnecessary.
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Absolutely. Helicopters are one of the least efficient modes of transport. Wikipedia has a good run-down on [the power efficiencies of various modes of transport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport), and [a Stack Exchange (Aviation) answer](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/5191/how-does-the-efficiency-of-a-fixed-wing-compare-to-a-rotary-wing) sums it up very nicely. We're still talking about using blimps for air transport because they're more energy efficient, and that consideration never goes away.
Also, helicopters can't move as fast as airplanes. The limiter here is the forward spinning rotor speed. If you add the linear velocity of the helicopter to the velocity of the main rotor as it's rotating forward, you really, really [don't want to break the speed of sound.](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16948/do-helicopter-rotor-tips-regularly-go-supersonic) This limits the top speed of a helicopter to around 400mph, whereas the cruising speed of an airliner is around 575mph.
Plus, there's a size issue. If you remove its wings, you can fit the largest ever built helicopter inside the largest ever built airplane, and carry it for more than four times the helicopter's maximum range.
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Have a look at the [autogyro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogyro). This was invented in 1923. It is not a helicopter: the rotor can turn but it is not powered. This gives it a lower stall speed than a fixed wing. It cannot hover in still air, but it would stay motionless in a light wind. It behaves like a very light conventional aircraft with a short take-off and landing.
Autogyros did not stop the development of regular aircraft. As aircraft engines got more powerful, and people used maintained runways rather than handy fields, the low stall speed was no longer the safety factor it once was. A fast autogyro would have increased air resistance from the forward travelling rotor arm. There were some applications such as submarine spotting, where the autogyro's slow speed and ability to stay in the air for long times were just what was wanted. They look fun, too. But they did not compete with fixed-wing aircraft.
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Helicopters are very maintenance intensive. They need an "A" check every 125 hours of flight and it is a very long procedure. Many helicopters also require various service actions every 25 hours of flight. In comparison, fixed-wing aircraft can go up to 600 hours before needing an "A" check and inspection usually takes less time.
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Absolutely.
Both fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft work by the principle of lift, and it's far simpler - both in terms of conception and construction - to build a fixed-wing aircraft than a rotary-wing one. This is because the simplest functional fixed-wing aircraft doesn't even need a propulsion system other than the pilot:
This is not true of rotary-wing aircraft; they require their wings to spin at a relatively high speed to generate enough lift to get the aircraft off the ground, and a pilot isn't capable of providing enough power, consistently enough, to accomplish this.
Essentially, basic physics ensures it's incredibly unlikely to invent rotary-wing aircraft without inventing fixed-wing ones first.
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*Airplane case 1: Crossing an ocean*
Really fancy military helicopters today have a max range around 1200mi. Most helicopters have vastly smaller ranges (250-400mi). Airliners can cross the Pacific Ocean or Asia non-stop.
*Airplane case 2: Crossing big mountains*
Modern helicopters have a max altitude around 25,000ft. This is not sufficient for parts of the Himalayas, and may be uncomfortably close for lower mountains. Airliners cruise around 40,000ft. Something like a Concorde or SR-71 could go even higher.
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I am working on a creature (tentatively calling them “beepipers”) that lives in hives (heavily based on honeybees). The drone (reproductive male) is born to mate with a queen, and will die shortly after doing so. He works very little and eats a lot, making him expensive to raise.
Here’s where the nuance starts. For a beepiper queen, one drone only provides enough seed for 50-60 fertilized eggs. As a result, a queen must continue to mate once a month or so throughout her life.
Beepiper drones mature reasonably quickly, but don’t leave the hive right away. This way, queens can formally trade their drones, giving all involved queens new genetic material. It is viable for a queen to mate with her own drones, but it’s obviously frowned upon, so the trade is the best way for nesting queens to maintain their hive.
A nesting queen wants a few foreign drones stocked up at a time, as she mates once a month. She guards this “hoard” jealously, since if she runs out of fertilized eggs, her workers replace her. The hoarded drones basically sit around and eat.
Shortly before winter, all of the hive’s drones and virgin queens will take their nuptial flights, allowing a new generation of queens to enter the picture. Queens are highly competitive; while nesting queens can tolerate each other well enough to trade, nuptial queens without hives are seen as a direct threat, particularly to their mothers.
The virgin queens are already allowed in and out of the hive, so they can easily get away, but the drones only otherwise leave the hive to be traded, so it is obvious when they are preparing for their nuptial flight.
Logically speaking, a smart nesting queen (who knows whenever anyone enters/leaves the hive) would kill any drones before they flee, as the drone could create a rival queen. However, if she succeeds in this, the species would end with her.
There are a few options I’m considering for addressing this problem.
* The flighting drone emits a toxic chemical that prevents the queen from killing him. However, he must then mate with a younger queen, who would also be vulnerable to this chemical, so this could get complicated.
* The workers actively defend the nuptial drones, keeping the queen from killing them or possibly sneaking them outside the hive. However, the workers are threatened from the drones leaving too, so this would have to be an instinctive measure.
* The drones are protected by moral instinct/religion, and a queen killing them outside of mating is considered a cardinal sin. I’d prefer to avoid this, since I want these creatures to be largely without moral constraints.
Would any of these work well to address this issue? I’d prefer the drone’s escape method to be simple, since it isn’t a particularly central part of my story, but it would close the continuity of the drone’s life cycle.
TLDR: Smart bee queens realize letting drones on nuptial flights creates rival queens. Why would they let them go anyway?
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## Creating Allies, Not Enemies
A new queen that has mated with one of your drones now has a connection to you, which makes her and her offspring from that drone less likely to want to challenge you. So you actually want to encourage your drones to go mate with new queens, because you're not creating rivals for yourself, you're creating rivals for all of the *other* nearby queens.
## Flipping the question
If it's commonplace to swap out drones, but young un-mated queens are a threat, and especially to their mothers, then why are *they* allowed out of the hive? Seems like a queen that wanted to eliminate potential rivals would kill the young queens (or at least prevent them from mating), not let them roam free.
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# Make love, not war
The drones exist only to be sexy. The queen and drone pheromones stimulate each other in a feedback loop, where ultimately the queen has control - she can choose to dampen her own pheromones, which in turn leads the drones to tune down their own, and inhibit sexual characteristics. This allows the queen to get on with her queenly business and only go "in heat" once a month when her sperm store is low, while the rest of the time the drones remain in a relatively drab state that isn't too distracting.
Virgin queens, however, produce their own drone-stimulating pheromones - this is, in part, how they convince them to leave the safety of the hive to go on a dangerous nuptial flight. Drones surrounding a virgin queen have their sexual characteristics in overdrive - and the senior queen finds them *irresistible*. She can try to lower her pheromone production, but the drones are saturated with the virgin queens' pheromones and remain in ultra-sexy state. The senior queen might attempt to attack them, but it inevitably devolves into, ahem, distraction - they are just too damn hot. While she's preoccupied with one or a few of the sexy sexy drones, the others are able to fly off safely with the virgin queen.
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**Genetic Drives**
One must presume that the behavior is genetically driven.
**Explaining Things Through Evolution**
Whenever a question of the form "Why does this mating strategy exist?" the answer must always be because strategies with small changes will produce fewer copies of the genes that produce them in the next generation.
When explaining such things, the usual thing is to explain it in terms of what the organism's genes know and want. This is as old as the book "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. It should be understood to be a metaphor, not actual anthropomorphism. I don't actually think that genes have knowledge and desire. They behave as though they do, since when they behave selfishly they get copied more.
**Known Cases in Other Animals**
Some quick examples.
If a male cat (house cat, leopard, tiger, lion, etc.) encounters a kitten under a certain age, he will kill it. He won't eat the body, just bite it until it is dead. This is because male cats are nomadic. A kitten under that age is unlikely to be his kitten. And if mother cat loses her kitten, she will be receptive to mating much sooner. So Mister Cat will have a receptive female, and remove rivals from the gene pool. As a genetic strategy, if he does not kill that kitten, the rival genes stay around, and Mother Cat stays unreceptive until the kitten is weaned. Months at least, by which time he likely has wandered away.
Males that are "good dads" to other male's kittens get erased from the gene pool.
From the standpoint of Mother Cat, it is *ALSO* a successful strategy. Not for her, but for the part of her potential genetic descendants that will be male. That is, her male offspring will be more successful if they do this also. So her *genetics* find it an attractive thing for a male to do this. She may be very upset that she has lost her kitten. She might even attack the male, scratching the heck out of him. Then she will go sulk for a day. Then she will come back and mate with him.
Because it is a genetically successful strategy, kitten-breath is a turn-on for female cats.
Consider chimps. A young male chimp must attract a mate. One thing he can do to be considered attractive is to show he is a good father. So young bachelor chimps will pester mothers with babies to be allowed to babysit. And they will do it in a way to be apparent to young females, to be seen caring for a baby. The problem is, a happy baby chimp will stay quiet and often go to sleep. A sleeping baby is not going to attract any attention.
So young bachelor chimp will pinch the baby to make it cry. Then he will make a big show of comforting the baby. The females will watch and judge his efforts. They will do this on their way to judging him a suitable mate.
The thing is, it works. It works even when he gets caught pinching the baby. To a female chimp, a male who creates a big show of comforting a baby, even when he mistreats it, is a male with a strategy to attract females. If his genes include this, then his male offspring will do the same. So her genes, which are interested in getting male genes that will be successful, will find this male attractive.
Because it is a successful genetic strategy, an abusive and showy male is attractive to a female chimp. (And consider, if you dare, the huge number of stories of how step-children get treated.)
**The Beepiper Case**
So finally, let's turn to our queen beepiper permitting drones to mate with her offspring. She has determined through the usual process that they are suitable to mate with her. Presumably they are fresh, not the fathers of her offspring. So they are suitable mates for her offspring.
(There might be some interesting drama here over keeping them fresh. Perhaps after about the time it takes for a newborn beepiper to reach adulthood, male drones become unattractive. That might be the life-expectancy of a male drone. Slam the door on them before they get a chance to mate with their own daughters.)
So her genes know that these mates are going to provide good genetic material for her offspring, and therefore will be good for making copies of her genes. Even if her offspring turn out to be rivals. Her genes will override any thoughts of her own well being. She will have drives to do things that are good for her genes regardless of how bad that turns out to be for her.
Genetically, her offspring have 50% overlap with her. So something that produces an increase of chance of reproduction for *one* of her offspring that has less than 50% chance of killing her, will be genetically attractive. If she can help multiple of her offspring at one time, it will approach the situation that her own death will be outweighed by that help.
So these mating flights, which set her offspring on their way, will be a genetically successful strategy, and so will be attractive to the queen.
As they will be attractive to every individual in the hive that is an offspring of the queen, even the non-breeding workers. Their genes have a genetic interest in the success of the mating flight, even if the rival queen has a chance to come back and burns down this hive. This is the case with bees in our world, where worker bees will assist "colonizing" queens that are about to leave the hive to form new colonies.
So the mating flights are allowed, even supported, by every individual in the hive who is genetically related to the soon-to-mate queens. They will find some means by which the flights can happen. Because, by so doing, they produce more copies of themselves in future generations.
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Bee hives, the dumb ones at least, are democratically led. Oh sure, they can't have sex or make babies, but every other decision? The workers put it to a vote and majority rules. Where to get food? A few scouts go out, they come back and dance to indicate what they found, the rest of the hive vote by following the scout of their choice. Need a new place? A few scouts go out, they come back and dance, the rest of the hive votes by exploring, then comes back and dances with their choice until the whole hive agrees on one place to stay. *Really* need a new place to stay? The whole swarm goes out and votes en masse.
As the beepipers evolve, it would be easy for these dances to evolve into proper debates. And since the workers are the ones who actually go out and do stuff, they are the ones with all the information and therefore power. Why would they inform the queen, who just sits there and lays eggs all day? She doesn't have to do anything, it's us who make this hive go round! The workers trade the drones. The workers allow the nuptial flights. The queens do nothing and are as commodified as the drones.
So why would queens allow drones to go on nuptial flights? Answer: It doesn't matter because it's the workers who decide. The queens are just as useless and powerless as the drones.
As for why the hive as whole would allow it: Daughter hives are easier to ally with than fully foreign hives. For at least one generation, probably more, it would expand their effective territory.
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It seems to me the workers would be the easiest solution. If the queen of their hive is replaced by a younger/ stronger rival that probably doesn't change very much for them, they will continue to be workers under the new queen.
In fact if their queen is starting to get old, getting a new one might be in their best interest to ensure the long term survival of the hive. Even if she isn't old but just unpopular the workers could always hope for a better new queen (and possibly be disappointed).
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## Evolution is funky
Survival of the fittest doesn't mean the strongest, or biggest, or most populous colony lives, it means that the species/mutations that can reproduce the most don’t go extinct.
So it might be beneficial for Queen Z to not allow nuptial flights, and maybe queen Z does stop them all. But it will be much harder for queen Z’s genes to spread, meaning whatever genes made queen Z do that won’t live on. However, Queen X did the opposite, and allowed nuptial flights. Now queen X, though maybe killed by rival queens, has spread her genes.
This might just seem like wild speculation, and that nothing like it has ever been observed. But it has! [Kentrophoros](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentrophoros) is a genus of ciliate which has a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that live on it. It eats some of the bacteria, and in return the bacteria get access to the ideal living conditions. Getting eaten might be bad for the individual, but they can reproduce and spread their genes from the kentrophoros, and so they are able to survive.
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## She Sends Her Own
The simplest solution is that she doesn't have to let her valuable traded drones out - she simply allows her own sons to go out. This will likely have a powerful instinctual urge behind it, as it's quite literally how the queens will propagate their own genes to future generations. The instinctual urge to send her sons out to make new hives would have to be just as strong as any animal's urge to have their own children.
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It is not beneficial for the drone to mate starting from. A smart drone will never do, regardless of the pleasure. If that much happens, the rest may happen as well.
Behavior is not always driven strictly by the personal benefit, even if individual is otherwise sentient. Drones are children for a queen, understandable she does not want to kill them. You can make them more attractive than just lazy eaters, say drones are great artists that tell stories and decorate internals of the hive.
P.S. Real bee drones do leave the hive, flying longer distances away than worker bees. They return if they fail to mate, or may enter another hive where, unlike worker bees, they would be welcome.
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I strongly back up boba fit's statement, in the long run killing your offspring means your genes die with you. Even if a queen is spreading her genes partially through trading drones she still wants every way to spread her genes. The threat of increased competition is not enough to counteract the advantage of more genes spread.
I do have a few points to add as to why this is the case though.
**Better a relative then a stranger for a neighbor**
A queen is going to be fighting for resources with their neighbors, no matter who they are. However, if their neighbor already shares genes with them their neighbor has an increased incentive to play 'nice' with you. Both sides can help spread their own genes by aiding the related queen, by contrast someone that doesn't share genes from you benefits entirely from your death.
If your going to be competing for resources anyways it's better to do it with someone that has some genetic imperative to cooperate with you then one that has none. Better to have your daughters out compete and drive out an unrelated queen then have to deal with the less cooperative queen, even if that means you also have to compete with your daughter.
**There will be drones regardless, so no point in handicapping yourself**
There are already other queens with drones. Those queens are going to let their drones out to mate. If you don't let your drones out to mate the new virgin queens will mate with the other drones. The queens will still reproduce and start hives, the only difference is that those new haves have none of your genetics! Since new colonies are going to be started regardless of your choices might as well ensure more of your genes are spread when that happens.
You might claim this argument is begging the question how this habit started, why did the queens start releasing drones when they first started to evolve this system? Well you could say that the ancestors of the beepippers (that for some reason I want to call beedrills...) were doing it eons ago and it simple persisted as they evolved and changed into a new species for billions of years the exact same logic, that other's will release drones so I might as well, was sufficient motive to release your own drones and it traces back to an ancient ancestor that had no incentive to not release drones.
**The virgin queens didn't really need your drones anyways**
If your really basing this off of eusocial insects then they presumably share a single trait that pretty much all eusocial insects have and which was likely the driving factor in development of eusocial insects in the first place, namely they use a haplodiploidy sex determination system.
With this system females can produce males without mating, the males get exactly half the genes from their mother and no genes from their non-existent father. A female is produced from mating, getting a random selection of half the females genes an *all* the male's genes, since he only has one copy of each gene. This means that a workers may share as much as 75% of their genetics (50% of their mothers and 100% of their fathers) making sisters more closely related to each other then their mother or their own offspring. This oddity of sisterhood is likely why these insects became eusocial, there was a much stronger incentive to aid your sisters then to add your children since your more closely related to them, thus the reason the insects started working together (that's massively oversimplifying it but good enough for now).
The point of all this is that the virgin queens presumably can produce sons without needing to mate. If already present queens really refused to release drones the virgin queens would just produce their own drones and have a mating flight with them. Perhaps in a modern beepippers it would take too long for males to reach maturity, but in their evolutionary past males reached it very rapidly and this would have been a viable option driving the original decision for existing queens to release their drones. In fact it's kind of doubtful modern beepippers would have drones that take so long to reach maturity and cost so much resources to raise given how rapidly drones can/are produced in most eusocial insects of today.
**Your daughters aren't a threat because they can't stand to be near you**
Practically every species out there has some form of inbreeding avoidance techniques, since inbreeding is genially bad. Now admittedly inbreeding is actually far less of a problem for haplodiploidy insects (since males don't have a second copy of each gene bad recessive genes tend to be quickly weeded out of the gene pool when they cause the male to be non-viable). Still there are reasons, including simple preference for genetic diversity, that inbreeding is still preferentially avoided.
You said local queens trade drones. If a local queen was your daughter then their drones would be your grandchild and inbreeding would happen regularly when you traded drones. To avoid this queens would likely do what most animals in nature do to avoid inbreeding and disperse. Your daughters would *not* stay local to you, they would intentionally fly far far away from you to avoid inbreeding. Thus the colonies they start would be competing with other queens, not you. The natural result of inbreeding avoidance is that you don't have to worry about competition with your daughters.
For the record this wouldn't be true for drones. Usually only one sex bothers to disperse in nature and given the drone trading strategies and that drones are solely the children of their queen without a father it makes more sense for females to be the ones that disperse to avoid inbreeding.
If you *really* want daughters to stay local to the queen you may have a bit of an out here by arguing the harm of inbreeding is legitimately so much lower for haplodiploidy insects relative to most animals that the advantage of staying local to cooperate with genetically related queens outweigh it, but that still implies cooperation, not competition, between hives if daughters stay local.
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You already answered your question. The reason why she wouldn't kill them is because she knows that if she does, her species will die out. The drones are of great value to her; both in keeping her species alive and in market trade. She cannot let them go or let other queens take them from her. You could say they're precious.
*Generated with minimal supervision by AI.*
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I want to have an alien species have trouble communicating with the hero(s), I've decided that this will be done in part because they don't even understand the concept of hearing, as in none of the animals of their world has the ability to hear.
While some animals on earth can't hear I would find it hard to believe an evolution of an entire planet will be able to skip such benefits unless there's something making hearing be useless or a hindrance, so I came up with the idea that something on that planet is so noisy that an animal wouldn't be able to hear anything else anyway, making hearing on that planet be a waste of resources and thus never resulting in an evolutionary benefit.
Now the only problem is that I'm stuck with the question what will be able to cause so much noise on a planet to render hearing useless yet keep the planet livable (to the aliens) for an evolutionary time scale?
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It all began billions of years ago, when the ancestor of all surviving modern plants first developed. In those times dust clouds covered the sky and little sunlight reached the ground. But there was an intense and constant wind whipping all over the planet. These plants evolved leaves and structures that somewhat resemble [windsocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsock). The tapered end extracts energy from the wind (I don't know how, ask the aliens). Wind-powered plants quickly out-competed the variants using only the dim sun-light. And this spelled doom for the sense of hearing on the planet; as the plants extract wind energy, they also produce a sound not unlike a kazoo, quite loudly, and not well played either. Since billions of years, countless "blades" of grass and "leaves" of trees were trumpeting about.
Animals never had a chance to evolve hearing. With ambient noises ranging from deafening to bone-crunching, there is no useful information in hearing. And even if hearing would be possible - listening to the cacophony of thousands, millions even, off-tune kazoos would quickly induce insanity in anything able to perceive it. A horrible fate awaits any unprotected human...
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Possible alternative: the planet has no (or a very thin) atmosphere.
Lots of celestial bodies have no atmosphere at all. Sound does not exist in these places, since sound requires a medium. A life form which evolved in this environment would never evolve vibration-based communication.
A noise-less world seems more plausible than a continuously noisy world, as the former is actually extremely common in real life. Of course, this opens up other questions, like how such a species survives on land without air to breathe - but in my opinion, these are easier to explain away. Perhaps this species respires by drinking liquid methane every so often.
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# Ultra-Cicadas:
There is ONE species that could hear - a cicada-like insect that once communicated through sound. But a curious symbiotic relationship developed that amped these insects up to absurd levels and has rendered hearing worthless. Any hearing ability has degenerated away long ago.
A Fungus-like autotroph on this planet forms a perfect sheltering environment for these insects to nest in. It insulates in cold climates and cools in hot ones. defends against predation, etc. But it gets energy from absorbing soundwaves. The insects made louder and louder noises in a more sustained way until the environment was incoherently loud. The noise eventually got so loud as to actively select against any species with the ability to hear.
The variety and range of these insects and audiotrophs (?) has spread around the world after a mass-extinction event. All sea life comes from re-colonized land organisms. While there is the possibility of hearing evolving, no current species have done it yet.
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**In your solar system, something has caused a constant stream of debris to enter the atmosphere of your world. The result is a constant loud rumble or thunder, constantly changing in pitch and volume depending on the debris that enters the atmosphere.**
Sound is nothing more than vibrations in the atmosphere. Or, more generally, vibrations in any medium. We humans call it "hearing" when the atmosphere vibrates and "feeling" when something else, like the floor, vibrates.
So the question simplifies to, "what can cause the atmosphere to vibrate enough to lead to limited or no evolution of the ability to hear?"
I'm voting for something entering the atmosphere constantly. As it enters, it causes explosions, rumbles, and thunder-sounding-stuff. If the mass varies from dense streams of dust or pebbles to larger Buick-sized objects, then you get variation in frequencies and volume.
*An alternative (and it might even be easier to rationalize than dust/debris) is for* energy *such as the Solar Wind to cause constant lightning to form on the planet, leading to constant sound.*
**So, the next question is, what can cause debris to constantly enter the atmosphere over the time scales necessary for evolution?**
*The lightening might be easier to justify because you could do something like a binary star where one star is stealing from the companion star and the resulting spiral of stellar debris is something the planet must regularly (if not constantly) pass through. This is a fast and kinda tag:Science-Fiction type of answer, but frankly, we're deep in tag:Science-Fiction territory anyway.*
So, let's focus on the debris. Planets have a habit of sweeping their orbits clear of debris fairly quickly when we're talking about evolutionary time scales. So this must be something that's constantly adding new material to the orbit of the planet. Conveniently, I shouldn't think that (compared to the mass of your planet) a large quantity of material would be needed to achieve the necessary sound.
Which is good, otherwise we'd have to deal with your planet's diameter increasing by a meter or two a year, which would have *massive* consequences on evolutionary time scales.
My suggestion is an asteroid field caused by the break-up of two super-Earths early in your world's evolutionary period. The assumption is that together they represent a LOT of material to draw from. The goal is to have a very wide asteroid field, one so wide that it places *the edge of the field* at the orbit of your world. As mass within the asteroid field bounces around, it's constantly (but not debilitatingly) bouncing into the orbit of your world.
**Is this believable?**
I'm comfortable with its ability to meet suspension-of-disbelief. From a scientific perspective, what I've described is impossible. Such an asteroid field would remain tightly bound due to the nature of gravity. It wouldn't spread out as I've suggested. And if it did, there's enough mass involved that it would, I believe, have a pretty good chance of slowly drawing your world *into the asteroid field* to eventually become the core of a new massive planet (maybe even a dwarf star, given the mass needed for the two original colliding worlds).
But, then again, if that were really happening, that would be a convenient way to rationalize the debris causing the noise. It just means your planet has a life span that's quite a bit shorter than Earth's.
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# Super-rotating dense atmosphere
A super-rotating atmosphere is a planetary atmosphere that rotates faster than its host planet. On Venus, for instance, the atmosphere above the clouds moves at anywhere from 300-400 km/h. That’s approximately the speed of an F5 tornado, which are nightmarishly loud.
Combine that with a thicker atmosphere that conducts sound better, and you will get a continuous roaring sound in excess of 100db at ground level at all times. That will seriously disincentivize the development of hearing as a meaningful way to navigate or identify threats.
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They can hear, they just can't hear us.
Humans hear at certain frequencies, between 2000-5000 hertz. Due to some atmospheric influences on the alien world, perhaps some constant noises that make it hard or impossible to hear at normal human frequencies, the aliens have adapted to hearing and speaking at much higher frequencies than humans. Therefore, the humans and aliens won't be able to communicate, due to their vastly different ranges of hearing. In addition, they use organs specialized for the production of high frequencies, not just using the mouth to create sound, so human and alien speech would be completely different, so they can't even understand that the other is attempting to speak.
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Consider a society that is both matrilineal and non-monogamous, such as Patrick Rothfuss' [Adem](https://kingkiller.fandom.com/wiki/Ademre#Sexual_beliefs_and_behavior) from *The Kingkiller Chronicles*.
For those unfamiliar with the work, there are basically two factors at play:
**No Cultural Aversion to Sex**
When an Adem is feeling frisky, they seek to fulfill that need as a matter of course, and have few aversions as to whom they use to that end. One of the Adem's nearby friends might even offer to "help"!
This invariably leads to lots of non-monogamous sex. (Perhaps a tendency towards monogamy later in life, but irrelevant for the example and ultimate question)
**The Myth of the Man-Mother**
Women naturally ripen like fruit, and give birth to children. Men have "no" effect on whether or not a Woman ripens.
This means that any given Adem has **no firm knowledge of whom their father is** (though they don't care and don't believe in "man-mothers" anyway).
**Conclusions**
It is quite possible that Adem could mate with their own half-siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.
Is this likely to cause their inhabitants any harm due to accidental inbreeding? Or is the sort of thing where as long as it doesn't happen too much (and since the culture isn't *intentionally* inbreeding), it's a moot point?
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It all depends on the size of the population, and the diversity of people's sexual partners.
"Accidental inbreeding" (specifically excluding purposeful incest like what the Habsburgs did) happens to mankind only when there's a handful of people in a secluded situation: commonly a mountain village, but it can happen to sufficiently xenophobic social, economic or ethnic communities as well. A few centuries pass, and everyone is triple cousins. The defects start building up soon.
But you need a tiny society with very little outside contact to achieve that. In regular medieval villages, many people never moved away, but enough people did that the diversity of the population was high enough to prevent inbreeding. Villages of a few hundred people have thrived, as long as they were on a road and connected to the outside world.
Your species has a handicap that they don't know their fathers, but they do know their mothers, so half the risk is eliminated. Communal raising of children is also done by many societies, such as the indigenous population of the Amazon basin. Specific parents matter less to them, and while I do not know if they tracked them and made genealogy charts to avoid inbreeding, they too lived in villages of up to a few thousand, and they have flourished, as long as they were in contact with other villages.
There's a reason for this: inbreeding is hard. In a village of a thousand people, picking a partner by random chance gives you only a fraction of a percent odds that they are closely related to you. At best, one in a hundred might have children with their half sibling. But the odds of that happening twice in a row (for any one person) are one in ten thousand, and you need a couple of generations for real defects to start building up.
So, as long as populations of your species do not live totally isolated from one another, they are not going to become inbred by chance.
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This statement always ends up being taken as controversial but I will state it nevertheless:
If we for a minute put morality and social norms aside, the negative effects of inbreeding are severely exaggerated among general population.
* yes, the possibility of recessive genes ending up paired increases, but there's nothing intrinsically bad about recessive genes.
* the always-used example of Habsburgs, which I do see as an example of negative effects of inbreeding, is even more an example of what happens when natural selection and Darwinism no longer applies for a certain line. Individuals that by themselves were unlikely to reach adulthood, let alone have offsprings, would reproduce their genetic material as a result of their surname. Their flaws were then accentuated (but not caused) by inbreeding.
So to answer your question - as long as rules of Darwinism are in effect in your world - the occasional accidental inbreeding won't cause harm to general population.
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**Pheromones (possibly)**
There have been studies ([this](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2705-close-family-smells-worse-than-a-stranger/) is one) where blind tests have been used to determine how attractive a person will find the odour of their near relatives compared to strangers. The data suggests that in general a person will find the odour of a near relative less attractive, thus reducing the chance of accidental incest.
Note that this research contradicts the earlier assertions of the proponents of [Genetic Sexual Attraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction), a pseudoscience proposed to justify attraction to close relatives.
While not a perfect protection from accidental incest, this provides a further factor to reduce the statistical likelihood of occurrences as described in KeizerHarm's answer.
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In Iceland it certainly seems possible. No offence meant.
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/icelandic-anti-incest-app-aims-to-stop-families-getting-too-close-8578404.html>
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probably not.
Well, at first it would, but since it would be a widespread problem the body begins to adapt.
Pheromones were already mentioned and are a good preventative protection, but if you truly want them to have sex with anyone , then that is not a way.
However, a reactive protection that already exists in humans could be extended.
Because a mothers womb aborts almost all birth defects completely by itself. [Which is why you see the "down syndrome" only with a specific chromosome: because all fetuses with a tripling of any other chromosome get killed off very early on]
This mechanism could sharpen, which would reduce birth defects generally (but also lower overall fertility due to "false positives"
Alternatively, a process could evolve that specifically checks for a "minimum difference" between egg and sperm cell DNA during the initial fertilization and completely stopping the process if the similarity is too high. (Which would also lower fertility due to false positives).
HOWEVER these lowered fertility rates could also explain how the liberal attitude towards sex comes to be:
There are few enough children already, so when a female gets pregnant it is a cause for celebration and everyone is happily helping with the upbringing of the child.
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I'm writing a fantasy story where magic is common and wizards follow a strict code of conduct. One of those tenets is *"never stray from humanity and do not seek immortality or godhood."* While I admit that becoming a god might be a complicated thing to restrict from *literal reality warpers*, how would governments go about policing and restricting people from obtaining eternal life through magical (and perhaps technological) ways? ~~One other question I have for this is, how would a ban on immortality impact healing magic and medicine if it could potentially be used to prolong life? What other kinds of impacts on society would take place if immortality was illegal?~~
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A strict maximum age.
Genesis 6:3:
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You could implement this sentiment into law. People who reach 120 years are required to die. If they don't agree to medically-assisted suicide, they are executed.
This is of course a rather harsh policy, but some worlds are harsh so I don't limit my worldbuilding to only pleasant ideas.
This policy would stop your magically immortal people from living longer than 120 years if you kept good enough records of when people were born and could find the violators. As far as I know, false-positives would be extrememly rare. If this policy had been in effect globally here on Earth, then in all of recorded history it would have only killed one mortal person who was still alive by non-magical means: [Jean Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment) and she would have been required to die two years, 164 days before her natural death. If you extended the limit to 125 years, then no non-magical old person would have been killed.
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I made a joke in earlier comments, but then got to thinking further... does your magic allow for resurrection? If so, you could have everyone required to come in every 10 years, say, as part of getting drivers license renewed, and a government official shoots you in the head. Or injects you with poison. Or something. If you die, it proves you haven’t crossed the line, so they resurrect you. If you don’t die, they try twice more to kill you, and if that fails, you get ejected into space/flung into prison/removed from history by a time cop who prevents your conception/etc.
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Let's think for a few seconds:
* The ban is quite arbitrary, so does not require much effort to stop believing in its validity
* The ban actually applies only to a small group of smart, high power individuals, whose power is even not specially bound to their social standing - exactly the worst type to keep in line
* People don't have much to lose in case of breaking the ban, while plenty to gain if they do it right
Well... in comparison to that war on drugs is a great success.
OK, so for practical purposes:
* a bunch of powerful healing magic is actually highly restricted and regulated (and this part is actually the most enforced part of the law)
* high rank individuals who live suspiciously long, have one day disappear in order not to raise too much suspicion
* every wizard pays a great lip service to the ban, just it's a public secret, that most people who are powerful enough to break the rules just do it
* people are more than happy to use this ban to score even with their personal enemies, so actually some transgressors are being punished
* idea to use curses to make the ban enforced is somehow considered as invasive, dangerous or disgusting - at least so say older and wiser wizards
* there are some common ways of avoiding the ban like emigration, assuming new identity, escape in to different dimension, go to hide in wilderness...
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**Other wizards need to take care of this problem.**
If a magic user has skills enough to achieve immortality, he or she has skills enough to dupe / buy off / intimidate the cops. The regular civilian police are going to be hopeless against some necromancer lich. Your only hope is other wizards.
1: Other wizards will probably know who among them is up to immortality shenanigans. Wizards have scrying glasses and divinations and such.
2: Nonimmortal wizards will likely be envious and seek to prevent that sort of cheating.
3: Assembled other wizards might have the skills to actually take on an immortal. I could imagine a "Witcher" sort of magic user who made this a regular gig.
4: These sorts of risky civic-minded actions will put the wizards willing to undertake them in a good light with the authorities, who might grant such wizards privileges and resources otherwise unavailable.
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Theft and murder are against the law, yet it happens every day. Even though immortality is illegal, not matter what you do to enforce it, someone will always find a way to get away with it.
Detailed birth records, magical observations and age tests and bureaucratic oversight are all nice and all, but it will only catch the honest.
One method that may help catch most, although draconic, a randomized culling. If you have death squads that go out and wipe out 2-5% of the population each year, odds are you will have wiped out ~99.73% within 100 years. Sorry, I'm a little fuzzy on statistics, but if you account for normal birth/death rate and take the statistics out to the 6th standard deviation, then you should ensure most of the population gets causght up in your death squad sweeps.
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The most powerful institutions are also the ones who most excel at tracking your income and taxes.
Just make it so that your income taxes are adjusted by age past a certain limit - say, after 100 any retirement plans are cancelled and your taxes on income are doubled every decade.
This would in effect cause a maximum age to be enforced by law.
Of course, the most rich and powerful could always evade taxes and move their wealth to havens, or deal in manaCoin. But then again, fantasy is no fun without a powerful lich for the protagonists to lynch.
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The maximum age limit that others have suggested is a good start, but can still be circumvented with some forged documents to fake your age. Also, doesn’t do much about godhood.
Think about how government and law enforcement try to control contraband like explosives: they limit the legal availability of the materials known (or suspected) to be used for immortality and omnipotence. Thaddeus the Green has been buying up all the quicksilver in the tri-county area? The feds have a judge give them a warrant to scry his laboratory. There would probably be whole teams of wizards with license to do theoretical research into immortality to figure out the probable methods, so long as they share what they find with the government (and submit to some extra transparency scrutiny, just in case).
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Is ontological immortality possible (i.e., one cannot die in any way, and will always regenerate from any trauma, like the Greek gods), or merely functional immortality (you won't die naturally, but can still be killed)?
If the former, prison is always an option.
If the latter, just impose the death penalty (or merely eternal prison) for anyone who is found to have become functionally immortal. If you want to allow the imposition of functional immortality as a last-ditch effort for treating certain injuries and diseases, then put a maximum lifespan cap on it: if you can no longer die by natural means, the government will put you to death on X date, and you agree to that as a condition of treatment.
How this would impact healing magic and medicine depends on the legal definition of functional immortality. Does it count if you have to keep having repeated rejuvenation treatments, such that your immortality isn't actually inherent to you but rather is a feature of your living conditions, or does it only count if you make yourself permanently immortal? If the intended effect is just to ensure that there is nobody over a certain maximum age, then none of that matters; you just impose the death penalty for anyone who can be proven to have past that age (like in *Logan's Run*), no matter what. Just make it high enough that no one would ever naturally live that long (unlike *Logan's Run*). But if the intent is merely to prevent people from becoming superhuman, then there need be no particular effect on healing magic or medicine, and no need to impose a lifespan cap.
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I can think of two ways that this could be done:
* Preemptive censorship, true immortality is only granted by one spell, everyone knows that such a spell exists, and the vaguest details of what is involved (this seems counterintuitive but it's necessary to prevent an accidental discovery) but there is a standing agreement that said spell is not taught or pursued by wizards for any reason. This only really works well where all wizards are trained by existing wizards, if there isn't a master-apprentice chain but if wizards are all, or even just largely, self-taught it kind of falls down.
* After the fact magical forensics, immortality leaves a mark, a mark that any good wizard can spot a mile away, literally. If immortals are easy to spot then weeding them out becomes easy as well. This assumes that wizards are governed, either internally or externally, if they're not the idea of banning immortality becomes problematic.
To what extent, because it will have *some* effect, a ban on immortality effects healing magic and life extension is a plot issue for you, as the author, to work through. The exact societal ramifications that follow on from that likewise.
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So, in my world, humans coexist with aliens, and in some rare cases, humans and aliens have exchange programs and all that stuff. This problem goes both for the humans and the aliens. To an alien from, say, Qualis, all humans look a) Ugly and b) the same. Aliens aren’t trained to pick up the subtle differences between two humans faces, and so to them, all humans from any ethnicity look practically identical. And humans can’t see the difference between two aliens either. So, my question is, how could the aliens and humans tell each other apart?
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This is a common problem among us too. It happens, for example, when you have to tell animals apart (i.e.: when you have dogs of the same breed and age), or when you have to tell twins apart. It also happens with cartoon characters - in old Donald and Scrooge McDuck comics, it was hard to tell Louie, Huey and Dewey apart, when they could be told apart at all.
It may be made harder for aliens if they have poor eyesight (i.e.: they only see our silhouette), or if they perceive humans mostly with senses other than sight.
If the humans wish to be nice to the aliens, they may wear accessories that make it easier for the aliens to tell one human from another - for example, if the aliens see mostly through sonar, having any object around that would appear differently to an ultrasound scanner might do. They might tell Alice from Bob because Alice has metal earrings (making a jingling sound close to her head), while Bob usually wears belts with big buckles (thus the jingling comes from the waist).
If the distinction must be visual, then allowing people to wear whatever they like will usually have them dressing differently. The aliens would tell people apart through their clothes, kinda like we tell Louie, Huey and Dewey apart in old cartoons and comics.
Another solution which would be really fun to implement would be hats! I played Team Fortress 2 for a long time, and in the beginning it was usually hard to tell two people apart when they were in the same team playing the same class. When hats were introduced, people kinda started wearing different hats based on their achievements and what games they owned, and it the variety of it made people unique. It was much easier to tell who was who because everyone had a different hat.
The same goes for aliens, of course. They could write their names on their foreheads or wear clothes of different colors. As long as they give themselves features which we are good at picking up, we will be able to tell them apart.
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1. Alien side - they cannot tell faces but other distinguishing characteristics are very apparent to them. For example Amy has an inverted nipple on the left, an accessory spleen and smells like ginger. Bert has 8 cervical vertebra, a prosthetic knee and smells like cat food. Cooper has three testicles, each unusually large, and smells like mince. The names the aliens use among themselves for each of us consist of a long list of an individual's physical idiosyncrasies.
2. Human side - I propose the aliens want to help us because they are sympathetic to our difficulty. We cannot pronounce their names anyway, so they give themselves nicknames with cultural meaning and then adorn themselves with reminder clues. "Scooby" has a green collar with a tag. "Freddy" has an ascot. "Daphne" has a green scarf.
That is a trick I lifted from a story I heard about an American in Turkey - his name was hard for the Turks but he sort of resembled a popular soccer player. So he started going by that dude's name as a nickname. The Turks saw the resemblance, appreciated the joke, and remembered this American's new Turkish name.
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**Alien AR smartphones will add name-labels to humans**
The aliens are at near-future technogy levels. Their smartphones are equipped with Augumented Reality displays, that will automatically run feature-recognition (i.e. facial recognition for humans) query against cloud-based service(exchange agency servers) when encountering hard-to-recognize species.
All of the technology required already exists to this day, it is just too expensive/big to use on large scale for us so this solution would be feasible for us in near-future, possibly already is for aliens. Its is also very flexible (exchange programs many for different species of aliens).
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The same way humans do when dealing with other ethnic groups, by learning the small differences that make a particular human stand out from their peers; height, body shape, hair and eye colour, but mainly "manner" how they speak, if they speak, their idioms, their body language.
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If aliens cannot "see" differences in humans, perhaps they could identify us by the smell (dogs do that pretty well), or by the sound of our voices, or even the noises we do while walking or moving our bodies. It may depend on which other senses they have available for that. If they have a sense of smell highly developed, they even may be able to "feel" our anger, hapiness or any other chemical change in our bodies. If they have their hearing sense highly developed, they could identify us by our hearthbeats or the internal organic sounds. They could even detect if we have digestive problems.
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1.) Sound. They can't tell us apart physically from one another, however, humans have a wide range of unique voices.
2.) Clothing. Not sure if this would work for you setup, but if humans/aliens wear specially designated clothes, then they could be used to identify individuals. Similar to how, when writing a game of risk, one of your options to draw the map is to make a color-map and index the provinces by color, perhaps the aliens have some special ability to identify unique patterns of colors and "index" known humans by them? Haircuts are another option. I usually recognize people by their clothing style/hair style long before I see their face (this is somewhat error prone, but it is correct more often than not). Even ignoring the obvious things, patterns such as how an individual walks or carries him/herself are also easy and quick identifiers.
3.) Behavior. If an alien knows somebody's name and refers to them by said name, and they respond, it is reasonably easy to determine who the name belongs to by their reaction.
4.) Name tags. Seriously, in big black letters. Since humans apparently only interact with aliens directly in a limited fashion (exchange programs), those aliens/humans in the exchange program can simply wear name-tags.
5.) Scent. Pheromones. Every individual has a somewhat unique scent (and some of us have a VERY... unique... scent, if you know what I mean. The same could apply to aliens -- no two smell alike. Once might smell like roses, and the other might smell like cat crap.
Regardless, unless the problem is biological (as in, it is IMPOSSIBLE to physically identify individuals from the opposite species) then the simplest path for both human and alien exchange students is to learn how to identify individuals of the other species.
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I would be interested in seeing what you would do with aliens with radically different senses to humans - Eg an alien that could see and interpret the electrical activity in your brain - similar to a shark. People have certain patterns of brain activity which is somewhat unique, so once they learn your name they'd be good at remembering you. On the other hand it could be an important plot point where one character is mistaken for another by the alien revealing that they are very similarly "wired" brain wise (eg both characters are secretly high functioning psychopaths) while coming from very different ideological backgrounds.
"I'm sorry, your mind looks just like a friend of mines. Please put down the gun."
On the other hand maybe the aliens have a concept of "individuality" that has to do with genetic lineages rather than physical bodily units, as determined by a range of senses including sonar and sight. So the Japanese astronaut leading the mission might get nicknamed "Japan" and the Japanese first officer might be referred to by the aliens by a name that translates as "Japan's Right Hand". The human known as "America's Left Hand" gets really offended by this, but "America's Right Hand" finds it amusing.
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Why make this task unnecessarily difficult? If you need to distinguish particular humans from the others, why not simply affix sticky notes with identifying codes to the "foreheads" (the relatively flat, furless upper ventral surfaces) of the ones in which you are interested?
But you may want to reconsider whether you truly need to distinguish one human from another. The mere fact that they nearly all have the same number of heads, limbs, orifices, etc is a strong indication that they all provide the same basic functionality.
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Well there is the obvious to use senses other than sight. Or....
Perhaps because of this issue people and aliens start wearing identifying marks, like armbands, or patches on their clothes. Maybe it gets to the point of segregation. Or maybe it goes the other route and becomes badges of honor.
Perhaps the issue is so rampant that the governments move in and barcode everyone at birth.
Perhaps society takes it to themselves to setup teaching courses on learning the subtilties of each alien nation.
Perhaps there is a tech company that comes in and sells name badges so that you always have an identifying avatar digitally displayed behind you. Which could be used to infiltrate alien societies or vice versa with fraudulent name badges becoming a problem.
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maybe they could read/smell/count/sense a human's microbiome signature- i.e. the unique variety and number of microorganisms living in human bodies.
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The aliens would learn to tell the differences eventually if their brains are similar to ours. We have something calked the fusiform face area (FFA) in our brains. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area?wprov=sfla1>
The FFA activates when looking at faces and is believed to be responsible for differentiating between them. But it also activates when ‘experts’ look at things they are experts at (bird watchers looking at birds, all this mentioned in link). In one experiment people were turned into experts in recognizing made up objects, the FFA activated at the end of the experiment, not the start.
The aliens would have to be taught the ‘rules’ for differentiating faces but even if they don’t have the equivalent of an FFA, chances are they could learn, become experts. As for the rules they could use, this can be a plot point. I’m told black people largely rely on skin color to tell people apart. Personally I pay less attention to faces than height, weight, hair color when it comes to distinguishing the ever changing employees at work that I don’t directly have to interact with. Someone could give the aliens bad rules, or some such.
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So let's say that I have a Hollywood-style voodoo doll. For instance, when I stick a pin in it, the subject feels a piercing pain and if I put it next to a flame, the subject feels hot and perhaps burns.
However, I've come to reconcile with the subject and, as part of burying the hatchet, I'd like to destroy the voodoo doll. But how can I do that without harming the subject? Unfortunately, I don't know how it was made (I got it from a witch in the swamp who has since disappeared), thus I can't simply reverse the creation process.
So how can I destroy the voodoo doll?
Inspired by [this Penny Arcade comic](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/01/04).
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In original voodoo a voodoo doll is just a ward against spirits you nailed to a structure or tree. The European tradition of poppets, which were the sympathetic magic links to a person, got associated with voodoo dolls by outsiders. So voodoo dolls as we commonly think of them were never actually part of voodoo. In fact voodoo is one of the few traditions they do not show up in. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19dzdsw>
A common concept in many [fantasy stories](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VoodooDoll) is the idea that a voodoo doll needs some part of a person to make/maintain the connection, hair, blood, a photo, ect. If you remove this thing the connection is broken. But really it depends on how magic in your world works.
Or course you could try the [Granny Weatherwax](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513Bs4HYbmL._SX277_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg) solution and put your real arm in a fire and make the voodoo doll burst into flames instead.
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An easy solution is, of course, **Don't destroy the doll**.
But why?
Well, voodoo dolls traditionally subject their counterparts to the same things that happen to them. These don't have to be negative.
You've reconciled with the person. Let's say you're friends now. They're spending a long day in the sun? Put the voodoo doll in your fridge. Or maybe they're out shoveling snow in the winter. Wrap it in a blanket. Give it a massage when they're sore.
Just remember to store it in a secure location to make sure nobody else can do bad things with it.
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Voodoo lore is hard to pry into. The practitioners are necessarily secretive. However, with some Google searching I see some standard patterns. The general trend is that you want to send the doll back to Gaia to have her help resolve the negative energies.
* [Submerging](http://www.mookychick.co.uk/health/spirituality/how-to-get-rid-of-a-voodoo-doll.php) it underwater is a common trend. Several sites mention that if you do this, you should not look back at the doll as you walk away from it.
* [Holy water](http://mysticinvestigations.com/paranormal/how-to-reverse-a-voodoo-doll-curse/) is also very popular. Some sites even suggest that if you submerge it in holy water and then let it dry, you can even anoint it with oil and burn it completely (without singing Romero's hair!)
* Many approaches involve keeping it safe in a white cloth bag with sea salt before disposal.
Another solution may be simply to bring it to a Voodoo practitioner you trust to get assistance. While I can search Google all day, many practitioners devote their life to Voodoo, and will obviously know quite a bit more.
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This is Hollywood voodoo, so a solution doesn't have to be accurate, just have the image and trappings of voodoo, the "rules" you have established for this voodoo take priority..
So...
Place the voodoo doll into a magic barrier circle consecrated to papa Legba (the voodoo loa of roads) or a circle of salt etc , thus limiting the range of the doll to within the circle.
Burn the doll.
Safely break the circle.
This gives you a couple of plot options, the spell works and the doll is disposed of, OR the curse in the doll is released when the doll is burned and once the circle is broken is released to find it's target.
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The basic idea of such a doll, voodoo or not, is a sympathetic link, in other words, something done to one thing makes this happen to another, similar or connected thing. This idea is very common, but of course, the details vary.
Depending on the specific rules of magic that apply here, we could have different stuff...
1. The doll itself is just a tool for a magic spell. It allows you to do bad stuff to the person, but only with the active help of magic. In other words, for example, if you simple put needles in the doll, nothing happens, but if you put needles in it while mumbling a magic spell while standing inside your magic circle at the right hour, the target feels the pain. Destroying such a doll is trivial, since nothing happens without magic.
2. Sometimes, intent is important. If that's the case, putting a needle into the doll because you needed a place for a needle for a moment, for example, will do nothing, but putting a needle into it with the intent to harm, will hurt. Also in this case, destroying is simple, because you can do so as long as you intend no harm to the person.
3. If the doll itself becomes a continuous magic link, so that everything transfers to the person, that's harder. In this cases, destroying it may be harder (or impossible). As @John pointed out, it may be possible to break the link of hair, blood, etc. is removed, but if that stuff is inside the doll, this may be hard. In such a case, a holy place might help, for example going into a church or temple that shields the effects and then destroying it. Also, another wizard/priest/etc. might be able to shield the doll for a while, while you destroy it.
4. As @John already pointed out, Granny Weatherwax destroyed a voodoo doll by using the link in the opposite direction, burning herself to burn the doll. While this is a possibility (if the doll is connected to the target, the target may also be connected backwards), this might be harder than the other way round, since the way from something that was connected to you back to you is pretty much unique, but the way from you to something that was connected to you isn't - there a millions and millions of skin cells, hairs, etc. floating around that were once connected to you. While we can imagine the doll having a stronger connection to you than all the other stuff, depending on the magic rules, it still might need a truly gifted wizard/etc. to use the link in the other direction (and "Granny Weatherwax did it" is pretty much as good as "Steven Hawkings understands it, so I should, too." - Granny is pretty much THE expert on witchy things in her world).
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I'm pretty sure Hollywood style voodoo dolls can't be destroyed without inflicting damage on the target, and since you're unable to have the creator unmake it, I don't see a safe way to destroy it, unless you want to expend a lot of time and energy learning enough voodoo to magically unenchant it yourself.
If that's not an option, the best approach is to give the voodoo doll to the target, and make its safekeeping their problem. "Let's bury the hatchet... by the way, you probably want to keep this someplace safe, and not accidentally light it on fire, or anything like that."
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A voodoo specialist can dissolve the doll by boiling it in a special potion.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GJudU.png)
Image source: [The Crown Of The Crusader Kings](https://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=D%202001-024) by Don Rosa.
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What about giving the voodoo doll to the subject?
Maybe it can be of positive use and they can decide what they want to do with it? Like scratching your own back or things similar to @Andon's answer.
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How do we punish elected politicians in a more effective way?
(Or at best, how do we avoid voters being willing to punish the whole political class in general?)
To briefly explain what I mean:
Exhibit 1:
"In 2010, Gnarr, a stand-up comedian, stood as mayor of Reykjavik. It was a satirical gesture, designed to protest against the political class blamed for miring Iceland in the financial crisis. To his horror, and the horror of the establishment, he won."
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/jon-gnarr-comedian-mayor-iceland>
Exhibit 2:
Recent Italian constitution referendum:
"While the reform has some intrinsic merits, the domestic debate is centered on the effort to unseat the prime minister. At the same time, financial markets see the vote as a test of the appetite of reform in the country"
<http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/30/italys-referendum-explained-what-you-need-to-know.html>
Exhibit 3:
Holland referendum of 2005 concerning EU constitution:
"According to a poll [1] by Maurice de Hond, 30% of the Constitution's opponents used the referendum as an opportunity to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the government, instead of confining their deliberations to the contents of the treaty that was put before them. At the time of the referendum, the Netherlands' centre-right coalition government, led by Jan Peter Balkenende, was suffering a period of unpopularity as it tried to push through cuts in public spending, and there was widespread disillusion with the country's political elite."
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_European_Constitution_referendum,_2005>
I picked those examples because it is a more clear case then deliberating whether some populist politician got elected to punish the establishment, or maybe indeed to his voters the program was indeed realistic and reasonable.
The problem, that I would like to tackle is the following - voters see a government that in their opinion seriously underperform. Possibility to elect another mainstream party with a not-so-different program seems not specially tempting. There may be also a problem of some undesirable changes that may be beyond blamed politician (either caused by long term changes or external factors), the voters do not bother analyse such minuscule details carefully; they just want to punish the person is in charge for not fixing the problem.
And then a referendum comes (on absolutely unrelated stuff), and they finally have a chance to say this guy in charge or whole political class a big "NO".
Could there be a method to satisfy voters bloodlust ( ;) ) in some way that would not derail unrelated projects or replace already not specially professional establishment with even less competent populist? Some way of punishing politicians and calming down before relevant election / referendum? Or maybe some way to avoid the whole problem in more creative way? Or maybe such few derailed project should be just accepted as collateral damage?
(Assume contemporary tech level; country neutral answer; just something that generally could work in a Western democracy. If there is a way to solve it then I would presumably have to put in the background of my story.)
[Answer]
"Punishing" politicians can be a very slippery slope. Allow me to explain.
Politician X is democratically elected. One problem which a significant portion of the Western World runs into is that citizen votes are not equally weighted. Instead, we each cast our vote for a certain representative in a certain sector, and the party with the most elected representatives wins.
So in practice, in a lot of Western Countries, it's not the most popular politician who gets elected, but the party leader who managed to get the most seats. For example, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won a majority government with something like 39% of the votes. That means that ***61%*** of voters ***did not*** support him.
He then goes and implements (to varying degrees) some of the policies which he promised he would. But those policies may very well be upsetting 61% of the voting-age population (if we extrapolate)! Because most of them did not want him to win in the first place.
So at this point, do you "punish" the politician for implementing the policies which got him elected in the first place? Would you make it so that only people who voted for him get to "punish" him? Neither is a good idea because, although his actions may be unpopular with some segment of the population, there is more to all this than meets the eye:
* Circumstances change all the time, and governing a country is very complex. Maybe his election promise (assuming he made it in good faith) is simply not realistically achievable in the political climate which he inherited. If the leader is constantly afraid of being punished for "not doing what he promised", governments will severely lose effectiveness.
* Leaders often make decisions based on far more information than the public. Some of that information may be highly specialized and difficult to understand, but it may also be classified. The media, or certain interest groups may spin these decisions as racist, evil, or incompetent, however the leader of the nation can't hesitate to make some of those important decisions simply because he is afraid of being "punished" by the public.
And so, the very concept of "punishing" our leaders is very tricky. They should definitely be held accountable for doing anything illegal, or otherwise manipulating the system for personal gain, etc. However, politics, by its very nature, is a divisive topic, and punishing political leaders simply because you don't agree with their policies or decisions would result in complete chaos, and ineffective governing. In fact, it would lead to nothing more than mob rule, and a complete breakdown of democracy.
[Answer]
Three procedures applicable and actually applied in democracies:
* In ancient Athens, [ostracism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism) was a procedure in which the citizens could vote to banish somebody for a limited time. There was no need to prove guilt; in was not a trial, but simply a vote. If a majority of voters (but not less than a certain minimum number) vote to send the person away, away they went. While in ancient Athens *anybody* could be ostracized, it is easily conceivable a similar law applying only to politicians; and in practice ostracism was used mainly against politicians.
* The same ancient Athenians had another nifty legal procedure, the *[graphê paranomôn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphe_paranomon)*, a lawsuit against a law, or, as we would say in Civil Law countries, an extraordinary recourse in the interest of the law. Any citizen could walk into a court of law and file a suit against a (relatively) recently promulgated law or in general any bill passed by the assembly, declaring it to be unconstitutional. As soon as the suit was filed, the law in question was suspended; the suit was tried by the [Heliaia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliaia), the supreme court of Athens, which had the authority to rescind the law or bill in question. The defendant was *the politician who had proposed the law or bill*; if they lost, they had to pay a fine or they could even lose the right to vote and to run for office, and of course the law or bill was rescinded. For added popular appeal, the judges/jurors of the Heliaia were not politicians but ordinary citizens, selected by lot from those citizens who manifested their wish to serve.
* In our time, Californians (as well as the citizens of other American states) have a legal procedure called a [recall election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_recall_election), which allows the citizens to depose the governor. Any citizen may initiate a recall campaign; if they gather a certain number of signatures, the state is compelled to organize a recall election, which is essentially an anticipated election combined with a referendum. Notably, this is how [Arnold Schwarzenegger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger) became governor of California in 2003, replacing the incumbent Gray Davis who was deposed (or "recalled") by the vote of the citizens.
In states which are not democratic politicians may meet their just desserts by means of much abbreviated procedures...
[Answer]
The main question, do you want to educate the population to use their vote wisely, or do you want to give the mob an outlet for their anger? Since we're on Worldbuilding SE, the site for the setting of fictional stories, I'll focus on the latter.
* Allow "recall" votes against legislators, governments, and Santa Claus. If the recall gets enough votes, there is a snap election for that position.
* Make it easier to run a "recall" vote than to vote on any substantive issue. That way, malcontents will cast their *against* vote directly against the persons they're upset with.
* Make it easier for legislators to depose governments. A proportional representation system rigged to produce many small parties, plus easy motions of no confidence. So you don't even need a general election to get a new president or prime minister.
[Answer]
2 options:
1. Have a "none of the above" option, or count non votes as a vote for none of the above. Establish a threshold %age, and a strong consequence of hitting that threshold.
It has always struck me as strange that in democracies where voting is compulsory you are essentially forced to vote for a candidate, even if you don't want them to represent you. Alternatively in democracies where voting is not compulsory, more than half of the population can choose not to support any candidate, yet some candidate ends up winning.
It seems to me that if >50% (generic round figure) of the population voted "none of the above"/failed to express support for any candidate (or if "none of the above" received more votes than any single candidate), then a new election should be held with new candidates, or the winning candidate is elected but for a reduced (half?) term.
As a circuit breaker to this process (to hedge against perpetual "none of the above" votes) random citizenry are selected for representative duties, similar to jury duty.
2. Have elections on a policy basis, instead of a party basis.
Let's say there are 5 candidates, who each hold different positions on particular issues. Have a question on the ballot, with people voting for each position (candidate not listed). The candidate who's own positions most closely represent that of the voting public gets the spot (or some similar mechanism). There may need to be some sort of open source/public/bottom up process for generating questions to go on the ballot.
[Answer]
"Punishment" may not be the thing you want, but many people consider dealing with the consequences of their decisions to be punishment, so let's use it as a blanket term.
First, you will need to be able to identify what constitutes fault, then how to rectify fault, and thereafter, how to conduct routine maintenance of the issue.
## 1. Identify what is fault
Faulty systems are those, which produce results that do not satisfy the intentions. So the first step is to clearly define the goals which are imposed on politicians, so that when they endeavour an action which does not benefit the goals, it will be clear. Unfortunately, this will require a rigorous process of evaluation and a considerable literacy on account of the general population.
Besides that, you will need to recognise where exactly the politician is responsible for generating fault. Where there is personal responsibility. The nature of political work is that politicians exercise discretion in order to create and maintain laws. Where did the politician overstep the discretion permitted to them?
## 2. Rectify fault
Fault creates undesirable circumstances and our duty is to rectify the situation, change the circumstances to desirable ones. Sometimes it is not entirely possible (death is a good example, replacing family members is impossible or maybe rectifying unhinged minds). In any case, there are reasonably predictable ways to make sure there are no further adverse consequences (understandably, a single abused childhood may start the demise of an entire community). So, you will need some way to figure out how to rectify and then make the person responsible for generating fault carry out the rectification. Same way as cleaning up after breaking a coffee mug. You broke it, you clean up.
Political positions are positions of power and their responsibility is management, the government of small and large institutions. Clearly, a politician who is shown to generate fault is not capable of carrying out such responsibility, so there must be management installed to oversee and direct their progress, make sure they don't screw up the rectification.
## 3. Routine maintenance
With enough data, you can reasonably identify common traits by which people who tend to generate fault can be identified and then prevented from occupying positions of power. Of a person is not unlucky, but is systematically faulty, they are obviously not suitable for power, and should be reassigned to positions which do not involve applications of personal discretion to others' livelihoods.
## 4. Bonus: systemically-induced fault
Sometimes you will not be facing "one bad apple". Instead, you'll see systemic fault generation, where positions of power attract specifically such people who are not suitable for power. This will happen when such positions are attached to benefits which do not directly relate with the carrying out of responsibilities of the position. Such that for example in the Soviet Union: people who occupied high government positions gained access to special products, such as rare caviar and cold cuts, not available to general public (regardless of available funds). In order to remove this, you will need to disconnect such benefits from positions of power and make them available to people regardless of the nature of their employment.
Corruption and crime are also generated through inability to gain sufficient means to acquire desired benefits by application of one's personal skillset. This means you will need to ensure that everyone's skillset is employed to the fullest: that there is a place for genius extortionists and contortionists in your society alike. If there is not, they will start applying their skillset in illicit ways, which will include conning their way into positions of power and leveraging that power to gain desired benefits.
[Answer]
1) Make it a crime for a politician to vote for an obviously illegal law. If a court strikes down a law by at least a 2/3 majority they have the option of declaring that the politicians should have known better.
2) Every year every sitting elected official not up for re-election instead faces a recall vote. Recall votes must state a specific action that was unacceptable and that action must have occurred (or become public knowledge) since the last time that politician faced the ballot box. The reason must be true, definitely possible and asking for something legal. (Thus Obama could not have been kicked out for failing to capture Bin Laden, or, had he captured him, failing to execute him by drawing and quartering.) If a politician gets tossed out this way all his votes since the last election go with him. Laws that were passed but now would fail are immediately struck from the books and all convictions based on them are tossed. (But the people are not eligible for wrongful-conviction compensation.) If a measure would now pass it is treated as having been passed on the date of the recall election and proceeds through the system from that point.
(Note that while on the surface this looks to involve an awful lot of work there's no need to look at the reasons unless the total is over 50% and in that case computers can chuck a lot of bad ballots. When humans analyze the ballots they'll no doubt see invalid reasons and computers could recognize many of them. (For example, chuck any Obama-recall votes with the words "birth certificate" or "Kenya".)
[Answer]
A good first step might be creating a standard agency similar to many advertising or broadcasting standards agencies. The sole purpose of this agency would be to make sure that things said by politicians (and all circumstances in which they find themselves thereafter) were accurately recorded, noted and weighed against the actions taken by the politician.
While this in itself won't satiate anybodies bloodlust, it will create a situation where many who would otherwise rise to power with no intention of following through on their promises will instead self-select themselves out of a political career.
If you also give people the ability to interact with this agency (IE to lodge complaints of 'they aren't fixing my street fast enough' or 'they said that there would be 37 billion moneys for my city and there isn't' then people will have a course of action to take that isn't just 'vote against the establishment'.
Then make knowingly lying to the public a crime (fraud, perhaps). By this point you should have people in power who genuinely want to make the world a better place/push a specific agenda, and you'll have plenty of information on what they said, to whom, and who doesn't think they're doing their job. If what they're doing matches what they said they would do, or there is evidence that they're at least pushing for it, then they're fine. Disagreements between politicians are expected, disagreements between people and the politicians they elect even more so.
If they've blatantly lied, said they were going to build a million houses and then shown no evidence of actually trying to do so: Bring in the evidence.
---
The downside to this approach is that *the entire thing* will then become politicised and used as just another tool in a good politicians arsenal. It completely removes any way for there to be under the table dealmaking and backchannel negotiations(which you may view as either positive or negative, depending upon your political leanings) and will add considerable strain to any governing body.
Oh, and it would cost the taxpayers money, which could be better spent on regulatory bodies for toasters.
[Answer]
The question presupposes that the people as a whole made a bad choice. That presumes that the masses shouldn't have self rule directly -- the ruling class needs to know the people's wishes in order to best fulfill them, but the people are incapable of choosing the actual method of fulfillment.
So, let's work with that.
The easiest answer for me is to offer the people only non-binding votes. Bread and circuses. If your fictional Machiavelli needs the populace to have an outlet for its anger, give them a Brexi... er... I mean... referendum that doesn't commit the government to any action. Then with the full power of your charisma, you can tell the masses, "We hear you are unhappy and we are going to do something to improve it."
It's like being a good lawyer: never ask a question if you don't already know the answer. In this case, never hold a vote that commits you to an action.
But I caution you... many scholars have suggested the best leaders for a republic are those who don't want the job. So maybe the vote in Iceland or elsewhere was actually exactly what needed to happen. Maybe the populace can govern itself. Maybe they really are as racist/mysogenistic/etc as the extremist party they voted for. Never discount the possibility that they know what they do.
[Answer]
In most parliamentary systems, political parties can vet their own candidates and the elected officials in parliament from a political party who know the potential leaders personally, elect the parliamentary leadership (and critically can eject the parliamentary leaders and replace them with other members of the same party if the rank and file loses faith the parliamentary leadership), so this tends to be less of a problem than in a U.S. style system when an unvetted candidate not backed by the party itself can be elected on that party's ticket.
In most U.S. style systems, politicians are loathe to attack their allies since that turns an incumbency into an open seat which could be lost by the party. Colorado has a system where vacancies in legislative seats are filled by the member's party, which reverses the incentive - your own party pushes you out if you are weak so they can have a stronger candidate when there is an election, while an opposing part wants the weak candidates to stay in so they have ammunition in the next election.
But, since parliamentary systems don't usually give citizens any direct say on the leadership chosen by elected members of parliament, when the parliament elects bad leaders voters have no safety valve to override parliamentary decisions on leadership, and so they use any referendum that comes along.
One tool that is common in the Western U.S. that could focus these issues would be to create a recall election option by filling out a sufficient petition. Then people wouldn't sublimate their efforts to express themselves to other fora. In a parliamentary system, in addition to a recall, there might need to be a way to force a snap election by petition.
[Answer]
Sometimes the old ways are best. The standard way to punish politicians throughout history has been killing them, and sometimes replacing the whole government or governmental system. (Why not, while you're at it, right?)
Say what you want about the French, [but they devised a very effective way punish their political leaders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror) when they'd had enough monarchy.
You can spend a lot of time analyzing and studying the problem here (how to hold those in power accountable for their actions), but ultimately, fundamentally, you encounter a very large, mostly unresolvable problem in that people are self-interested, and people in power have the means to protect themselves by virtue of being in power. So at a very basic level, it's nearly impossible to do what you want to do "within the system," precisely because those in power use the system to protect themselves. In modern times, that means a massive government and the resources of millions of people they can levy to their defense. Therefore, if you want a way to actually, effectively punish those in power at any kind of scale, you have little option but to burn the system down with them... at which point, you can round them up and cut off their heads, or levy whatever other punitive measures you have in mind.
[Answer]
## Skin in the game
Pay them at wages competitive with private industry -- contingent on good performance. And then, have the voters decide that by popvote.
Or whatever. I'm just looking for a pretense to have a tickable box on the ballot specifically for venting approval/disapproval of the government -- so they don't misuse the category where they select Candidate Blue or Candidate Orange.
[Answer]
Politicians are a **product of society**, in the same way physicians, teachers, etc. Punish does not solves anything, and can make it worse; one focus on politicians beacause, **the greater the power, the more obvius the weaknesses and corruption**.
The most effective way is to **truly and sincerely commit with sanitize society. Starting with self**, but not stopping there. Before blaming politicians of corruption (which is not only stole money), stop doing corrupted acts and take actions in order to those around us stop doing it, as well.
Example: If someone suspect that his/her children cheat at school, comfront it so (s)he understands and recognizes the error, and rectify it; And talk to the authorities, seeking avoind future cheats.
At the same time, one must seek, all the time, **for better controls**. Politicians must have a contract with **objective goals** (specifiying objective measure methods). And it they can't achieve them, must resign or be dismissed (and can be candidates again with other objectives, as long as they don't perpetuate).
And how avoid that some sociopath inadvertently takes control and then it is too late? Well, because **commitment within political structures** is a fundamental part of any commitment for a better society. As a quote atributed to Pluto said: *The penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by the worst men*.
Every people must engange in some sort of political activity, say one hour a week at least. It can be control some politician's act, design something, etc.
[Answer]
Make it illegal for anyone to run for office who hasn't written a legally binding contractual list of promises, e.g. if I get into office I will reduce unemployment to 5% by 2018. Something quantifiable and easily measured.
If they do not fulfil their contract the wronged party (the public) can take legal action against the politician, starting with removing them from office but being anything in the normal range of civil actions / torts, etc. (e.g. probably fines, prohibitions against running for office again, etc.) If a politician had to publicly state which campaign promises they were or weren't prepared to add to their contract you'd get a lot less of the promising-the-earth style politics that can see any prat end up in office.
Accountability in short, the kind of accountability businesses have to provide but governments don't. After all, you wouldn't sign up for a monthly broadband contract without knowing the provider was legally obligated to actually provide you with working broadband, as long as you pay your bill. Why shouldn't it be the same for governments if you're paying your taxes?
[Answer]
Allow voters to vote in a special advisor to the leader. Once a year there would be an election where advisors pushing for certain agendas can run for this role. Voters get to vote yes/no on each advisor. Once elected the leader would be obligated to meet with the advisor on a regular basis and report on progress. This advisor would server for 6 months and could be highly annoying to the leader during that time. Over 50% of the voters would have to approve of the advisor, to prevent intentional harassment of leaders by voters that don't really care about an issue.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine a world exactly like Earth, complete with humans and all. The scientists of this world suddenly discover that, unless drastic measures are taken, all life on Earth will be eradicated. However, there is one (and only one) option that can save the world, if we can get the funding. This plan would cost an exorbitant amount of money, but has a probable chance of being successful. In this situation, what would happen to the costs of the materials necessary for the plan? Would the sellers raise the price due to the increased demand, or would they lower it in order to make saving the world easier?
[Answer]
We can see what happens already. It happens daily in business. Let's get to work
>
> However, there is one (and only one) option that can save the world, if we can get the funding.
>
>
>
This phrasing indicates either an absurdly unlikely circumstance, or a partial picture. It is very unlikely that there is actually only one solution. For example, let's assume the problem is trivial: "put these 7 numbers in order: 1, 3, 5, 7, 4, 13, 20." There are many solutions such as
* Swap the 5 and the 7. Then swap the 7 and the 4
* Swap the 4 and the 5. Then swap the 5 and the 7.
* Jumble the whole group up, put it through StackSort ([read the image's tooltip](https://xkcd.com/1185/)). Then go get a drink of water.
And so forth. The actual number of degrees of freedom in the problem is quite staggering, especially when you consider the question of "what happens next after we succeed?" Are we thirsty? Maybe the plans that involved drinking water are good!
What you more likely are describing is a case where there is a hard requirement: thou shalt do X, or the entire planet dies. There may be many implementations of X which function, although your word choices indicate that most courses of action will not satisfy X.
Thus the goal of every rational actor in this scenario is two fold:
* Ensure the survival of the planet
* Ensure that, after the planet is saved, their position is as ideal as possible.
*Alternatively, [in mercenary order](http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-08-04) of priorities: 1) get paid. 2) live long enough to enjoy getting paid.*
Now this works great as long as everyone has perfect information. However, we don't. Its entirely possible that we may do our part, but someone else slacks off. In this case, we may be obliged to do even more work to save the planet, making up for the slackers. Now we're getting somewhere. This sounds a lot like a traditional Prisoner's Dilemma. This is a dilemma where two individuals (we'll call them Alice and Bob) commit a crime. There's not enough evidence to convict either one, so they are called in for questioning. There, they are provided with a dilemma:
>
> If you agree to testify against your partner, your testimony plus the evidence will be enough to convict him. This same deal is being offered to your partner. We admit, we don't have enough evidence to convict either of you without the other person admitting you two both did it, so here's the deal. If neither of you testify, we're going to convict both of you on a lesser crime, and give you both 1 year in jail. If either of you testifies against the other, they can go scott free, while the other person spends 9 years in jail. If both of you agree to testify, you'll both get convicted, but we'll only sentence you to 3 year.
>
>
>
The logic diagram looks like this
```
Alice
Quiet Testifies
+-------------+--------------+
Quiet | Alice: 1yrs | Alice: 0yrs |
| Bob: 1yrs | Bob: 9yrs |
Bob +-------------+--------------+
Testifies | Alice: 9yrs | Alice: 3yr |
| Bob: 0yrs | Bob: 3yr |
+-------------+--------------+
```
The dilemma forms because the best course of action is to both stay quiet. However, if you both realize this, you have to worry that your partner might try to decrease their own sentence by ratting you out. Thus, you must be conservative and testify. The result of the dilemma is that the most rational course of action is to testify, and both of you serve 3 years, even though you could have gotten away with just 1.
We can draw an analogy to our example. Instead of "Quiet" and "Testify," we can "Conform" to what is best for the planet, or "Defect" and do what is best for us
```
Alice
Conform Defect
+---------------------+--------------------+
Conform | Everyone lives | Everyone lives |
| Everyone is even | Alice makes money |
Bob +---------------------+--------------------+
Defect | Everyone lives | Everyone dies |
| Bob makes money | Everyone is unhappy|
+---------------------+--------------------+
```
Obviously this pattern has more players, but the basic story with two players is enough to understand what is happening. The correlary to the prisoner's dilemma suggests that everyone gets greedy, then dies.
However, that's not the end of the story for this dilemma. You see, if it was that simple, being a prosecutor or Attorney General would be a piece of cake! In reality, this doesn't work. We find that criminals refuse to snitch on each other with *remarkable* consistency. There's clearly a second force going on in the real world! From talking with criminals, we find the answer is obvious. A snitch doesn't get very far in the crime world. If you snitch, you've basically ended your career as a criminal. Nobody will work with a snitch, and everybody knows it. So this adjusts the logic of both Alice and Bob in our example. Both of them know the other person knows that snitches will be brutally punished. They may avoid a few years of jail time, but the trade isn't worth it. This knowledge is enough to get both Alice and Bob to conform, refusing to testify against their partner, and both get a year in prison.
Likewise the global "essence" will likely rise up to try to find ways to ensure conformance. This will likely be in the form of governments putting dramatic pressure on companies to not defect in the name of profit. Sure, they can defect, but it might be the straw that broke the camel's back, causing the earth to die, and even if someone else did cover for them, they'd be labeled as a profiteering pile of filth and nobody will work with them, nor accept their money.
The real question is not whether there will be defectors, but whether second order effects will creep in. At some point, when you're leaning on a company to do something "for the common good" rather than "for your own profit," you can lean hard enough that the company gives you the middle finger, and folds up instead. The challenge for the government is to find ways to put pressure on the companies without causing them to fold up.
There's another related experiment that has been done, involving two parties. Each party is assigned a random role. The first party is given two envelopes and some money, say $100. They are told to divide the money up between the two envelopes. One is money they will keep, and the other is kept by the second party. The second party is then permitted to look at the distribution of cash, and make a choice. They can either take their money, and the first person keeps theirs, or they can refuse it, and the first person gets nothing.
The game theory logic for player one is simple. The first person's goal is to get as much money as they can, without causing the second player to defect. If they defect, nobody gets any money. The second player's logic is theoretically easy: just take the money, you always profit. However, if the first player knows this, they may only leave $1.
This scenario is not well described in game theory. You actually need drama theory to make sense of the results. However, the results are easy to spot. In America, the most common result was a 50/50 split. If the first person tried to take more money, such as a 90/10 split, the second person would punish them by making sure nobody gets money.
In some African nations, the result was different. The first player would choose 90/10, and the second player would accept. When asked why, the answer would be "because \10 is better than \$0, and if I was in the first player's position, I'd have gotten to have the $90 anyways." In some groups, the split was actually quite arbitrary. It was found these groups were known for sharing everything as a group. It really didn't matter if the split was 50/50 or 90/10, they were going to pool the money later once both parties got back together!
So this is the stage for where your question really ends up. Large powers like governments will put pressure on the companies to band together and do things for the common good. The amount of pressure they can put on the companies before they defect depends on the culture.
So now we get back to the original issue of many solutions to the problem. The more solutions there are, the less pressure will be needed to ensure enough conformance to survive. As the number of solutions get smaller, more pressure will be needed, causing more companies to defect. At some point, that can be the end of humanity. However, we cannot know one way or another without a very lengthy exploration of exactly what scenario we are in, and what solutions present.
[Answer]
In such a situation of dire global emergency, it is entirely likely that governments would switch to a command-economy mode, meaning that if the vendors of the goods necessary to save the world did not voluntarily reduce their profit margins, then governments would take steps to make it a *legal necessity* for the vendors to supply the goods at cost.
In the event that the vendors attempted to decline to supply the goods entirely, the vendors' businesses could be seized and nationalised, and if necessary any persons with necessary trade secrets could be... *compelled* by whatever means necessary to divulge those secrets for the good of the entire world.
[Answer]
Ideally, the suppliers would provide the necessary materials at a reasonable price.
In all likelihood though, given the nature of humanity and the inability of the entire race to work together harmoniously (even if it would mean utter extinction), the price of the necessary components would skyrocket and a very select, very rich stakeholders would more than likely demand exorbitant compensation or concessions as the age old question of "What do I get out of it?" is raised.
More specifically, it would most likely become a case of - "If these scientists can avoid the catastrophe, why should I not monopolize the solution and charge for the privilege? After all, it's only fair that I'm properly compensated for my time and material, and those that really want to be saved will find a way to pay for it?"
I don't hold much hope for humanity.
[Answer]
I completely agree with Monty Wild that for a short-term project seizure of resources would be the probable outcome.
Two issues though that might throw a wrench into your 'save-the-world' project:
* Since when is there only 1 scientific opinion? I thought there were at least 3: the world is going to end soon - the world is going to end next century - the world is not going to end. Yes, sure, the Flat Earth society (thankfully) gets laughed at, but what about the climate change issues? Does the climate change or does it not? Also, will your population believe the scientists (so that your politicians get the support to push such a large-scale project through)?
* As long as your potential DoomsDay is more than two decades away, I think you're pretty much SOL. Humans really aren't good at planning on such long terms; any politician suggesting to seize resources for the next twenty years will get laughed out of office (or at least not reelected). And global cooperation for such a long time seems very unlikely. Putting so many resources into a single project will inevitably effect the population, and there will inevitably be a country where the population revolts and stops contributing. Which will probably trigger a domino-effect amongst the economically weaker countries, and you need to be very, very lucky if it doesn't completely destroy any chances of success.
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It is in the sellers' interest to not be wiped out by the same issue that will wipe out everyone else so suddenly, so they have no incentive to raise the price beyond the point where the plan would be put into place. However, if the high demand means their inexpensive way of making something is not sufficient, their costs will increase and their prices will likely also increase. Finally, if the solution is nonobvious, the society may have a need to offer a strong incentive for the creation of that solution, which could be in the form of a high reward and price paid for a solution. (The money is pretty meaningless if live on Earth were wiped out, though).
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The climate change analogy suggests that the response would be to deny the problem for as long as possible, and then to ensure that even if everyone else perishes the well-off have enough bunkers and tinned food to survive it.
The World War analogy suggests that there would be some combination of command economy and long-term debt (e.g. the Lend-Lease programme and the Marshall plan). Get the materials first and leave an IOU.
There would undoubtably be profiteering and some inflation of the prices. That's human nature; if, as you've set it out, there's no way the project would *not* be funded regardless of the cost, market forces don't apply. See for example the Daraprim pricing scandal: rather than the cost being related to production in any way, or ability of people to pay, the makers inflated it hugely.
If you're holding the resource necessary to save the world, the only thing stopping you from demanding *all the money in the world* for it is the risk that going too far will result in you being expropriated by the government or murdered by an angry mob.
Another example from the real world is Tamiflu and the debate over [expropriating it from the patent holders in the event of a potential bird flu pandemic](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CLGLBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=flu%20drug%20patent%20expropriation&source=bl&ots=n-eB7RuKYg&sig=G8HA4vp3l_hjJsNboUms-eUlkYs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigvqSs2-3LAhUB2xoKHfdNDVUQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=flu%20drug%20patent%20expropriation&f=false).
A bit depends on the details: is the solution building a single thing in a single place? What opportunities are there for ISS-like international cooperation? Is there a chance that the disaster might be partial, or attenuated so it only affects some part of the world? Could the problem or solution be *weaponised*? These all affect who gets to profit from and pay for the fix.
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Look at our own history for your answer.
First, even in times of war trading still happens. The currency may change, but trading it's self continues. This is even true between enemies at times. So some kind of economy would still exist.
Next look at World War 2 and some of the countries war efforts. In the USA there was an extreme drive for metals. Prices went up, and stuff got hard to find. Propaganda and similar campaigns to "Make it do" arose. Look into how that worked out. There were several lines that people would not cross (Alarm clocks, sliced bread, and beauty products) but many many more that people were willing to give up (canned goods, typewriters, toys, and appliances)
In a "do or die" situation, I would think the same basic principal would unfold, with rationing, propaganda, and and a sense of "For Earth (or what ever the world is called)" people would be willing, at least historically, to make the daily sacrifices needed to build the anti-dooms-day device.
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Quoting [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_shock):
>
> In economics, a **demand shock** is a sudden event that increases or decreases demand for goods or services temporarily.
>
>
>
Unfortunately, that article doesn't give a lot of detail, although it does point to a couple of examples (probably smaller and less dramatic than your hypothetical), and give you a name for your concept that you can use for further reading. It does back up your guess that prices increase; however, price gouging can only really occur if there is a monopoly or near-monopoly on production, and for some reason it's hard for more entrepeneurs to join in (common reasons are regulation like patents or naturally-occurring prohibitive startup costs, like drilling an oil well). Otherwise, competition between producers undercutting each other will continue to keep prices reasonable. Likely if price-gouging did arise, the government would step in and break up monopolies or lower barriers to entry (if possible) to restore competition and drop the prices again.
It may even be the case that as the industry booms, competition intensifies, economies of scale increase, and efficiency of production and investment in industry R&D actually become a higher priority, so that costs and therefore prices actually lower. This is especially likely if previously the market for some resource was pretty niche but has now become a major commodity.
However, it's also plausible that as demand increases, it becomes economically viable to pursue less efficient means of production in the name of increasing total output (suppose you have to mine some ore, and you need a certain level of purity in order for it to be actually worth digging out of the ground; as demand increases, the minimum level of purity that's "worth it" widens out). That would lead to an increase in price, but a reasonable one, since it reflects the increased underlying cost of production to keep pace with demand.
Generally the shift of a bunch of labour and resources into this Big Solution could conceivably draw resources away from general economic activity, which might see a decline in quality of life, or a crash in unstable markets or something equally dramatic. However, macroeconomics can be counterintuitive, and arbitrarily increasing consumption and giving people unproductive busywork has at times been proposed as a solution to some economic problems. I'm not really qualified to comment on that.
The prospect of imminent catastrophe will have direct social and economic impacts as well. Planning for the future now seems like less of a good idea, which makes investment seem like less of a good idea, which may lead to trouble. It's hard to say how people will individually react, and how optimistic or pessimistic they would be, but they could conceivably cause more widespread havoc. All this economist's talk becomes kind of irrelevant if people stop coming to work and start rioting instead and societal order breaks down. You may also find that people will deny that the apocalypse could possibly be happening, or even deny that it should be stopped. But that's more outside the scope of your question.
In short: demand shocks have occurred in the past, and you might want to look them up (I haven't). If competition in production is easy, that will help to mitigate the impact on prices – simply put, as soon as producing unobtanium ore because hugely profitable, mining companies will flood in until it is merely very profitable, and then continue flooding in for as long as it is more profitable than whatever they were doing before, and thus is the equilibrium largely restored. Either way, you might find that the socio-psychological impact of imminent possible doom has a more striking impact on daily life than commodity market prices anyway.
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With technology it is possible to detect Gravitational waves as Gravitational waves have been detected by LIGO. Could a species evolve to have a sense organ for detecting Gravitational waves? What types of conditions could cause a species to evolve to detect gravitational waves? How big would a biological gravitational wave detector be?
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A commonly considered life form on meter scale at liquid water temperature on a planet: **no way**. Whatever would it be for?
So reach more. What about planet *sized* life forms that live in interstellar space. SF has speculated on [life forms formed from magnetic structures millions of miles across feeding at the heliopause](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/119550/what-was-this-story-about-interstallar-magnetic-beings).
A gravitational sense might make sense for a creature like *that*.
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Basically no, unless you stretch the definitions enough that not everyone will agree it is a sense organ for a species. The measurement, as Mike pointed out, was a fraction of the charge width of a proton over several kilometers. To throw actual numbers at it, over the distance of their 4000m run, they detected a length shift of .000000000000000004m (I'm intentionally using the same units, and not relying on scientific notation). This is not easy to measure, especially given **seismic activity many orders of magnitude greater than the signal** which had to be isolated! From the [Physics Review](https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102):
>
> Each test mass is suspended as the final stage of a
> quadruple-pendulum system [56] , supported by an active seismic
> isolation platform [57]. These systems collectively provide more than
> 10 orders of magnitude of isolation from ground motion for frequen-
> cies above 10 Hz.
>
> ...
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> Another 10^5 channels record the interferometer’s operating point and the state of the control systems. Data collection is synchronized to Global Positioning System (GPS) time to better than 10μs[66]. Timing accuracy is
> verified with an atomic clock and a secondary GPS receiver at each observatory site.
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>
>
This sort of extreme accuracy is only seen in technical structures. There's at least 2 or 3 dozen atomic clocks involved in the timing measurements alone. To have it occur in organics is going to take some leaps of faith. **In general, organics prefers to build solutions which solve may problems well rather than specialized single-purpose solutions that solve one problem very well.** Organics is more likely to work around the effects of gravity waves than to build a sensor organ to observe them, at least on our scale.
One possible organic entity that could build such a detector would be a planet sized organic entity, or a solar system sized one. Once you have the entire resources of a planet or a star at your disposal, the sort of problems you might consider working on start to include things on the scale of gravity waves. It would likely be a serendipitous ability caused by the need to solve many other problems using long distance interferometery. It might solve some of the distance challenges. If you could build an interferometer the diameter of Earth's orbit, you could probably increase the minimum detection size from less than the width of a proton to half the width of a water molecule!
**Such an entity might evolve in a *very* low energy environment**, having consumed most of the usable energy in its corner of the galaxy. The tiniest shred of information might be useful for it in its quest to find more energy to consume, and gravity waves are nearly as small as they come! Of course, these entities would certainly stretch our imagination about what a living creature is. They would more likely be a strangely well organized body of dust and gas whose gravitational effects slowly generate sentience and reason like electrical stimuli do in our brains today.
**Alternatively, one might claim LIGO *is* a sense organ designed to detect gravity waves.** After all, it was constructed by a species to detect them. Sure, it's not coded in DNA, but do we really want to limit our thinking to merely things coded in DNA? Perhaps we can claim its the curiosity coded into our DNA that caused us to detect sensory organs. Can curiosity be considered a sense? Maybe. Why not! What's in a name, anyways!
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The only reason for any creature to evolve such an organ would be because it is somehow useful.
The only places in the Universe where it would be useful would be in very extreme environments, such as orbiting a Magstar, Neutron star or a black hole, where you can expect to encounter powerful gravitational waves.
While this is a staple of SF writers like Stephen Baxter, it is difficult to envision such a creature. It would probably resemble a solar sail or perhaps a large mesh antenna to "feed" off the energies being released by the rotating neutron star, the magnetic fields of a Magstar or the accretion disc of a black hole (any creature waiting to feed from the Hawking radiation of a stellar mass black hole will be hungry for a pretty inconceivable number of years [10^67]).
For a creature in that environment, gravitational energy *could* become very dangerous. The announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves suggests this was the collision of two huge black holes, the release of gravitational energy via gravity waves was the equivalent of several solar masses and a peak power output similar to the energy of the visible universe for a tiny fraction of a second.
Being a very fragile, gossamer structure in free space orbiting the extreme body, there will be a large incentive to be able to predict the changes in the environment and react to them. If we consider a large antenna like creature shaped somewhat like a spider web, there will be a preexisting nervous system to send signals down the "web lines", which might become adapted to this sort of use. Unlike LIGO, there would be several or perhaps several hundred radial lines all leading back to the "brain". If some sort of synchronous signal is already part of the anatomy (perhaps to ensure the antenna body is properly aligned) then changes in the signal strength across the various lines or the interference patterns of returning signals would serve the same purpose as LIGO, although probably on a much cruder scale. Since it would be very close to the source of gravitational waves, this would probably do.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iXqbp.jpg)
Imagine this image on a scale of thousands of kilometres....
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The short answer is no. The accuracy required by LIGO, able to detect a difference of one thousandth the size of a proton over a distance of four kilometres, is beyond the capacity of an evolved biological system, since there's no intermediate stage that would be partially useful like there is with eyes and such-like.
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Well, if the species evolved from carbon based organisms , no . However, if the creature has, say, Nanites instead of cells, could "feel" evolutionary pressures, and lived on a planet near the center of its galaxy, I suppose its possible, granted that the creature is enormous.
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LIGO is huge, but in contrast, LISA Pathfinder is very small. What they definitely do have in common is duality. LIGO is composed of two facilities a couple thousand miles apart, while LISA Pathfinder also has as its heart two free-falling (in orbit) masses. So maybe this could work for a hivemind species that has extremely (extremely extremely extremely extremely extremely extremely extremely) sensitive senses of gravity/acceleration and kinesthetics.
The kinesthetic sense would also have to be modified in that rather than awareness of the spatial orientation of a single organism's limbs, they would instead have awareness of the spacial orientation of the individual organisms in relation to each other.
As for why, maybe they live a very *very* long time and have evolved this sense from being through solar apocalypses in the past just by sheer virtue of *outliving stars*, and developing this sense in order to detect the approach of such events in order to prepare (by moving to a different system).
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Many of the answers are based on the assumption that gravitational waves are microscopic phenomena. This is of course not true, gravitational waves are as macroscopic as things get. Two giant bodies, each many many times the mass and density of the Sun, colliding at close to the speed of light and causing violent ripples in the very fabric of spacetime is not a microscopic phenomenon.
On Earth we need very sensitive equipment to detect them because such events happen to be very rare in our cosmological neighborhood, so we need to observe ones that are happening far away. For organisms that evolved in places where it's common for such events to occur nearby (and nearby doesn't mean in the same system, even the same galactic cluster would do), sensing gravitational waves may be as easy as sensing light. The usecase does not have to be very specific either - we didn't evolve to sense light so that we can react to solar phenomena, it just happens to be a type of wave abundant around us so we use its interactions with our enviornment to gain information.
In short, I would argue that if there exists galactic clusters where very massive/dense bodies are quite common, it's not only possible but likely that even ordinary planet-based lifeforms sense gravitational waves as part of daily life.
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In writing my merfolk centric fantasy novel, I've largely ignored any creatures of burden used within their society. Animals of burden were very important in the growth of human civilization, and the small supply of these type of animals (to my understanding) is one of the reasons why the Americas struggled to develop larger civilizations.
In the fantasy world of my story, I already had to confront the problem of not much usable food growing underwater - and so I simply invented a bunch of naturally growing underwater crops, that grow in abundance (though the merfolk still have a great number of issues with agriculture.)
Still though, I feel that there might be some reasons for the merfolk to use some fantasy creature, or at least domesticated version of a real sea creature, as a pack or plow animal. I am not certain how beneficial riding such creatures would be. Riding would require a lot of gear to stay on the mount (with a traditional merfolk tail) and if the mount could not swim faster than the merfolk, it's unlikely they would be in widespread use.
Cavalry I am sure what also lose much of its effectiveness. Unless you find some way to tame and ride a hostile sea creature like a shark, you probably aren't going to do anything resembling cavalry.
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## Yes, they would.
I can affirm this because mounts follow the general yet extremely potent principle of specialization : A specialized entity -person, machine or animal- will always perform better than a generalist or worse, an incompetent one at the task it is specialized in.
The very concept of giving and sharing tasks with others -and by extension domestication- relies on the idea that you cannot do every tasks as well as at least another one : Biology constraints, experience and knowledge, all of these make you specialized for something, and weaker in others... Than others. After all, you cannot be good at everything! Combining merfolk aptitude at planning and resource management with carefully chosen pet skillsets will create synergies and give generally better outcomes.
To focus on mounts, here are a few hard advantages that mounts often have over their riders. Hard because, there's very little which can match those without excruciating costs behind or some modern machines. So now grab your whale, dolphin, seahorse (ok, perhaps not them) and go for this ride :) :
#### Maximum power output and sheer mass
[Even in water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_principle), heavy house stones and tightly packed kelp balls will still be very heavy to move around. Like on land, take a big animal for these kind of tasks.
Also, have you seen an armoured horse charging at you? Worse, a war elephant? A metal-plated [cachalot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale) could break through any enemy lines with ease. Heavy mounts are great for frontline wars.
### Speed
A mount can be faster than you. Unless your merfolks are moving very fast, they'll ride a mount. If you have big [black marlins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_marlin), I wouldn't be surprised to see merfolks attached to them running races, too1.
### Burden transfer
When we basically do anything from walking to pushing stuff, we use our own energy. You can move this energy cost to a third party for two main benefits :
* First, you can sit back and relax, enjoying a nice cup of Yorkshire tea while your mount does the job, Attach a carriage to a giant medusa, throw it in the [Gulf stream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream) and you're in for a gentle, peaceful ride along the flows.
* They act as energy batteries. Use a pair of walruses to travel from Kelpington to Coral City, then exchange them for another pair to reach New Beach's town. You travelled twice if not thrice the distance you would have made alone, with very little efforts from your part.
### Social
Because not everything is physical, animals are also known to help people get through hard times or to live better with their mental disorders. Dolphins could be a good alternative to horses in that regard : smart enough and very social, sea?
Also, having a mount displays the social status of someone : If you manage to feed your 5 orcas, it means you have a good chunk of meat and money in your palms. Any people of high-status would have one mount just to show they're comfortable financially. In other words, rare or tough to tame mounts can make great [positional goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good).
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1 : Well... I would be bubbling out loud of surprise by the whole scene, but not because of their speed :p.
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Oxen, mules and company were not useful because they were fast, they were useful because they allowed to have more power available to perform tasks which would have otherwise taken the effort or several humans or be plainly impossible.
Therefore, if you can have a domesticated creature to help with for example transporting loads, that's already a win. You mentioned the difficulty of having the equivalent of agriculture: normally life rich waters are such because of the effective circulation between the surface and the bottom, mixing and transporting nutrients; a water beast of burden could be used to raise nutrients from the bottom through the water column, helping improving its productivity. This would be the water equivalent of tillage for land agriculture.
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As a human-sized merfolk, especially with children, I think a pet porpoise, or even a pet killer whale, could be quite protective against sharks. Much like having a pet wolf, or pet bear or elephant.
The porpoise is about our same strength, but even without much in the way of natural weaponry, they are smart and fast and a nose butt can kill a shark; sharks fear them. And porpoises have "adopted" and protected humans at sea from sharks. Don't you want your mer-kids out playing with a porpoise or two?
Killer whales are fast, smart, far stronger than humans and as deadly as their name against sea predators. Thus good protectors. And if they can be domesticated to help carry burdens -- how much of a slaughtered whale can one of them carry home, versus one mer-folk?
Wolves were great hunters all on their own, better than humans in several respects (speed, scent tracking, hearing) but teamed up with humans because of our brains, our strategy, and our technology, we could kill at a safe distance, and take prey wolves could not. We provided them with a steady supply of food, and for animals that intermittently starved and gorged, a steady supply was enough. And they "get" working in packs (so do porpoises).
Find ways your merfolk with human intelligence makes life in the human pack easier and emotionally satisfying for the porpoises and killer whales, and they will provide both muscle and protection as their role in your society.
One thing I think humans could do that they cannot is provide some sort of medical care. Just like dogs and some other animals, saving an animal in dire need of medical care can create a loving friend for life. That includes feeding a starving animal, rescuing a trapped animal, warming a freezing animal.
I'm not sure what the analogs are for merfolk, or what you have them doing for a living, but get creative, translate the dynamics that led to us landfolk domesticating land animals, into merfolk domesticating sea animals.
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# Chariots, chariots, chariots
Once upon a time, humans had a similar problem to the one you envision for your merfolk: they had a bunch of horses that were not that strong individually, and couldn't carry a rider very quickly or for long distances. So they tied a bunch of them to a cart and put a guy with weapons in the cart. The weight is distributed between individual animals, making it much less tiring.
Until horses were bred to bear an individual rider, chariots dominated plains warfare. Your merfolk could do the same, with the added bonus that they don't even have to invent the wheel for it! Just stick the "rider" into a harness, give them reins to control their pack of trained squids or whatever, and go for it. Give the merfolk long lances to avoid the problem of reaching the enemy.
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# Humans already use underwater mounts so yes.
Humans spend less time underwater than merfolk [and use mounts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal), why wouldn't merfolk?
Dolphins, sea lions, and seals are most commonly used as they're very intelligent and easily trained. They can carry great loads, detect enemies and food with sonar, and their bodies are much better suited to moving quickly.
Unless the merfolk are magically quick, their bodies probably aren't as well suited to the sea as actual underwater animals who are fully ready for it. Having underwater servants is a massive advantage to any prosperous nation.
# For riding, just hang on the back.
You could likely design some sort of rope to hold on the back. You swim behind the dolphin, being dragged by it and adding in your speed to move.
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Orcs are just as smart as humans. They have access to all the resources they need to survive in abundance. Why are they constantly at war?
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#### INFO
Orcs are a society of roughly 0.8 Million people. Each member of their society needs roughly half again as much food as an adult human, and they have access to this from advanced farming techniques.
They have access to abundant natural resources, all manner of luxury items, and a massive space. It is, in most regards, a natural utopia.
However, the Orcs are constantly at war. They raise armies instead of crops, and break alliances when they see fit. They are the scourge of society. **Why?**
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#### MORE INFO
* The Orcs have a similar intelligence as a human, and the same lifespan.
* The Orcs migrated to this area before their civilization began, so if your answer uses culture, please consider this.
* Magic exists but is limited; please don't use this in your answer.
* Late medieval tech level for the orcs, as with their neighbors. There are other countries with early-to-middle renaissance, but they are far away and unimportant.
* The lands surrounding them are peaceful, but offer a fierce resistance. Their land is not the Utopia the orcs have, and is in fact resource-scarce. They do not provoke the orcs, but are capable of defending themselves.
* More info may be added when needed.
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**Cultural Misunderstanding.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yunpM.png)
Orc clans raid each other several times a year. Usually during the Summer after the harvest, when there is plenty to eat and steal, but sometimes during the Winter when the fields are empty and there is nothing else to do.
The Raid is seen as a game for the orcs, a way to harden up their young people and give them a taste of battle. If your tribe raids my tribe and carries off some good stuff, the neighboring tribes might point their fingers and tease me. But I won't declare open war on your people. However my youths will make damn sure they raid you double hard next time -- IN YOUR FACE SUCKERS!
Orcs rarely die during these raids, as the focus is on carrying off horses and goods rather than killing each other. Even then the Orcs' heal faster and better than humans so an incapacitating wound might not be fatal.
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**Note:** When raiding Orcs favor blunt weapons, as they are slightly less deadly, and don't use any sort of slings or bows. This in part leads to the humans as viewing the orcs as primitive. In reality they have advanced metal and ranged weapons. But those are for warfare and not for the raid.
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On the other hand the defenders want to capture the raiders alive and ransom them back to their families. In this way the defenders can end up richer than the attackers.
Usually however it is a draw. Some horses and grain and tools and meats are stolen, and some raiders are captured and ransomed. Often the stolen goods are used to pay the ransoms. Each clan suffers nominal losses and goes into the next raid with renewed enthusiasm.
The problem appears when an Orc clan lives next to a human city. The Orcs expect the humans to be ready for them, to raid and be raided by the humans as a matter of course.
What they don't expect is for the first raid to be an utter bloodbath. These humans are puny of course, but they don't play ball. They keep all their REALLY good stuff in one or two places in the city, but those places have stone walls and metal portcullises, and loads of guys with metal armor and sharp sticks.
On the other hand, when you break into peoples houses to nick their candlestick and spinning wheel they scream and fight to the death. They are especially vicious if there is a baby human in the room. Don't they know we would never hurt a baby? What would be the point?
But they scream and scream and that brings extra humans. Even some of the tough guys with the sharp sticks. The raiding group is outnumbered and flees in terror. Then the humans raise an army and march over the border.
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# Population control
Orcs reproduce on a *massive* scale, compared to other species. Without the invention of contraception, their numbers would grow to unsustainable numbers, so their culture developed many different ways to mitigate this.
Those ways include:
* Dangerous sports for fun and prestige
* Sacrifices to honour their gods
* Ritual combat for property, romantic partners, special privileges and such
* War against neighboring countries.
# Slaves
* The Orcs might have utopic lands, but why farm it yourself if you can force someone else to do it?
# Religion
* Regardless of what the gods want - if you promise people a transcendent afterlife (instead of a regular or terrible one) if they die honourably in battle, they'll have no reason *not* to go to war.
# Good, old-fashioned Xenophobia/Supremacism
* Sure, sometimes it's nice to bargain with the neighbours. But why hold up your own end? After all, they're only humans. Compared to the Mighty Orcs, they're not *much* better than animals. I mean - they're not even *green!* and even if they may appear sentient, those tiny little teeth could *never* hold a "True Soul".
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## They are more Emotional than Humans
Intelligence is only one factor when considering how a person (or orc) will behave. Hormones play a major factor as well. Despite being an intelligent species, humans quite often make very reckless choices because of the feelings we have. Picture the difference between a woman's aggression and patience at different points in her natural cycle. Now picture PMS as being the stable end of an orc's natural cycle. Then try to picture a state significantly amplified to represent a female orc's version of PMS, and a male orc's normal state being somewhere in between these two points.
Although orcs are able to reason out that the humans near their borders are not worth attacking, their gut feelings tell a different story. When a human feels slightly offended, an orc feels mortified. When a human feels aggravation, and orc feels rage. This gives orcs a very smash first, think later nature.
## Hormones Impact Etiquette
Because of these strong emotions, orc society has developed such that all orcs are extremely considerate of each other and have developed a very high standard of empathy to keep from triggering one another. They have very strict, almost ritualistic rules of manners to make sure they are not constantly offending each other and starting fights. Orcs always knock, and wait 3 seconds before entering a room. They always raise their hands before they speak to make sure they do not interrupt a conversation. They always use "I feel" instead of "You make me feel" to prevent blame escalation. And if an orc sits down during a debate, it is because he/she needs time to collect their emotions so all other orcs in the room stop talking until the upset orc is recollected. And most importantly, they always send their families and neighbors well thought out gifts on important holidays to make sure everyone feels known and important.
## This Makes War Practically Unavoidable
But those rude, heartless humans... they just walk right up to you and start talking, they interrupt, they never stop to ask how your feel, they are condescending. But what really makes things difficult: they never EVEN ONCE remembered to send the orcs a proper Autumn Equinox gift. A good orc knows that the Autumn Equinox is when you visit your neighbor tribes to make sure everyone has enough food stored for the winter, but the humans never check on the orcs, and when the orcs try to check on the humans, they just lock their gates and start yelling and this makes orcs angry. Angry enough to want to smash in the gates and start slaughtering everyone inside.
>
> Their land is not the Utopia the orcs have, and is in fact resource-scarce.
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This makes the situation even worse. If the orc lands are rich in resources, and the human lands are poor in natural resources as described, then this powder keg may in fact have fusses burning from both ends. Humans go to war over resources all the time. If the orcs have them and the humans do not, then the humans will likely feel compelled to take those resources by force. Humans don't check on neighboring kingdoms to make sure they have enough food for winter, they just pillage each other if they don't. So, between the humans offending the orcs, and the orcs having what the humans want, war is pretty much inevitable.
## Once Started, the War Can Not Be Ended
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The humans of this generation may have learned a long time ago not to provoke orcs, but that does not mean that humans in the past knew better.
If an orcish parent tells her children about how hundreds of years ago humans attacked the orclands, the children take this VERY personally, because that is how their emotions work. This maddening hate for humans could last for generations, perhaps even growing worse over time as each telling of the stories is amplified by the disdain of each new generation; so, even if the orcs successfully drive the humans away once, when the humans return 200 or 300 years later with peaceful intentions, the sins of their forefathers are not forgotten, and certainly not forgiven. While the humans see the war with the orcs as a footnote in history; to the orcs, humans are and forever will be bitter enemies.
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### Religion
They worship a god who delights in war, not unlike [Gruumsh](https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Gruumsh_(3.5e_Deity)) from Dungeons & Dragons. Making war is simply one of the ways they can please their god; if they don't, they believe they will be punished.
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# The thrill of the hunt
Orcs are simply wired differently. They don't dislike good food, riches are nice, and a decadent lifestyle isn't unfulfilling, but it isn't great either.
To an orc, to be in the middle of battle is to truly live. Feeling the blood flowing inside (and often outside) the body, fighting an opponent not knowing if they will die, is utter bliss. Not even the best drugs can compare to the ecstasy of battle. To the Orcs then, war is akin to THE sport. Battle after battle, there is no way to feel more alive.
Now Orcs would be content fighting each other but don't really like killing their friends. Enemies races, however, aren't friends and bring similar opposition. Gaining something (battles) without murdering friends. Orcs thus intentionally provoke all races surrounding them so that they have more wars.
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## It is the only option they believe they have
From their point of view it could be the only option they think they have, they've angered all the surrounding kingdoms and believe if they try to settle down and make farms the surrounding kingdoms will just come and take their crops and other stuff, just like what the orcs did to them. So they keep raiding and pillaging to keep their status quo, which they believe is the safest option.
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**Testosterone**
Orcs have evolved with a natural elevated level of testosterone. Their ancestral environment was not nearly so utopian as is now. It was much more highly competitive with a high number of predatory species. Competition between predatory species bread conflict into their behavioral DNA.
**Male Female birth ratio**
Compounding conflict oriented behavior, the environment favored male offspring as the death rate of fighting males was in the past high. Where humans have a birth rate of 1.05-1.06 male to 1 female, Orcs have a birthrate of 1.1 males to 1 female. Increased testosterone and reduced availability of suitable mates again agitates the societal fabric, galvanizing a culture of "Gather what you can take own what you can hold."
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Overpopulation
Orcs breed much faster than humans and reach full maturity age 6. To prevent overpopulation and ensure that the strongest go on to breed again, every generation goes to war with either other orc communities or human communities. The actual outcome of the war isn't as important as the fact that population rates remain the same.
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You have identified the problem of race essentialism. This is an opportunity for you to write different orcs. Write orcs who are poets, dancers, gardeners. You're right that it makes not sense for them to be at war all the time. So do something different.
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I'm creating a city in a fantasy setting that has no magic in a medieval earth-like world. The city is located near a huge mountain range. It used to be a small city but grew large with relative success in the mining industry.
The psychoactive substance or drug was discovered in the mountains by chance and grew popular within the city slums and subsequently it became a huge and frowned upon trade export.
However I'm not sure how to physically manifest the substance in terms of material or how it has obtained.
I initially thought of the substance as a by-product of the ore extraction/refining process, so it goes hand in hand with the cities industrial growth. But I'm not too keen on that now. I thought of fungus too but I want something on a larger scale than just mushroom picking in a cave.
The substance will also have some religious impact later on in the story too i.e. forgotten tribes of the mountain who originally discovered the substance centuries earlier.
Thanks guys, this is my first post so take it easy :)
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Psychoactive drugs are very unlikely to originate from mining and minerals. They are very likely to originate from plants or fungi. Your idea of a fungus was a good one and [psilocybin mushrooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom) (magic mushrooms) in particular would be a good choice.
Archaeological evidence suggests that psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used by humans since prehistoric times including in religious rituals and there are over 100 species of Psilocybe mushrooms distributed across Europe Asia and the Americas.
Effects include euphoria, altered thinking processes, closed and open-eye visual synesthesia, an altered sense of time, and spiritual experiences.
Cannabis and Opium Poppy could also be used along with many other possibilities.
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If it doesn't have to be a real Earth plant, then there are quite a few possibilities, tea being one of the more promising.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ljxhz.jpg)
Traditional tea is made from the leaves of [Tea bushes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Cultivation_and_harvesting). The leaves are picked, dried, boiled, and then the liquid is drunk.
Lots of other plants and herbs are prepared this way for medicinal purposes, and this could be the source of the drug.
A miner in the mountians notices a plant that he hasn't seen grow anywhere else. He has a bit of a botany background from helping his healer grandma in her medicinal herb garden, and decides to see if this plant has any useful properties.
He makes a tea, and then [follows her instructions on how to safely test a plant](https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/universal-edibility-test.htm) to make sure it's not deadly. And then it gets trippy.
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# Model your drug on coffee
As explained by the most excellent CGP Grey:
[**Caffeine is the world's most used psychoactive drug**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTVE5iPMKLg).
The fact that caffeine is available this was is not immediately obvious to the eye. As explained in the video: the process to get caffeine is to harvest the berry when it is just ripe, extract the seed, dry it, roast it, grind it, and brew it. I honestly wonder how someone thought of this in the first place.
[The coffee industry in the world is **substantial**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee#Commodity_market).
[Coffee has been used in religious/occult contexts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee#Folklore_and_culture).
With this you have everything you need:
* A psychoactive drug
* Complex and forgettable knowledge needed to extract it
* Industrial production once known
* Occult/religious use
So model your drug on coffee, make changes as you see fit, and there you are.
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Going with your "industrialization" idea. There are some things that grow well underground and you could have the origin being a fungus that grows rapidly in the conditions created by mining, which isn't far-fetched at all.
In Colorado, for example, Bats, have taken up residence in abandoned mines. They leave their droppings on the floor of the mines, and various insects and bacteria feed on the droppings.
Come up with a way for the organism to get introduced to the mines, such as a nearby cave, maybe a cave utilized to get to the ore more quickly.... (the deposits are into the mountain several Kilometers, and going through the cave got them there more quickly.) Then, when introduced to the mine, there is something in the mine (the ore or tailings) that makes the organism grow much more quickly. (maybe the cave's proximity to the ore made for the right environment for it to grow at all, then when actually put in the midst of the nutrient which makes it grow faster, it's growth increases to the point where it can be gathered in more than just small quantities in the cave?
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# Opium
Its [long history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium#Ancient_use_.28pre-500_CE.29) allows it to be referred to at just about any technological level also it can to be something known rather than having to discover it along your story line. You can discover the plant growing rather than having to discover knowledge about it.
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> Opium has been actively collected since prehistoric times. Though western scholars typically estimate this to be around 1500 BCE. Indian scholars maintain that the verses and the history contained in them have been orally transmitted thousands of years before.
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> Opium was used with poison hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death, but it was also used in medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, c. 1500 BCE, describes a way to "stop a crying child" using grains of the poppy plant strained to a pulp.
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Poppies grow easily on any disturbed ground, they're not particularly climate dependent so you can just have it springing up on the heaps of disturbed soil from your mining operations.
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**TL;DR: A plant or fungus-based narcotic is probably the most realistic, but you can also consider crystal-like or liquid-based substances as well. Or even a naturally-occuring gas.**
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If you don't want to go the plants/fungus route, you can also consider a crystallized substance. An excellent example would be [**glitterstim**](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Glitterstim) or [**spice**](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Spice) from the Star Wars universe. There are actually two variants of the drug, but the more potent of the two is a by-product of the energy spiders on Kessel digesting ore found in the rock.
Following the discovery of how it's produced, the owners of Kessel (primarily Lando Calrissian) undertook vast conservation efforts, understanding that the spiders could no longer survive and/or produce spice once the ore veins had been mined out.
The weaker variation, called [**ryll**](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ryll/Legends), is a naturally-occurring substance scattered throughout the subterranean caverns of the planet Ryloth.
The [**spice melange**](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_Melange) of the Dune franchise would be another example of this.
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Another possibility is a naturally-occurring liquid substance like [**alcohol**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol) - perhaps one found underground in well-like springs. It's not beyond the realm of reality that underground water could be laced with minerals while travelling underground, only to emerge in certain spots as a liquid with psychoactive and/or narcotic properties. Or maybe the substance gets created when microscopic organisms rot in the water over time causing [fermentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermentation).
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Lastly, you could go the route of a gaseous substance - something along the lines of [**natural gas**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas), but used as a narcotic rather than an energy source. As an example, [nitrous oxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide) (laughing gas) can be found in the atmosphere here on Earth, albeit in small quantities.
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It doesn't need to be a plant: some toads (notably the cane toad in Australia) produce venom in their skin which has psychoactive effects. Maybe the local analogue of the rat does something similar. Not only is this creature a pest in a city because it eats and spoils food, but it also produces a venom with psychoactive properties. Raw venom is seriously toxic of course, but it turns out that if you boil it with the juice of a local berry the poison is neutralized leaving just the psychoactive component. Or if you want to go weird you could have a variant on this: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Siberia>
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Just for completeness... if you really want a mineral drug, such does exist. [Bromide salts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_bromide) (which are obtained from ocean salt and also side products of potash production) are sedatives and anti-seizure medications (thought not the safest medicines out there...). There is even a saying about a phrase being a ['bromide'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromide_(language)), meaning that it's boring (puts you to sleep).
I don't think lithium is entertaining enough to be addictive (it is, of course, found in minerals, too), but a fun fact is that the soft drink 7-up was originally [Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up) and contained lithium citrate.
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How about a lichen or moss that only grows on mineral exposed through excavation?
This way you can build a moral conflict between prosperity through mineral trade and misery through drug abuse.
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Silphium?
Ergot?
They grow some plants/trees and the ergot grows on the plants when the plants are stored in (mighty) faggots in the caves?
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In environmental studies, very often the reasons for a specie thriving is a result of mixed reasons (see <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/11/cancers-invasion-equation>).
You can pretty much invent any kind of organism that contains a psychoactive substance, that is thriving in your environment by the mixed means of:
* abundant nutrition
* lack of predators
* perfect temperature / light conditions.
each one of these parameters hold a potentialy juicy backstory:
* how the mining led to use chemicals that allowed eg some fungi to overgrow
* how the first settlers of the city came with pets who killed local species.
* how the darkness of the mines created space for a formerly restrained process.
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Because you specifically mentioned mountains as the geographic origin of your psychoactive agent, this is one of my favorites, based on **Earth's Himalayan honey bees**. I highly recommend watching the video.
<http://awesci.com/the-hallucinogenic-honey-from-the-himalayan-bees/>
<https://youtu.be/Y_b2i_FvYPw?t=14m30s>
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You say you'd be dissatisfied with the scale of "mushroom picking", but mushrooms aren't the only psychoactive organisms around, and they certainly aren't the only ones possible. Imagine a psychoactive species of mold that thrives on the surface of exposed, moist [choose a mineral ore that is economically important in the region]. Someone discovers (maybe even by accident) that if your finely pulverized [whatever] ore gets damp, you will soon have a big, gritty pile of this psychoactive mold. Suddenly mining sites are being robbed of entire carts full of ore to be ground into powder for growing party mold. Maybe even the legitimate mining companies get in on it if there's no moral panic associated with the drug. That would scale up nicely.
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It sounds like you want something plausible but unexpected, outside the common substances in the real world? How about an invasive insect (body, eggs, secretions?) that either thrives on the waste of the city (starving beggar eats it and becomes a mystic; waste workers cleaning things start to see things; kids who like to pick up bugs because thats how kids are start having vivid imaginary friends, lots of possibilities) or on some mineral in the mine tailings. The insect could have been introduced as the city became a hub for commerce, rather like the reintroduction of bedbugs to american cities.
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If it's OK for your hallucinogen to be fictional then some variety of mineral, such as "handwavium crystals", perhaps also known as "crystal wave", might be used. If you "need" it to be "real" in "the real world" (and which one is *that*, might I ask? :-) then I think you'll find that rocks and minerals aren't particularly hallucinogenic. For that you'll need to turn to the ever-popular worlds of plants and fungi. Poppies, cannabis, various fungi, and the leaves of numerous plants are all hallucinogenic to some degree or another.
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What you need to think is that it doesn't HAVE to be made from a single source. It can be a cocktail-type drug, manufactured from multiple ingredients.
Since you're keen to the industrialization background, you can maybe factor in some by-products from the manufacturing industry (salts, effluents and the like), which are deadly in original concentrations, but have a pleasant intoxicating feeling when diluted adequately.
Combine this with some plant extracts to act as the diluting agent or something, some naturally-occurring seeds to give another pleasant caffeine-like buzz, and you've got your super-drug.
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**Bacteria**,
You could have some kind of subterranean bacteria that lives in the mines and your psychoactive chemical could be a secretion of this biological goo as it eats at the ore that is mined here.
Medieval peoples didn't really know what a bacteria was, so it could just seem to them to be some kind of slime that grows on exposed ore, or it could bioluminescence on the mineshaft walls. This would make it seem magical or fit in with your religious requirement. The only real sticky point here is that even though you know it's bacteria for someone of that era they would not necessarily know that. So I would be careful on how I describe this within their worldview as they may not understand how it works on a fundamental level. For them it could be just "soul fire" or some other quasi mystic stuff, like "faerie dust".
I wouldn't be a stretch to say they found it originally in a natural tunnel, that was used by these previous peoples as a place of worship. It could be a naturally occurring bacteria.
This stuff could be easily killed by UV radiation so that it's hard to transport the live bacteria (which is harmless / non-infectious if ingested) the point is to control where it can be produced.
If it's just a plant growing on the side of the mountain, it would be easy to cultivate and "steal" it from them. But if it only grows on a particular type of ore and needs care when transporting it to "seed" a new mineshaft it's much harder for someone to do that. This way they could maintain a monopoly on it. This would make the environment/area it grows in more valuable.
For example: Maybe it would have to be shielded from the harsh light when transported. Perhaps it could be transported only short distances or even require an environment that matches the original tunnels it came from while being transported. Which may not be an easy feat with their tech level, but could allow them to scale up production by transplanting it to new mine shafts locally.
There could be some special ways to collect and process the stuff it produces, but I cant think of anything else that's creative in that regard.
Just an idea I didn't see posted
Cheers.
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Building on the universe established in [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/21142/how-do-you-find-a-mate-when-everyone-looks-amazing), what happens to identity verification when someone's physical appearance and genetic code are modifiable at any time?
Review of universe rules:
* All genetic disorders have been eliminated. Children are tested at birth for [disorders](http://www.genome.gov/10001204) and those disorders are eliminated. Eugenics doesn't play a role here as every outward attribute is maleable.
* Genetic manipulation is cheap, ubiquitous, and perfect (no side-effects or unintentional changes).
* Genomes are cheap to sequence ($10/genome).
* Gene treatments are capable of manipulating every single characteristics of a person's body, including but not limited to, hair color, eye color, skin color, facial structure, body fat distribution, height, musculature, sex.
* Near-future (max 2025) technology levels. (Admittedly, genetic manipulation of this kind is probably not going to be available in the next 10 years, but just go with it.)
* Genetic manipulations are highly regulated with perfect enforcement of regulations by a global regulatory body. This doesn't preclude people from making illegal genetic changes, just the assurance that they will be caught and the changes reverted.
* Manipulation of the brain or brain chemistry is strictly prohibited. (Sorry, schizophrenics, your time will come.)
Additional rules:
* While the treatments are very monetarily cheap for all possible manipulations, the changes themselves can be painful and lengthy. For example, adding two inches to your height would require time off your feet and some painkillers as your bones, tendons and muscles reform themselves to the new genetic blueprint.
* Genetic privacy is tightly regulated with long court histories protecting a person's genome; think European privacy laws only with stronger penalties and tighter enforcement.
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To establish a user's identity, three different components may be used, something the user has (such as a credit card), something the user knows (PIN to a credit card) or something permanently attached to the user (fingerprints or facial recognition). Strong authentication or [two factor authentication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication) relies on having two of the three identification components.
With this new gene manipulation technology, biometric authentication no longer works the way it did. Looking at someone's picture on a drivers license or taking fingerprints no longer unequivocally establishes someone's identity.
*What kind of technological and/or regulatory solution(s) might be used to ensure that a person's identity can be verified with 99.99999% accuracy?* (At this degree of accuracy, a misidentification will occur once in every million identification attempts) Broader changes to society as a result of amorphous physical identities are outside the scope of this question.
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You already answered your own question.
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This perfect regulation could be used to create a transaction log, or tlog.The numerical representation of one's generic code could be hashed before and after each modification, then appended to one's ID as part of the "perfect enforcement." The more modifications, the longer your hash is.
Given the absolute mastery of genetic modification, the "ID" could be something innate, such as the insertion of inert "junk DNA." The same hash could be included on a person's smart ID card. Casual identification could be as simple as bumping cards (like with some smart phones, perhaps as part of a handshake or hug) for temporary transfer is your hash, then touching/breathing onto/licking the card to allow for comparison.
I may flesh this out over the weekend, but it seems good enough to get the idea across.
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[Digital Signatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature)
After modification, your genetic code will be "signed" by the regulatory body, using secured private keys. Then that signature will be appended to your "junk" DNA areas as well as stored in a master user database. It can then be verified by anyone using the available public keys.
This will allow unique verification of the individual regardless of any modifications, and isn't avoidable without illegal gene mods.
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You are looking for something that no society has yet found a need to develop: a method of identification which yields the right answer anywhere *near* that success rate.
It does bring up the question of how you wish to measure the effectiveness of this identification. Once you get that deep into trying to "perfect" something statistical, we have to talk about false-positive and false-negative rates separately. For example, we can always have a statistical test whose false-positive rate is 0.000001 (A person who is not you can impersonate you only 1 in a million times) simply by raising the false-negative rate (You may fail to identify as yourself, say, 30% of the time). When going for statistical perfection, always remember that there are no perfect statistics.
As for the trifecta of security (something you have, something you know, and something you are) I think you ave correctly identified that the "something you are" is the only tricky one. However, it is worth noting that **the vast majority of biometric identifications are not believed to be stored in genetic code, but rather develop quasi-randomly during our time as an embryo**. For instance, fingerprints *types* are inherited, but the details used for fingerprint matching are not. They develop between weeks 10 and 15 of a fetus' development. ([source](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-ones-fingerprints-sim/))
However, if you want a *really* solid identification, start with a friend. A good impersonator should not be able to dupe a close friend over long periods of time. It's technically possible, but such connections go deep enough that it is highly likely a friend would be able to detect that something is up.
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Perhaps mitochondrial DNA could be used in lieu of nuclear DNA. I would imagine this would lead to a lot of paranoia about falling hair/skin etc.
Alternatively a part of the genome that does not code for a protein could be used, i.e. an existing superfluous region or one that was added in. The location of this piece in the genome would likely be the identifying factor that only the individual/regulatory body would know.
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What does appearance have to do with identity? Do you not recognize your acquaintances if they put on different clothing, change hair styles or colors, grow or shave facial hair, even gain or lose large amounts of weight? (Or in the case of women, get breast implants?) Changing other factors would be no different.
Banking accounts &c would be dealt with just as they are online now. As others have pointed out, most banks, mutual funds, credit card companies, and so on have never had any physical contact with their customers.
For the governments who want to control their populations, too effing bad. Technology has just made this impossible. Consider that in most places it's only been within the last century or so that there was any concept of government ID.
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Simple ... change yourself beyond recognition = loose your identity. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Once you eat it, it's gone. Same with changing your identity. To the demand "But I want too ... please?" the answer is a simple "no". Trying to fool people by changing your genetic code has it's consequences.
Another consideration is that the gene's that make up say your height comprise such a minuscule amount of your DNA that your DNA will still be indistinguishable from any other being in the universe past, present, or future. For this reason genomic identity can never be fooled or changed.
Besides, it will never be a easy as you make it sound. Consider this ... one would think that we could clone blood cells instead of doing blood drives yes? Believe me when I say 10's millions have gone into that research ... consider the windfall of revenues for the manufacturer let alone considering the lives saved. The problem is that all efforts to clone mere blood cells (white or red) have been miserable in the quality control department ... and that's normal cells, not custom designed ones. The result is cancerous blood cells, and all it takes is a tiny percent of a percent to wipe out the whole container. That should be child's play compared to what you are talking about and yet despite all the funds going into it they say best case it will start being viable 20 years from now ... to make a blood cell to put in a person. Which, if historical medical advances is any indication, it will likely be 50 years down the road and still fraught with innumerable disadvantages.
Sorry to be a killjoy, but hey my second paragraph about should at least give you an answer to show were it doable it wouldn't be an identity problem.
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It would be impossible to have 99.999% accuracy with genetics completely out of the question (eye, voice, fingerprints, DNA, etc). [DNA tests](http://www.dna-geneticconnections.com/dna_accuracy.html) are accurate now with 99.9% accuracy when given valid samples.
Without using DNA, it would come down to memorized information and/or electronic verification. Lots of security questions or information about someone only you would know (cross checking). Digital security will hopefully be more secure and you may have to keep an implant or electronic id that is always signed to whatever your current DNA makeup is. There would have to be strict laws on keeping id with you at all times.
With advanced technology, though criminals will also advance. Forgeries, copies, fakes, and (identity) thefts will be just as prolific as now and will cause more harm than they do now. If someone can steal your identity card/chip or stalk you to know what you know, there is no way to prove with certainty that you are who you say you are.
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Probably they brand every child [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8UjVU.jpg) after birth with something like this?
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Firstly: It's worth mentioning that genetics does not and cannot be used on its own to effect a change in a person. Genes are the blueprint your body is built to, but once you've been built all that changing the plans is going to do is confuse things.
Anyway: Let's assume some process that's capable of rebuilding a person to the exact specifications given in a certain genetic code. We still run into problems. While gross characteristics (height, eye/skin/hair colour) can be modified, some absolutely unique identifiers remain unique regardless of genetic interference. Examples are fingerprints, iris patterning and vocal patterns. These don't develop identically even given identical genetic structures, and so could potentially still be used.
Anyway: Let's assume that the appearance modifying tech is perfect, and that one person can become an absolutely down to the micron clone of another human, just with a different brain structure. Now we're down to some pretty esoteric non-memory based identification mechanisms. Two recommendations would be subconscious patterns of behaviour (tells) or walking gait. I favour gait. Even if your body is physically identical one person's brain will still send messages to the body in a unique way (as brain modding is not allowed). This means that any two people will use the same body differently. Remember how awkward you felt going through growth spurts in puberty? Modifying yourself would induce that, and different brains would settle for different ways of handling it. Long strides or short? Roll the hips or swivel the hips? Do you use the balls of your feet or put all your weight through your heels? Whole criminal cases have been based on patterns of wear on shoes that come from how a person habitually walks, and that isn't wholly a function of genetics.
Anyway: Lets assume that both the body and the brain/body links are identical. If your society is suitably advanced and the genetic modding is as regulated as you say, then a person's genetic history can be used as their ID. Use genome for everything, from paying for food to checking in for airline flights, and build in unique markers. Sure: a person with sufficient illegal links could get their UID changed to that of another person, but the instant they try to use it the wonderfully interlinked Genetic Security Grid (which track all legal genetic modifications and is linked to all genetic security devices) will throw up an error in the same way that credit card companies detect fraud. If your genome is used in the wrong place at the wrong time then the security forces descend, detain both clones and go through a lengthy interrogation process.
Anyway: There's still issues here in that a suitably clever criminal can change genome, meet their clone and switch places. This is where you apply the same processes as mints do. Embed a chip in every legally modified person. Use some decently scrambled identification information, and match the chip to a specific cocktail of drugs with long lasting metabolic rates. You can even go as far as encoding security information in bone striations detectable by X-Ray. Do this in a suitable way (along with physical measures on the chip such as micro-dimpling or miniature holographs) and it becomes nigh on impossible to match your genetic UID to someone else's without missing out a critical piece of information on the chip or in the drug cocktail or accidentally setting off the genetic fraud alarms.
All of the above assume a level of biological and technological prowess a long way ahead of our own. But I think that fits in with your world in general.
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Given this rule, my first thought was ultra fast and hyper accurate brain scans of the outward folds and contours of the brain, or perhaps the network of blood vessels within it. Maybe you have to think of a phrase/picture/idea and the resulting patters of brain activity will identify you.
This seems to be the one physical part of the body that is relatively untouched by all this modification and thus the place to start.
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Anything over the Internet or phone can't use your physical appearance to identify you - why not take a page from their book?
Broadly, there are three forms of authentication:
* **Something you know** like a password. If you don't have a shared password with them, they'll often ask you about semi-public information. In real life, if you call to cancel a credit-card, they'll ask you questions like *"What type of car do you drive"* or *"What's your mother's maiden name?"*
* **Something you have** like a passport, employee badge, [hardware authenticator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID), etc.
* **Something you are** such as finger-prints, retinal scanner, DNA scan, etc. If people can truly alter all of these things at will in your world, then this category is useless.
---
So for your world, my advice would be: all citizens are required to carry some sort of identification badge at all time. Every badge has a secret PIN number associated with it.
If someone steals your badge and beats your pin-number out of you, they could steal your identity. But that would be even more work than stealing your identity in the *real* world!
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## The Backstory (Actually important)
From the current day to an unspecified number of decades in the future, a brutally efficient, totalitarian dystopia-state rises and runs basically all of humanity under its empire. It's not a conventional dystopia, nor is it actually **that bad to its people**. I drew inspiration from china and their social credit system, and many other of their surveillance/control systems.
It is run by a small council of leaders called the **overseers**, which are sort of appointed by some selection method, designed to find the best candidates possible out of the government organization, the 'state'. Not a dictatorship, but not a democracy either, the people shouldn't even know they exist. Beside them and their government, the 'state', a black box which runs society, are the massive corporate entities that support the overseers and provide the people with jobs.
They are the science and research firms that created the [phase-gates](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240718/how-to-store-and-release-vast-amounts-of-electricity-for-industrial-processes), [keidran](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240715/how-to-make-chocolate-safe-for-keidran-basically-dog-people), exoskeletons and [accompanying military/terraforming equipment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240278/how-would-we-make-antimatter-in-industrial-quantities), and built the [starships](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240544/what-would-a-laser-powered-interstellar-cargo-ship-look-like) and [dyson swarm](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/240069/can-you-destroy-a-dyson-swarm). There is a digital, government controlled cash system, which is linked to a social credit system, which is linked to a worldwide surveillance and biometric tracking network.
There is no concept of privacy or opinion, and you are always watched. Maybe not maliciously, but the police can preemptively know when someone might commit a crime, and prevent it, for example. It is slow and insidious, taking control of the top of foreign governments with its corporate partners, and then slowly implement its systems without the people ever batting an eye, until they realize that they don't have any freedom, they self-censor as there are consequences for free speech, and they don't know who it is they are run by.
But the point is that they are brutally efficient, the people suffer in the sort term, but the long term is the bettering of society. With such efficiency, theres no need for the support of the free market to make interstellar travel possible, or for crime and war to impede progress. The 'free market' is really just run by the state, and so scientific progress is for them to pursue, regardless of needing incentive for the public.
They are cruel, but they have a point and a moral, and most importantly, you can't really hate them, they aren't a cardboard cutout villain, and they see themselves as righteous.
## The Question
How long would it reasonably take for such an empire to gain full control of humanity, fast enough that the plot isn't too far into the future, but not so quickly that people catch on and rebellion and genocide ensues.
It's basically coercion, slow, imperceptible moves towards gaining control of all world governments enough to install themselves as a de-facto government. Of course you could argue that this is an opinion based question, but **I'm not asking you to build my society for me**.
But the question this post centers on is this:
**When in history has a change this drastic ever happened? Where can I draw comparisons in history to this?**
This is closer to a fact than an opinion. History is finitely large, and I cut out a very specific criteria for what the question refers to. I want to know when something like this happened, so I can gauge what the future should look like.
I know of two obvious transitions that I can compare to. The Informational Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party. The information revolution is ongoing, right now.
Sixty years ago, you could tell someone they'd have a supercomputer more powerful than every IBM machine of the time put together and they'd say you're full of hot air. What will the world look like sixty years from today? Will things keep on picking up steam?
And another example is the CCP. A generation ago, under Mao, China was a third world country, but today, basically everything can and is manufactured there. They are approaching the bleeding edge and facing off titans that have never been challenged in recent history, like the United States.
Where else in history has something like this happened? If at all?
## After Note (Skip if desired)
Before you berate me on how this system could **never** work properly, I know that already. The thing is that you're listening to the plot of a book a fourteen-year-old author dreamed up, me, and I am trying to fix the problems it had and organize the mess I left myself, but before I do that, I need to know how far in the future, and thus what kind of tech, they would have access to, to plan out this society.
I kind of did it backwards, setting the aesthetic and feel of the world and then setting up a society based on how I want it to feel, instead of the other way around.
I originally had it as a vague "cashless-society social-credit-system dark-cloudy-concrete-skylines and cold-heartless-megacorporations" society, paraphrasing myself from a year ago.
I remember listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcnGlOUXw9A), [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXXyIYXmu_M), and [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z69T1yUzn44), and being inspired for the tone of this world. Even though we never see it (this empire proper) through the series of books I planned.
If you noticed they aren't that old, then you can guess that I only abandoned my ambitions for a few months, and am coming back to add the science and logic it didn't have.
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Ray Dalio, a famous investor and fantastic original thinker, has done a lot of this research in this area, at least as far as how economic factors contribute to these changes and on what range of timelines they occur (at least historically) with some predictions for the future (namely the decline of the USA and rise of China). It's in his 2021 book **Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail** (#1 Best Seller in Macroeconomics).
For realistic but fictional purposes, you could throw in a natural disaster or climactic event that shifts the power dramatically when people are in a desperate or vulnerable situation.
How about the development and perfection of a radically transformative technology, such as nuclear fusion to produce energy cheaply, that is retained in the hands of the few?
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**20 - 60 years**
There's a truism in the physical sciences that, in order for a new idea to succeed, it doesn't need to convince the old guard - it just needs to wait for them all to retire. It's the same way in society. You can't convince the majority of a radical new idea, and you've disclaimed the usual method of change, which is rounding them up and having them all shot, so you're left with the slow and steady approach.
If your ideas appeal to disaffected college-age youth right now, it'll be mainstream 20 years from now when they're the middle-age adults running the show. If it's more esoteric and further from the mainstream, you might need a couple generations to draw people in.
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## Taking inspiration from Nazi Germany
Germany was transformed from a (somewhat dysfunctional) democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship over the course of 10 years. So this is a piece of history you might want to study for inspiration.
Now this transformation was not *completely* non-violent. The *Schutzstaffel* and *Sturmabteilung* were paramilitary organizations that used intimidation and violence against political opponents. There was quite a lot of violence within the Nazi party itself as well (the *Röhm purge*, for example). And the final vote for the Enabling Act that officially turned Adolf Hitler into the supreme leader of Germany also happened while the parliament was surrounded by his paramilitaries. But calling it a violent authoritarian revoultion would not be appropriate either. In 1933, the Nazi party was elected as the strongest party in parliament in a mostly free and fair election.
It is very well possible to imagine a similar de-democratization of a state to happen with less violence. What you need is:
* An enemy that is (or can be presented as) an existential threat.
* A propaganda machine that convinces the population that only an authoritarian dictatorship is able to deal with this threat.
* A political party with the agenda to establish such an authoritarian dictatorship.
* A weak democracy that is unable to launch an appropriate counter-propaganda campaign.
When you have all that, then you can plausibly put the authoritarian party in charge through a regular democratic election.
Now, that the party is in power, it can start its work to dismantle personal liberties and democracy. But changing everything at once might be too dangerous. It could result in a counter-revolution before the state created all the authoritarian tools of oppression it needs to deal with one. So it's far smarter to use salami tactics.
Slowly remove one personal liberty after another, use propaganda to convince people that it was necessary to deal with the existential threat, and when people accepted the new status quo, tackle the next piece of civil liberty. Same with tolerating political opposition. Create laws which criminalize the democratic opposition, so it can be persecuted. Take control of the media to control public opinion. Take control of the election infrastructure so it can be manipulated. Give the leading party more and more special privileges until all other parties become irrelevant. Then you can abandon them altogether as an obsolete relic of a forgotten time. Now the party is de-facto "the state".
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America and Russia are examples right?
America didnt do exactly what you describe, but it is an example of a gradual shift to a more dystopian society without (part of) the populace noticing too much to do anything about it. Russia does do similar, but both Russia do it mostly through one tool: information.
With control over information you can create cultural and behavioural changes. In America this often shows in all local news outlets being controlled by one media group who pushes an agenda. This can lead to people voting and protesting for something not in their own or the public interest. If this was done to all news outlets in America you can change what people value enough within one or two generations to align with your wants and needs. After all if all information your populace gets is “this is good for you” then the populace will try to achieve it. With only a few individuals able to understand the full topic and able to contradict it, but without a way to spread that information far and wide easily. Not to mention that those people would be the one’s who have to censor themselves or risk arrests.
And your idea is basically in progress in China. My brother married a chinese woman and she says that basically a culture exists of “if you dont clash with the government you can have a full life”. And for most Han chinese this is true so there is not really a problem for them. Why bother trying to change something if it seems no problem or even good for most people? Keep in mind that as draconian as China is (at least I think it is) it does control the media enough for people to get a sense of progress being made because of the government and their systems. And in a way that is true, the question would be if other governments couldnt have done the same or better but with less draconian measures.
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First to counter your opinion that such system is impossible: it is not. If a system improves the lives of population (or convince them it did), people will ignore any decrease of personal freedoms. Just look at the COVID situation. Practically everywhere on the planet governments decreased people's freedoms. And except of small minorities nobody even complained about it. Even more, the general population was more discriminatory against people complaining then against immigrants (in EU, I think that study was published in Nature?)! So with modern propaganda you only have to explain/convince people that sacrificing personal freedoms is worth it, and you won't have any issues.
Now, to answer your question:
**20 years or less**
If you show your population the need for such a system it could be done in far less time: 5-10 years. Just look at China with their social credit score. Sure not everyone would be happy by the change, but if you control the information, and you have the backing of the elite, it would be practically impossible for a resistance to form. And sooner or later (judging by the COVID sooner) people would get used to the new normal.
And you can easily take a pandemic for your reason. Or economic crisis. Or transition to green industry. Or external enemy. Or exctinction level danger from space - potential comet on a colision course/near (super)nova candidate.
In fact, your timeline is not that dependant on social changes, but on technological ones. Especially if you want to include orbital infrastructure needed for dyson sphere construction. For that level if infrastructure I doubt you could go earlier than 100 years from now. Even if we have the technology to start building such projects (and we kinda do), we don't have the infrastructure and industrial capacity to do so at the moment. And stuff like that cannot change in a year or two.
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## About Negative Five Years
The overthrow has already happened. The fact that most people missed it actually amplifies the idea that they can effectively move behind the scenes to manipulate power.
As others have pointed out, the key is control of the media, but how quickly and subversively one can usurp power with that kind of control has been vastly underestimated by other answers. Especially considering the power of modern social media to control the flow of inter-personal communication. The trick is not to tell people what to believe, but to make everyone believe that the usurper's will is the will of the People.
6 years ago, Cancel Culture was a very frowned upon idea. Nearly every American believed that freedom of speech was good, and censorship was bad, but within a single year, massive parts of the American power structure was overturned as record numbers of CEOs and influencers were literally forced out of thier positions of influence and replaced with a regime of people sympathetic to Cancel Culture's objectives. Through the use of algorithms designed from the ground up to identify individual values and manipulate them, key personnel in social media companies had a kind of power that was never before seen. The "Media" was no longer a single narrative that had to raise up a new generation with new values, it was a thing that was placed between the seemingly private and honest conversations we have on a daily basis, and changed the narrative of our individual lives.
## The way it worked
If you say a thing that is against the values of your social media platform it can be censored, but if you support thier values, your message is amplified. So, people seeking the opinions of friends, family, and experts suddenly started getting a heavily filtered version of those people's opinions... and no one's opinions hold more weight that those of the people you choose to put a personal trust in.
In a world where there are thousands of influencers saying one thing, and millions saying something else, algorithms can drown out those millions of voices in favor of the thousands and make it look like the collective voice of a nation is rising up to demand a given change. This was made even more effective by the rise of chatbots/AI. Not only could your feed be manipulated, but the weak messages contained in that feed could be propped up in favor of the weaker argument by creating the illusion that the weaker arguments have a lot of support. Suddenly, people seeking truth started having that truth decided for them, and fed to them in a manner that it FELT like we were discovering it for ourselves. Politicians, investors, and CEOs who never faced this style of information warfare before were all easily manipulated by these controlled narratives leading to a massive overthrow in power that only took a few years to cement.
Sure the US government still stands and major American corporations still have all the same names, but the choices being made at every level of society from school board policies, to HR choices, to legislation are all now being driven by the personal story we each receive every day in our Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds... and that story is controlled by the esoteric whims put in place by a small handful of tech leaders who have thier own vision of how to make the world a better place.
Because information has become so easy to control, there is no need to murder millions of people to usurp power anymore because it is so easy to just tuck those dissenters into little black-hole echo chambers away from society at large where they can yell and scream all they want... because no one who matters will ever hear them.
## How much of this is facts
Considering the comments section, I think I really need to take a moment to unwind fact from fiction here, because this accidently came off as a conspiracy theory manifesto instead of a Worldbuilding thought experiment. It is a matter of fact that many tech companies implemented programs like Google's Fake News Initiative and YouTube's Misinformation Policies that have attempted to use algorithms to weed out fact from fiction. These algorithms are often the targets of controversy because there is no real way for the outside world to confirm that they are bias free or actually delivering truth at all.
It is also true that the AI technologies now exists that someone in control of a social media platform could choose to do all of the things I've described above, but very little proof that I know of that anyone has or that the social media platforms are working together in a single conspiracy to control the narrative.
The point of my answer was not that this narrative is true, only that it has enough truth in it that you could convince an audience that your story's takeover has already happened, we just don't know it yet, thus making the shortest time frame a negative number of years.
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**Isolate individuals by replacing society of humans with technology controlled by Big Brother\*.**
1. Introduce technology. This should be seductive and engaging and should be a substitute for interpersonal interactions.
2. Introduce personalized version of technology. Persons accustomed to interacting with technology (and everyone interacting with the same technology) will now interact with their own personalized version of the technology.
3. Now separated from the larger herd, each individual can be provided a "virtual herd" of simulated interaction.
4. Individuals can now be recombined into smaller silos of like minded individuals (this in some respects using prior grouping like age, place, sociocultural background) who are fed the same simulated interactions. Virtual AI individuals will be part of each smaller silo. These silos will be under your control although the precise methods of control will differ according to the individuals in each silo.
This took about 70 years in real life but it was slow because of limitations in technology. I think with all tech in place it could be done in 2 generations or 40 years. The first generation to get them hooked on the tech (TV in our world; step 1) and then 2,3, and 4 (using cell phones) will be in the second generation.
* just in case: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four)>
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# 20 years from a single unknown person to ruling an entire country
1,400 years ago the Prophet Muhammed drastically united hundreds of disparate and disconnected tribal and pagan groups into a single, monotheistic nation state that took and overcame part of the Eastern Byzantine empire and the Persian Empire.
He was a lone man who preached to his tribe in Makkah, and when persecuted and after avoiding multiple assassination attempts, emigrated to an enclave of his followers in Madina, and from there the message spread. A treaty was enacted with his home tribe once his followers' numbers grew significantly, and that enabled peace and the majority of the spread of the message. Within 20 years, the entire Arabian continent had followed his message.
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Source, and further information: <https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-accomplishments-of-prophet-muhammad>
As for the argument of violence, it's recorded that the battles that occurred in the establishment of this nation state occurred as an evolving consequence of persecution, torture and abuse that the Prophet Muhammed and his followers encountered throughout the establishment and growth of the state.
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**Depending on a bunch of factors, I argue that it could be as low as a few months to 5-20 years.**
Here are the examples upon which I base this assertion:
The PATRIOT Act got signed into law in just a little over a month after 9/11, and we have since seen expansion of state surveillance and US military involvement abroad following the attacks. Now, one could say that US military interventions abroad and erosion of civil liberties are simply part of the 20+ year change that was marked by 9/11.
The Pearl Harbor attack took place in December of 1941. In February of 1942, Executive Order 9066 was signed, leading to the internment of Japanese Americans.
The Russian Apartment bombings, theorized by some to have been orchestrated by the Russian security services, killed around 300 and injured around 1000 and allowed Vladimir Putin to gain power a little under a year later.
Before the United States entered the First World War, public opinion was largely in favor of isolationism, but, due to a combination of factors such as propaganda in favor of intervention, the Zimmerman telegram, and German attacks on American ships, the US entered the war in 1917. What is of interest is that the Espionage Act of 1917 was amended in 1918 to make it illegal to incite resistance to the war effort. This was upheld by a Supreme Court decision in 1919 (Abrams v. United States).
It would seem that, given the right pressures, people are a lot more willing to give up their (Or other people's) freedoms than many would like to think. So, if your government can create the perception, founded or otherwise, that there is a great threat looming, or take advantage of societal attitudes regarding those perceived as "others", it's entirely plausible that they can restrict personal freedoms in a short amount of time.
Thomas Sankara, President of Upper Volta (Renamed to Burkina Faso under his administration), managed to [dramatically improve his country](https://www.thomassankara.net/facts-about-thomas-sankara-in-burkina-faso/?lang=en) of 7 million people in just 4 years before his assassination as a result of a coup backed by France.
Now, these examples aren't non-violent, but you did say "without a genocide. As long as millions aren't left dead or in concentration camps, then it works". These examples happened as a result of war, coup, or terrorism, and Sankara's government engaged in political repression and execution of political opponents, but, in the US and Burkina Faso themselves, the death toll wasn't in the millions (Now, as for all of the countries affected by the "War on Terror", that's another story. Millions were killed or displaced, economic damage is in the trillions of dollars, and unforeseen consequences). In the far future, it would be plausible, say, for a faction within the government to stage a false flag attack of some kind and use the ensuing panic as an excuse to grab power.
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### About the rest of the question's body
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> When in history has a change this drastic ever happened? Where can I draw comparisons in history to this?
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I'd look into all "communist" revolutions, mainly the USSR creation and Mao's China (that you spoke of already). You can more broadly look at the industrial revolution of all industrialized countries, as while they weren't always short or accompanied by political changes, they always had their fair share of political instabilities, cultural shock and economic transformations.
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> Sixty years ago, you could tell someone they'd have a supercomputer more powerful than every IBM machine of the time put together and they'd say you're full of hot air. What will the world look like sixty years from today? Will things keep on picking up steam?
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For what possible technologies will exist, I'd refer you to modern sci-fi, as they inspire our research, and are themselves influenced back by technological advances.
For pure computing, you have more miniaturization and quantum computing (and the death of current day cryptography, which combined with programs like PRISM, could serve as a basis for your overseer's rise in power)
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> And another example is the CCP. A generation ago, under Mao, China was a third world country, but today, basically everything can and is manufactured there. They are approaching the bleeding edge and facing off titans that have never been challenged in recent history, like the United States.
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Definitely the 1910's Russia / USSR, that went from bona-fide middle age backwater country to a industrial titan in a decade
1920's Japan, that went from middle age almost colony to challenging European powers in a decade too.
WW2 USA, that got out of recession and became the major political power for basically all of modern time in less than a decade.
You will also want to look deeply into the industrial revolution, how it changed the economic powers, and how it triggered cultural and political changes and revolutions
There's also probably similar stories all other central and south america, and south and east asia in the Cold War period, with the political and economical regimes being changed in both ways.
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You should look at Facebook's rise, more specifically [how its founder talks (talked ?) about privacy no longer being a "social norm"](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy), and the companies [fluctuating stance on privacy](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/19-year-old-mark-zuckerberg-on-privacy-issues-versus-today.html), as it will give you a good indicator on how fast culture about security and privacy can change.
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You'll want to look up state capitalism and how it works, in good and bad ways, as this is straight up what you are describing.
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You'll have an economic regime change, a political regime change, and some form of world conquest to do.
The economic regime change can be quick to placate if your overseer regime is as efficient as you describe it, but it will also need a political change at some point, and historically this almost always meant revolution, one of the only counter examples I can think of being Industrial Revolution Britain, that at that point already gave political power to those having economic power, and as such didn't needed a revolution for that.
We can look at the USSR for an example of a complete upheaval of economic, political and cultural shift, it means that revolution could be done as shortly as a decade, with lot of blood spilled.
Your overseers would need to do that all across the world, with varying degrees of change to be done depending on the region
This part however, could be done more peacefully with modern equivalent of the Marshall Plan, Warsaw Pact, European Union and/or NATO. The theory behind communism global revolution may also interest you for this part. Historically they were pushed forward because of the Cold War and the consequences of two World Wars, but as seen with communism, it could be prioritized as a political conquest for the sake of it.
If we were to say the Marshall Plan "conquered" western europe in half a century, it wouldn't look out of touch to say your overseers could engineer a similar feat, and some decades added for the rest of the world.
As such, to me, you if your overseer started their revolution today (2023) in an country that is already an economic power and not at war, it wouldn't look too far fetched to see 2030~2040 have the first overseer regime country, and 2080~2100 having most / all of the world either directly controlled by the overseers, or either allied or too closely dependent on the overseer-directed country to say your regime is global.
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To add another example to some great answers, I present: [Meiji restoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration).
Japan went from a semi-feudal state to an industrialized nation in mere decades. So, 10-50 years?
Some notes that could help your worldbuilding:
1. This was a time of rampant colonialism. China had recently been defeated in the Second Opium War, which helped foster a climate of "either we modernize or the same shall happen here". A common threat is a great unifier.
2. This transformation was more about incorporating methods from abroad at first, rather than creating a system from scratch.
I'd say that your best bet is to have some embryonic form of this dystopia already working somewhere, and have it expand to the rest of the world as a response to an external threat, either real or fictitious.
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If you want to accelerate it, you need an event.
The event can be violent, WWI/II (Germany) or 9/11 (USA), or technological, moveable type (Europe) or the internet (most of the world). Both of these latter examples significantly changed the way ordinary people gained information, or misinformation.
Fictionally you get technologies like the telescreen (1984) or facial recognition (Minority Report). These technologies allow the level of oversight and monitoring of the population that wasn't possible previously.
The corporations that oversee our every word, Google, Facebook etc, can tie all your internet actions with your physical location (phone (Google)) and the words you say (smart speaker/television (Amazon, Samsung), phone assistant (Google), everything you buy (Amazon, Google) for a level of monitoring of your activities previously inconceivable to the authors of such fictional works without direct government intervention and oversight.
Through the mechanisms by which money controls western democracies, the tech corporations controlling a significant proportion of that money alongside the data, I'd give an estimate of 20 years. From the approximate point when the internet became mainstream, to few years ago when people started noticing, with some exceptions, that we were apparently travelling headlong into a corporate controlled dystopia.
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The real challenge here is the national borders. Within a country, this kind of change can happen almost overnight, as others have said. Rebellion against the full force of the state is immensely difficult, so things can move pretty quick. Even if people do catch on, rebelling is just too hard.
But uniting the planet under one government is very hard. You can get away with putting it in the backstory of something set 60-80 years in the future, but writing a story about how it happens would be a great creative challenge.
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Taking the question at face value - when the USSR and satellites around the world crumbled, a few examples (alas too few) were rather peaceful.
In Czechoslovakia lots of people -- and active politicians in power -- came out to the streets, and eventually agreed not only that the communist-only power is dissolved and democracy will elect new leaders soon, but also that the country has un-reconcilable differences and so splits into Czechia and Slovakia (with both languages as nationally official, and other close ties remaining - but separate budgets and power centers... even though many Czech politicians are originally Slovaks).
So the society did change radically (from authoritarism to democracy, from one country to two) with no blood shed this time. There were a few times too many in earlier decades of attempts.
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You know the answer to your question - because you state it: "Before you berate me on how this system could never work properly".
What you've listed, to me, sounds like my version of personal Hell. You cannot reconcile the removal of all freedom (and therefore autonomy) and "It's not actually bad".
Such a removal of freedom *IS* the thing that is bad. Freedom is an essential component of Human Nature.
For your system to work, even remotely close to what you've articulated - you have to deal with Human Nature. A good story that somewhat attempts to address this is the Movie Equilibrium - which (TL;DW, no spoilers) seeks to deal with Human Nature/Human Emotion (as the source of all evil in the world) by a drug that renders everyone emotionless.
That is perhaps the best way you start to have such a story - even then though, the history of brutally repressive regimes are generally much shorter than the history of those that are built on mutual co-operation and respecting individual rights/sovereignty.
To answer your question - in your society, you are going to have people like me.
People who look at this sentence:
"nor is it actually that bad to its people. I drew inspiration from china and their social credit system, and many other of their surveillance/control systems."
And say 'No, a Social Credit system and mass surveillance is bad *on it's own merits*'
It is that element of Humanity that you need to struggle with in your story - not the technological solution.
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## Can a N dimensional being physically interact with a N+X dimensional being "sliding" a part of itself in said N dimensional world?
Giving it some thought I came up with three options:
1. Yes, the interaction is possible and the physics stays the same as if it were two N-dimensional objects interacting.
2. The physics that affects the lower-dimensional entity is constrained to the realm of that lower dimension, meaning that the lower-dimensional entity would not be able to affect anything higher-dimensional.
3. The lower dimension could (physically speaking) not be an infinitesimally but finitely thin slice of the higher dimension, so that the lower-dimensional entity can *negligibly* affect the higher-dimensional entity.
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* Assume N+X where N and X are strictly positive, and, unless strictly necessary, assume both are natural numbers. I would constrain it more, but again, maybe an irrational number of dimensions is a thing and I don't know it.
* In option 3, I did not look lower than the atomic level as I greatly lack knowledge to do so. I can't (and don't want to) deal with elementary particles, Plank's length, black holes, etc...
If going lower is required, that is not a problem.
I also don't have the knowledge to go to the atomic level, but at least I have a slightly better understanding of my own incompetence, and I have to start somewhere.
* For any required details that are not specified, you may use a realistic setting of your choice.
* If an unproven but credible theory would permit it, then I would gladly hear about it. (By "credible", I mean loop quantum gravity or string theory, for example, are OK. But stuff like flat earth or me-not-getting-my-midnight-snack theory are not.)
* You may handwave anything that is not about the physical interaction.
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# Yes. Depends on X and N, and on the cut.
More specifically depends mainly on N (and on the the ratio between X and N+X). The lower the value of N, the worse the damage.
Of course, the size and location of the cut in respect to the whole being also play a part, if N allows it.
In principle, a large enough M-1 dimensional cut *may* cleave a M-dimensional polytope (or sentient being, the cut does not care which) in two. The fact that the cut would be infinitely thin in the extra dimension is immaterial: the object doing the cut is interfering with chemical bonds on its two sides (if it didn't, *there would be no cut*).
The simplest case we can directly experiment is X+N = 3. A three-space-dimensional being could be *us*.
Should a *two*-dimensional being (N=1) hit us, that would be a very precise, microtomic cut, and it would be potentially painful and even lethal. To be precise: the cut itself would be painless, but an instant later, the broken chemical bonds on at least one side still connected to the brain would start sending pain signals.
But a *one*-dimensional (N=2) hit would be a zero-width *stab* and we would not even feel it. It could pierce us through, and *it would do no damage whatsoever*. Not having width or breadth, the stab would leave no hole. Even a *moving* one-dimensional wire, describing a 2-dimensional arc (so, impossible for a one-dimensional being) would do little damage, the chemical bonds interrupted for too short a span to be really massively disrupted.
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**Probably Not**
For this answer, I'll specifically be using 2D and 3D as example, but it should still give you some insight into how this would work with other dimensions.
So you are a 3D person, now lets say in front of you, there was a 2D plane, like, *perfectly* 2D.
A 2D plane would be invisible to any 3D person, because a 2D plane is infinitely thin, so no photon/light of any wavelength will be able to reflect off of the plane, they just pass right through it, because they would need a wavelength infinitely small.
But it is not just photons, *any* massive(has mass) particle has a wavelength, determined by the equation: wavelength = h/mv where h is Planck's constant, m is mass, and v is velocity. Therefore, any thing with mass will also pass through the plane, since no massive particle has an infinitely small wavelength.
So basically a 2D plane would be completely undetectable to any 3D or higher dimensional being. Since no light would be interacting with the 2D plane, no 2D person would see anything 3D passing through the 2D plane either (think: if you were invisible you wouldn't see anything since no light can hit your eyes).
So no, neither the 2D people nor 3D people would be able to interact or even detect each other.
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**Avatars.**
I agree with KaffeeByte's answer as being the "most likely scientific explanation as we understand it". There are ideas of [a real higher dimension that has real meaning](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/collapsing-4-d-star-could-have-spawned-universe/) but so far as I know there is no concept that we could interact with it, or vice versa.
But that's no fun. H.P. Lovecraft is famous for his extra-dimensional monsters, and numerous sci-fi/fantasy stories have flirted with ideas of extra-dimensional entities and one of the more common ways they resolve it is simply having "avatars".
Humans do not have the ability to project into a 2-dimensional universe in order to interact with it. But what can 4-dimensional entities do? Who's to say, other than you, dear author. It wouldn't raise many eyebrows to simply claim that a 4th dimensional being has the power to project an avatar -- a representation of itself -- into our world in order to interact with it.
If you follow the Lovecraft model, these projections are distorted horrors liable to drive you insane simply from looking at them, since they clearly aren't bothering with the laws of physics. If you follow more of the traditional fantasy model, then they can look human, or however you please (devils, angels, fairies), but it's important to realize that in all cases, the "avatar" is *not the main body of the entity*.
Typically, to make it interesting, avatars are necessarily physically here and can be damaged or destroyed, but it's the equivalent of a gnat biting your thumb. You might go "ouch" and pull your finger back but it's not going to seriously harm you.
In some world concepts, these avatars require some effort by the higher level entity, so getting them to retreat makes the characters safe for some time -- the entity needs a minute to recover (which, to humans, could be 5 minutes or a billion years). So, typically, these entities can be "harmed" but as their main body is outside of our dimension and likely subject to laws of physics we can't comprehend, the ability to do them any real harm is likely zero. The ability to do them temporary harm is up to your imagination.
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The more I thought about this, the more I want to answer...
**This is a proposal for the rules of your world**
Because in the Real World, creatures of dimensions X<3<Y don't exist. Well, maybe they do, but here's the problem: there has never been any evidence of any effect in the Real World that can only be explained by the presence of such creatures (or even passive objects).1
*But that's no fun at all!*
**Can an N=1 creature hurt anything?**
No — but it could be yes!
The most complex N=1 creature is a straight line. A very rigid worm, you might say, but because it has *no other dimension* it's infinitely thin in every direction other than the direction of the line. Being infinitely thin, it has no mass. Therefore, it passes cleanly through any dimension N>1 without damage. At worst, more massive objects deflect it or they just move imperceptibly out of the way to allow it to pass. No molecular cohesion is ever lost.
*Unless you want it to. That's the fun of creating rules for your world. If you want N=1 creatures to cause damage, then we need to ask ourselves, "what would molecular disruption look like if a 1D object passed through something?" Let's stay away from atomic cohesion. Disrupting atomic cohesion is called fission and it's nasty. But molecular cohesion... A sheet of metal might be very cleanly cut by such a creature. A living being, where cells have the ability to re-establish cohesion, might not be damaged at all.*
**Can an N=2 creature hurt anything?**
No — but it could be yes!
But remember the N=1 problem. When you look at a 2D creature edge-on, what you're seeing is the 1D edge of the 2D object. It's infinitely thin. We can model that process by hanging a 3 meter x 3 meter sheet of aluminum foil. When you face it, it's opaque. But when you look at the edge (on a *very* calm day with a *very* flat sheet), you can't see it. If you walked directly into the edge (and perfectly...), you'd have the same damage properties of a 1D object... *kinda.*
What happens when that infinitely thin sheet has entirely separated you into two halves? That's a good question! It's infinitely thin, but does that mean it's not there? If the material is *impermeable,* meaning nothing can pass through it, then you just cut our poor test subject in half. *Maybe.*
The problem is that "impermeable" is an interesting word. Maybe fluid can't pass through it, but can magnetism? How about the atomic forces? In other words, our test subject may *continue walking,* and they'd better hurry before the lack of blood, which has stopped flowing, leads to their death. Could the electrical charges in the brain continue to flow in such a condition? The electrons can't pierce the sheet — but would the charge couple to the other side of the synapse?
*Ah, the joy of creating rules for your imaginary world!*
Even if we consider the other direction, the sheet-on direction, where the 2D object can be very clearly seen by the 3D person because it's blocking sunlight (in your world, an infinitely thin object can be opaque!), but would it hurt to run into it? A 2D object still has no mass because it's infinitely thin. It would cause less notice than running through air! *But it's impermeable!* So you suffocate because this opaque, weightless object you just ran into is... wait. You didn't suffocate, because the sheet *can't be bent.* That would require a third dimension. Which means when you hit it, it bounced harmlessly away and you only noticed it visually because you didn't feel a thing.
*But how does gravity affect a 2D object? From our Real World perspective, it has no mass, and so isn't subject to gravity. Once tossed in the direction of the sky it would keep on going forever until the face of the sheet struck something else. Hopefully something soft so it stopped rather than bouncing off and continuing its journey. But as we discussed, it could cause harm. If anchored, it would stop a runner. If used to slice into a 3D object and held there, that object would eventually die due to necessary 3D things not having the ability to happen any more — so long as your rules allowed an infinitely thin object to be, for example, impermeable.*
To quote Captain Jack Sparrow (second time in two days, imagine that...), "Ah-ha! So, we've established my proposal as sound in principle. Now, we're just haggling over price."
**If you're asking about Real Life, the answer is simply "No." If asking about your imaginary world, the answer is, "absolutely yes!" We just need to set the rules.**
This Stack often focuses too much on the Real World. There's a lot of cool stuff in the Real World! It's also boring, which is why we read novels, go to movies, and play video games. What makes those flights of fantasy fun is that they invoke rules that aren't identical to the rules here. They let us play the "What If?" game.
I like your world! Cool things happen there! It'd be a scary place because *things I can't see* can hurt me!
The question is, how do you want them to hurt people?
If my answer has provided you with sufficient inspiration to answer that question, then have at it and consider posting your final story on the Worldbuilding blog, [Universe Factory](https://medium.com/universe-factory). Some amazing fiction has been written there!
If you're still in need of inspiration and guidance, you'll need to ask a new question. Remember, you need to be *specific* and you need to describe a *problem to solve.* Help us understand what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it. Then explain what's stopping you from solving the problem. We're really good at taking it from there.
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1 *This is a generalization. There are plenty of people who may jump on this and start talking about [Quantum Strings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory) and such things. But that's just arguing for the sake of arguing. No one has ever been garrotted by a quantum string. A lot of physicists would probably be happy if it had happened just once, though.*
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## Making physics work between 3 and 4 dimensional beings is weird
If your higher being is only 1 dimension more complex, the cut could be like a cut constrained along a single axis. It does not matter that you cut someone in half flatly or at an angle, the outcome is still the same.
The problem you are running into with your energy equation is that you are using the wrong unit of measurement. Mass is a property of a given volume of matter. Just like you can not use volume and area interchangeably, you can't use 3d mass (Mass₃) and 4d "mass" (Mass₄) interchangeably.
If Mass₃ = Volume \* Density, then Mass₃ = X \* Y \* Z \* Density and in 4 dimensions Mass₄ = W \* X \* Y \* Z \* Density. So your sword has zero Mass₄ just like a plane has zero volume, but it still has Mass₃ just like a plane still has area, even when represented in 3d space.
The sword is not stopped by the 4d body because along with having no Mass₄, it also has no resistance in 4d space because the area of intersection is zero. Normally X/0 is undefined because it makes an infinite set of different possible outcomes, but 0/X is always 0; so, 0/0 produces an infinite set of numbers that all equal 0 meaning that 0/0 is equivalent to 0. So in 4 dimensions, your sword has neither mass₄ nor resistance₄; so, it is not stopped by the body of the 4 dimensional being, but can cut through it normally in 3 dimensional space.
If your higher being were 2 dimensions more complex instead of 1, then things might be different. The result would be like getting acupuncture from an infinitely thin needle; so, it would not really effect the higher being at all, but at 1 dimension different, you can still cut the higher being in half... which is probably fatal, just depending on how this higher beings biology works.
One final consideration is that it might be easier for a 4d being to bleed out than to be cut in half. If you break a line on a square, then any fluid inside can flow out. If you break square on a cube, then 3 fluids can flow out, so if your break a 3-dimentional aspect of a 4d being, then 4d blood can be spilled; so 3d trauma should kill a 4d being regardless of if you can cut it in half or not.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wp1q0.png)
## The easier solution is to simply treat humans as 4 dimensional.
Just because we only perceive and interact in 3 dimensions does not mean we are not 4 dimensional beings... heck, we could very well be 11 dimensional beings, and simply have no way of knowing it. So if we assume we actually exist in 4 dimensions, then to the higher being, we would also be 4 dimensional beings, but we would behave like trains stuck on a track, unable to deviate from the paths that we can understand. We could will our selves in some directions, but not others.
So in this manner of thinking, having a 4 dimensional being enter our 3 dimensional awareness would be like the higher being steeping out onto the train tracks. Sure she could stand next to us all day and night and we would never notice her, but once she is on our track, we can see her, hear her, and most importantly for the sake of this question, plunge our 4 dimensional sword right into her.
Either way, I believe the sword could be fatal, but I think treating every being as existing in, but not necessarily aware of the other dimensions will make understanding your world a lot easier.
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**It will hurt as much as striking at your shadow.**
This answer may not be 100% scientific, but maybe it's more approachable for non-sciency people. Humans have different ways to project themselves into a 2-dimensional space. They take pictures of themselves in their 3-dimensional world and display them on a 2-dimensional surface. They also cast shadows which reduces their 3-dimensional body to a 2-dimensional projection. Striking at any such projection doesn't hurt the actual human.
As you said yourself, humans cannot interact with or even see a 4-dimensional space, so the Goddess must project her image into 3 dimensions, like a hologram. You can play with this idea like you play with video filters on your phone: add or reduce contrast, color or sharpness, distort the image or make things suddenly appear that were previously hidden behind another object.
But that still doesn't allow humans to interact with the actual Goddess. Depending on the technology or magic used to create the hologram, they could interact with that (like cracking a screen), but the actual 4-dimensional being isn't affected by any of that.
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*(I will be grossly approximating things below, but this is to give an idea more than a physics lecture I cannot do anymore)*
You can use gravity as an example of a field in a higher dimension interacting with our 3D.
In 3D (the world around as as we see it), an object attracted by another object (say, the Earth by the Sun) sees it as a force.
There is a complete topic of physics devoted to that explains apples falling on the head of people, and the ability to predict the next eclipse.
When looking at that in a higher dimension, there are no more forces, but shortest paths of movement. And again, complete physics was devoted to that that explains everything.
So it is not really that physics changes between the dimensions, it is just interpreted differently, with the tools of that dimension. The hypothetical entity in a higher dimension could interact with the 3DS one, by changing something with *their* physics tools - and that would be seen by the lower-dimension entity as something happening with *their* measurements, based on *their* physics.
In other words, the high-D entity does something (modifies the curvature for instance), and the low-D entity interprets it as a mass having changed.
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The answer depends on the physics you choose, but the closest real life physics we have says "yes, it can interact."
The best models of how things interact today use fields, such as electrostatic fields, where the "mover" of particles are distributed throughout the space. This means that, in any N-subspace of a (N+X)-space there is the ability to impart motion.
The physics we understand today are all built on calculus and the idea of limits. We can think of a thin slab of the (N+X) space and look at what the interactions are like. This slab can be any shape in N dimensions, but must be "thin" in the remaining X dimensions. We can then make the slab thinner and thinner until we approach the limit of "a slab with 0 thickness." With current mathematics, this limit descries a N dimensional shape, so whatever behavior your chosen equations yield, that's what you get. The mathematics of this decrease in dimension from N+X to N is pretty robustly backed by current mathematics. Since current mathematics is what we're invoking when we say "N dimensions, I think this shapes your answer.
As we are not used to thinking of higher dimensions, it may be useful to think of our reality as the N+X and look at how a lower dimension works upon it (instead of the other way around). In particular, consider N=2 and X=1. This situation does a very good job of capturing how an Obsidian blade works. Obsidian blades are used in surgery (particularly cosmetic surgery) because they can be made with a blade edge that is a single molecule thick. As such, they can cleave a cell in half, cutting the cell wall apart. Now a molecule is theoretically a 3d object, but it is not hard to think of what would happen if we slimmed that down to something infinitely thin (such as a plane of electrons).
Now the question to ask is "what happens *while* the 2-d blade is inside the cell wall of the 3-d cell?" A full 3d Obsidian blade will indeed push the halves of the cell apart, but a 2d one would not. A 2d one, however, would react with the cell wall. For example, this would decidedly shift the surface tension. This might cause the lipids in the cell wall to pull away from the knife, allowing water to rush in. When the 2d knife was removed (pulled out or passing through), the movement in the cell wall will have occurred, and there will be a hole to heal. Conversely, if the physics of the cell wall caused the lipids to push towards the blade, one would see something similar to the [decorative marbling on chocolate](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/Spiderweb_design_on_Halloween_doughnut_%2815273017330%29.jpg/800px-Spiderweb_design_on_Halloween_doughnut_%2815273017330%29.jpg):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yU1ZI.jpg)
The physics of a 3-d surface tension causing something to be drug along a 2-d surface are intuitive.
Now what about the other interaction? The trickiest aspect of this is that most of the forces we understand are central forces. This means that if something in the 3d surface is not in-plane with the 2d surface, the forces it applies are "out of plane." This is a huge problem for Obsidian knives. If a torque is applied to the knife, it is brittle and the edge snaps. It's 2d nature is brittle and weak in the 3rd dimension. You would have to have a physics which deals with this.
One interesting solution to this might be to have the surface curve in response to out of plane forces, curving until the sum of all forces is in plane (at which point the physics would behave sanely again)
Another interesting question would be what if your N dimensional space was *not* a subspace of the N+X dimensional space. If the N dimensional space is a subspace of the N+X space, you have a N+X dimensional manifold, which is easy. But this doesn't have to be true. Consider a funny space which consists of the surface of a sphere (2 dimensional space), where each point on the sphere has a "hair" attached to it (a 1 dimensional line). This is not a manifold, and the physics of what happens are harder to define with calculus. A 2 dimensional object would be confined to the sphere because it's too high of dimension to fit into any of the threads. There would be some interaction at the surface where the surface and the hairs meet, but it requires some special effort to define how they should interact there.
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Well i want to give my 2 cents as well xD
So, as others such as Starfish Prime have pointed out the answer depends on what you want it to be. And i dont agree with anyone saying Yes or No. I consider those dishonest answers. We dont know how such interactions would work and accordingly anything said is pure speculation with no evidence. No matter how much some want to use "Science", the fact of the matter is that we dont know.
With that disclaimer, i would approach the answer to this question with an example our brains can imagine. Flatlanders. I.e 2D beings.
We know that it is Mathematically impossible for us to interact with a proper 2D world because dimensions really dont work that way. There isnt some huge XY Plane dividing the universe into Positive and negative coordinates. So the notion of a 2D world is fairly ambigues as it is.
But, if we assume for the sake of argument that this 2D world lives on the surface of a magical sphere we can make some predictions. The Sphere is a 3D entity, so we can interact with it. Even though the Surface is 2D.
So how might Flatland look to us ? Well honestly, it would probably be pretty empty because we comprese an entire Universe into a finitly sized sphere. So chances are anything interesting happens at scales approaching the Planck lenght.
If we again just assume the scales are large enough that we can make observations, we would almost certainly be able to directly interact with the Flat Landers. Because as a higher entity we could for example move somthing through the 3D Sphere. Though the question here is if the Sphere is solid or in what way interactions obey the laws of physics.
For example, in Flat Land (so on the Surface of the sphere) Gravity would be an inverse law, not inverse square. So Gravity would be significantly stronger. Same with all other Forces, such as the Strong, Weak and Electromagnetic interactions. Chances are, the moment we for example send a small sphere to pass through Flat land it will almost instantly collapse into the equivilant of a Neutron Star or Black Hole as there is SO MUCH mass so close together.
Meaning for the Flat landers, any interaction we have with them would be very destructive. But again, this depends on the scales envolved. If what we send through is, from their POV, the size of a Galaxy the consequences will be more significant.
Another thing to point out is that by definition, the Constants of the Universe in Flat land are drastically differnt, so it could be that the Energy we send into Flat Land is way more or way less destructive.
Now, during all of this we have not talked about them ain question, can the Flatlanders interact with us ? The answer is, yes and no. They cant send anything out because they exsist on the Surface of a sphere. They are 2D and 2D objects cannot exsist on their own in our universe. Hence why the only way for us to interact with them is if Flatland is a 3D sphere. If Flat land was not closed we couldnt interact with it.
The Flat landers migth be able to interact with objects we send in assuming those objects stay in the right shape. We could for example establish a very simple Morse code since we can just look at them and see what they are doing. But this is very one sided since one party sees everything while the other cannot imagine what we look like.
It is a resonable assumption to make that these principles also apply to n+ Dimensions for us. If there is some 5D entity, it could prosumably only interact with us if the Universe is a Hypersphere or some other closed shape. If that is the case they can make the same attempts at communication. And the same differences apply.
In a 5D world, Gravity is a inverse cube law so it is SIGNIFICANTLY weaker. Same with the other forces. But the difference is not as bad as with the jump from 2+1 to 3+1 Dimensions. (Remember, Flat Land still has a time dimension).
Weather or not they could slide into us is also answered, Yes prosumably. We could push a rod or whatever through a Flatlander so higher entities prosumably could do the same.
But remember, to us that wouldnt be "sliding in", rather a n-1 shape would appear. As in, we push a 3+1 object into Flatland and they see a 2+1 object. Same with higher dimensions. If a 4+1 entity pushes a 4+1 Rod into us, we see whatever that shape is in 3+1 dimensions. Which mathematically is the crosssection but for higher dimensional shapes that is a bit hard to imagine.
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There is a continent totally taken over by zombies, yet this situation somehow lasts for multiple years. How could we assume it could last for so long?
A human can survive for only about a month without food. A zombie would maybe eat if one sees food and is hungry, but how could they produce it to sustain themselves? They are usually depicted as not very intelligent beings. I cannot imagine them, say, driving and maintaining farm machines, growing crops and animals. Then you would additionally need the industry to provide fuel and parts for these farm machines. OK, then maybe as much as a zombie parliament to govern the country. But if they can do that much, can they really still be considered zombies?
Logically thinking, any "zombie culture" should end by all of them dying from hunger in a matter of months, as they lack the civilization to produce all they need for living. Maybe a very small number could survive in the forests by hunting and gathering, but the ecological system is unlikely to support many this way, while in many stories zombies are abundant. How is this contradiction generally addressed?
This question calls for somewhat "science fictions" approach: zombies have been produced by some virus, runaway experiment, alien technology and the like. If by necromancer, then by raising bodies that are recently dead. At least weak, half realistic explanation would be preferred (science fiction does not require to have all named technologies available today).
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# Torpor
If you’ve ever played a zombie game, you know that until living prey enters a zombie-infested environment, everything appears quiescent, and the zombies are almost indistinguishable from corpses. Once nutrition becomes available, they wake up, feed, and then return to their rest state. This is called *torpor* in animals, and is surprisingly common.
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> Torpor is a state of decreased physiological activity in an animal, usually marked by a reduced body temperature and metabolic rate. Torpor enables animals to survive periods of reduced food availability.
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This is even easier for cold blooded animals, like reptiles and zombies, who go months between meals. Since their metabolisms are slow, zombies happily chill in torpor for as long as necessary, waking only when prey, either human or animal, becomes plentiful enough to bother waking up and hunting.
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You'll have to add more to the zombie lore to justify a zombie starving to death.
Given the entire structure of the human body, the way zombies are depicted in basically every medium is a work of total fantasy. Consider the growling noise. What is filling any lungs to push that air out? What about the ones that are cut in half? Or the ones that are still growling even if they are just a severed head? Blood circulation is necessary for a lot of things as well, so a walking corpse no matter how fresh is not likely to be within the scope of realism without some kind of extra-human addition.
That being said... the only way for a zombie to survive at all would be through the work of the human imagination. By that logic, the only way they die would also be a part of that same necessity. So the answer is really up to you to define, or ignore.
Not a very satisfying answer, but it is along the same lines of asking how the force works in star wars. It obviously works exactly how the current writers deem it to work. Same with Zombies or any creatures of the undead realms.
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> They are usually depicted as not very sentient beings, I cannot imagine them say driving and maintaining farm machines, growing crops and animals, then you need the industry to provide fuel and parts for these farm machines.
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Well, the original zombies of legend were slaves working on plantations in Haiti.
The legend also says that they were controlled by necromancers (voodoo practitioners), so the zombies would only do what they were told to.
Zombies are like flesh automatons. Give them simple commands and they will execute those. If you have enough zombies, even if each one is doing one simple thing, the phenomenon of emergence happens. The zombies are then able to build and operate very complex systems, just like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive.
Granted, you need maintenance here and there. But a single necromancer should be able to handle it. They don't even have to be present in the zombie lands throughout the year. If they pay a visit every once and then, they can adjust what needs adjusting and ensure that the zombie society thrives.
In such a system, a few zombies could efficiently take care of farming to feed all the other zombies. They could raise cattle to satisfy their daily intake of brains. The rest of the zombies would work to bring money into the zombie continent so that they can trade for whatever it is that they and the necromancer need.
Zombies are perfect for jobs such as management, accounting, IT and customer service, since these are areas where having a negative charisma score is part of the job description and a living person would have to leave their soul at the office's door anyway. In this day of remote working, zombies would be even more competitive against the living in the job market.
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## Automated food production
Maybe they are feeding off fully automated self-sustaining food production factories that were originally built to feed billions of people.
Factories operate on a power source that does not need refueling (at least as of now), and they use artificial photosynthesis and genetically engineered microorganisms to produce stuff that can sustain the zombies. Additional nutrients come from zombies that "accidentally get involved in the process".
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Carnivorous skin. Much like a carnivorous plant, a zombie attracts insects. In this case maggots and the like are attracted to that sweet scent of rotten flesh. Once enough prey has established itself in the zombie, a shift in pH or whatever will digest them and provide the zombie with enough nutrients until a big meal opportunity can be found. This requires to sacrifice a bit of one's own skin, though the zombie will not live forever but rot at a much much smaller rate.
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**Zombies are Gourmands**
Just like the rest of us, they eat what they prefer when they can get it - human brains. But when they can't, anything will do in a pinch. That includes even the neural tissue of slugs and insects.
Humans have become very creative in finding things to eat - from roasting termites to eating the accumulated dried spit making up the nests of swallows. Zombies are no different - just less clever in disguising the origin of the protein and it's flavor and texture. Mmmm - crunchy!
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The trouble here stems from people consuming modern entertainment uncritically, and changing trends in that entertainment.
There are at least 3 completely different, distinct things that have been called "zombie" over the years. In no particular order, they are:
1. The slave-like servant of a voodoo priest, supposedly created through magical abduction of a newly-buried corpse (or possibly, of a person unwittingly buried alive after having been poisoned by the voodoo priest). Mostly only of interest for historical perspective.
2. An *undead* (in the original meaning of the term, thus vampire-like) revenant of a corpse, hungry for the flesh of the living, with numbers ever increasing through either contagion, the rising of the buried dead, or both.
3. A rabies-like plague, mostly explicable without resorting to the supernatural.
It's clear *why* #3 became so popular. Though the Romero movies of the 1980s hinted at it, we didn't really see this until *28 Days Later*, and we've only seen imperfect renditions of it since (with shows like *The Walking Dead* and *World War Z* falling back to supernatural tropes for lack more clever plot devices). This third option gives it a little more plausibility, improving suspension of disbelief, new anxieties (biohzard concerns, etc). No longer did we have to deal with the overlap of religion (of either the nearly pre-Christian Eastern European superstitious variety, or of the Rapture's "rising of the dead all at once" Evangelical-adjacent mythology).
But it confused people. People conflated #2 and #3, didn't understand that there probably needed to be different rules for each.
Will the zombie limb move around on its own, animated? Can muscles even contract without supply of lung-oxygenated blood? If a bite is shallow enough that it doesn't break the skin, does it turn someone? How about if half-putrid body fluids are being flung around as you machete the still-biting corpses trying to kill you?
These questions simply aren't sensibly answerable, unless you've chosen a zombie model. But you not only haven't chosen a model, you seem to be unaware that there are even such.
In a supernatural model:
* Zombies are animated by a supernatural force.
* Zombies are contagious based on a defilement rule... the bite transmits no virus or substance, it defiles. Defilement makes the person vulnerable to a form of possession which apparently cannot be exorcised (the body likely has already died anyway).
* Though the rules probably aren't well understood, if enough of a corpse remains that it can be possessed, it will likely move on its own and attempt sinister ends. One inch of chopped-off finger? Probably safe. Arm at the shoulder? Probably squirming.
In a scientific model:
* Zombies are animated by biological processes. When the zombie ceases to be a viable biological organism, it expires.
* Zombies are contagious based on pathogens. Bites are the least of your worries. Hissing and spitting zombies, blood and body fluids flying everywhere as you use the hardware store tool rack to dismember them, various carrion insects spreading it like the plague. Bet you didn't think grandma would zombie out just from eating the picnic potato salad someone didn't think to cover, eh?
* Zombies need to more or less remain whole. While they might not feel pain anymore, a severed arm without a tourniquet means they expire in mere minutes. And the arm won't move around on its own.
* They need food, just like everything else. Even starvation rations would have them requiring a thousand calories a day. They need water, potentially lots of it. The vast majority of injuries that causes bleeding will result in infection and even gangrene.
And if this is alot to dump on you, then I have to tell you that pretty much no one gets this. Other than the 28 X Later franchise (yay, just another 8 years before we get 28 Years Later, but damn will we have to wait awhile for the one after that!), no one gets this right. Every single movie, every single tv show, just wallows through, never bothering to do anything right.
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Zombie don't eat for hunger and need of self sustenance, they eat out of a sort of rage against the living, induced by the agent causing the zombification, in the same way as a rabid animal bites. Not feeding does not lead to starvation.
And for those who die of other causes, there is a replenishment ensured by the agent diffusion.
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I guess that depends on the origin of these zombies! Also the difference between infected and zombies can be a fine line depending the context! Are they intelligent at all? Or are only moved by impulses? If scientists wanted to create "super humans" by slowing a lot aging and decay (like formol but in a cellular level?) at cost of some stopped-necrosis process and regeneration abilities whatsoever. Maybe modified skin cells to make them photosynthetic (with some downside like not being able to get nutrition elsewhere, even if they "eat").
In a book called Apocalypse Z - Manel Loureiro, I remember the main character saying something on the lines of that they would have to wait all winter and spring so zombies would remain calmer (similar to the [great answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/239650/98794) of @Daniel-b about Torpor), and due to the environment conditions like plants growing wherever, moss, rain, snow, this can affect and make, literally, a zombie be trapped in a wall or grass, due to plant growth, etc.
Most animals have survival instincts and, why not, all zombies somehow gather in covered places whenever the months are harsh (very hot in summer, very cold in winter) (I can't but imagine the infected in I am Legend or vampires during daylight hours). This can also allow for some life to develop during those months so later they can "hunt" (even if it's just for "fun" or instincts).
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I am designing a hard sci-fi universe where humanity is confined to the Solar system and travels using fusion.
One of the obstacles I am facing is how to make humans meet **one** alien race which is roughly on the same technology level as humans are.
Namely :
* Reliable interplanetary travel
* No reliable interstellar travel
* No space elevators
* No antigravity
* No antimatter production
* No [strong AI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)
It seems unbelievable that aliens will encounter us while being on the same technological level. They will be vastly technologically superior to us if they can travel between the stars.
The same applies to humans if we meet aliens in their solar system.
The only viable way is to come up with some way to connect different star systems to bypass the interstellar journey: the gate system of some kind.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5XnVl.jpg)
Naturally, such a system requires gate-builders, which is a trope beaten so hard, that it barely breathes.
The other way is to make these gates form naturally, but it requires very advanced technology to harness their power. The closest thing that is similar to a pair of gates is a wormhole. Essentially, the ability to handle those will bring humanity to the same level as gate-builders themselves.
Is there any other way to meet aliens different from just accidentally meeting them, while maintaining a reasonable technological level?
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# Unwilling visitors
Aliens do not have the technology for interstellar travel, but nature is an unforgiving female dog.
The poor bastards were evicted from their stellar system when another star came close to theirs and pulled them out. They had to spend all their resources - and I mean all - just to survive underground in a rogue planet.
Now, as you say, they have:
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> * Reliable interplanetary travel
> * No reliable interstellar travel
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When their planet eventually comes into our solar system, they might think: "oh there's a couple planets here where we could thrive" (Earth and Mars). It takes astronomically less energy to move from a escaping planet to Mars or Earth than it takes to make the Sun capture their planet, even with the help of a body such as Jupiter. So they come down to us.
Or humans are just curious and try to get samples of the visiting planet before it leaves the solar system, and SURPRISE!
You could reverse this by making Earth the rogue planet. I am writing a book on this and have a handful questions on the technicalities here in this site. I don't feel like this is just my idea though and would be glad to see other authors' take on this.
**Edit, per request:**
There are three more issues that need to be tackled here.
## Surviving on a rogue planet
A planet that goes rogue will have its surface frozen in less than geological time. Earth, for example, might have oxygen rains within a year from its departure. Here is a Kurzgesagt about it:
[What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZJlf5rHVs)
In this case, most if not all ecossystems would be gone. For an Earth like planet with an Earth like civilization, survival would require going very deep underground for warmth. The surface may get its heat from the Sun but the core will take almost a hundred billion years to freeze.
Survivors don't need to go all the way to the core, but they should dig at least a few kilometers into the crust. That could provide stable temperatures for millennia.
The next three biggest problems are energy, food, and other resources in general. A civilization capable of digging that should have mastered nuclear fission power, maybe fusion as well. That could power hydroponic and aeroponic farms. The civilization may have taken some farm animals to the underworld with it as a protein source. Finally, as for resources: no place richer in ores than the crust!
We all suspended disbelief for a smaller scale version of this in The Matrix movies (Zion was an underworld civilization). This wouldn't be too far-fetched.
## Surviving for very long, but without becoming too advanced
With all said above, you might have a civilization that is stable. It would have a very reduced population from the start. With the underworld as its sole environment, they would also be very constrained in resources. This means they would develop very slowly in terms of technology, if at all. No star also means they can never reach Kardashev level 2 (or even a full level 1!). Space research and travel would not be incentivized, as that would be a relative waste of resources. Space research could be kickstarted again once the planet does pass by a star. So you have a society that does not evolve rapidly through millennia, and even if it does achieve something, its space technology will not surpass Earth's. More likely the aliens will be better at materials science and anything about survival, but will be worse than earthlings in most other areas despite being a much older civilization.
That said, they will be much more careful about wars. Nuking your enemies in an underworld could lead to global extinction with even just one small bomb, depending on how the underworld is set. But classic gun warfare over very limited resources might keep everyone too busy to develop science that is much more advanced than Earth's. This is one more reason they might spend hundreds of thousands of years without advancing much.
Who knows, maybe some religious or philosophical beliefs also keep them alive in peace but also rejecting further tech advance. Or maybe they spent so long being told what to do by limited AI's (not AGI's) that almost nobody gets into science.
## Detection
From the alien's point of view, knowing about the Earth might be a no-brainer. We have detected thousands of planets on other stars. Maybe they detected *SOL c* (that would be Earth) between millions of years to five thousand years ago (from Earth's relativistic point of view). Some promising signs of life (just as we found dimethyl sulfide on K2-18 b recently), but nothing conclusive and surely no signs of intelligent life. When they do get into our solar system, they will already know about the planets here. They will be in for a few surprises when they see Earth up close. It supports life, but it's already taken by a civilization of its own.
As for us... We were able to detect Oumuamua as it did a flyby around the Sun, and it's just 115 meters long (that's 1.25 football fields in American units). Granted, we would have found it too late if it was coming right at us, and there are still people looking for "planet 9" in our system... but as long as something Earth-sized came within maybe the orbit of Neptune or Uranus, we should be able to detect it, even visually. This will happen sooner and more easily if the planet is coming from a plane close to that of the planets around the sun, and if the rogue planet has a high albedo. Alternatively one of our interstellar probes might crash against it, causing many scientists to focus where the probe was.
Or we might pick up radio signals from some equipment that the aliens put on the surface of their world when they came into the solar system.
Or - the most chaotic way - they could send a probe here ahead of their closest approach, in order to assess the capacity of planets in our system to sustain (their) life. We could find such a probe on Mars, the Moon or somewhere else. The probe would probably send a signal back to its homeworld as a focused beam, so even if we can't make heads or tails of it we could look at the general direction the signal is going and find an Earth sized projectile coming into our system. That should make the news on Earth mainstream media for like a couple days.
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Alternatively, we don't get to talk to aliens directly. A probe comes by our system, the alien equivalent of the Pioneer/Voyager/New Horizons probes (we did send those on unreliable interstellar travel, so...). If you drop the no AGI rule, they could be 50 or 100 years more advanced than us when they launched, and their probe might be a [Von Neumann probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft).
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How about this:
* The milky way is absolutely teeming with life, most of it confined to [super earths](https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/what-is-an-exoplanet/planet-types/super-earth/), so the few dozens or so instances intelligent life emerged they didn't manage to leave their gravity well. There's the theory that a ["good" planet for life to emerge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhabitable_planet) will be tendentially larger than Earth. Absolutely teeming means that one out of every few dozen or so star systems has life.
* Because it took one generation of stars to die and form heavy elements, all inhabited solar systems are close in age to ours, or a younger (there's a paper somewhere on erxiv arguing this but I haven't read it)
* Earth sized, habitable planets are rare and sought after (literally, using telescopes etc.) Interstellar travel takes ages and is only undertaken with a worthwhile goal - What happens in your story is this: One other intelligent species (with space travel, so from an earth sized planet), and humans discover an (inhabited or not) earth sized habitable planet and send a steady stream of generation ships to this system from more or less opposite directions. The Red Mars trilogy makes the point that terraforming one planet takes two centuries with the resources of earth right next door, maybe your planet is better suited but the tools are far more limited? You could construct a scenario where one side arrives a few decades or a century earlier, without having too much of a foothold.
Basically the earth like planet is an excuse for both species to meet in the middle. You still need to come up with solutions for the incredible long travel time.
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## Frame Challenge: They can be way more advanced than us but not in ways that matter.
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> They will be vastly technologically superior to us if they can travel between the stars.
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This axiom is not necessarily true. There are plenty of ways that your alien race could be technological comparable with humanity in all the ways that matter for your story to work without being technologically identical.
**Option 1: FTL is not as hard as you think**
You are assuming that FTL travel requires a massive chain of technological development that we have yet to achieve. Yet our own civilization went from not having a basic understanding of the inner workings of an atomic nucleolus to using atomic physics to destroy entire cities in just a few years. Humans could easily, right now, be a single scientific discovery away from knowing everything we need to know to make our own FTL engines, and we would not even know it until we get there. In fact, there is already some very promising research into [Casimir Cavities](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09484-z) showing that a precisely made meta-material can in theory achieve perpetual motion using Alcubierre's warp metrics and quantum physics. FTL, or at least reactionless, relativistic propulsion, could be a near future discovery as soon as someone figures out how to turn these microscopic experiments into something that works at human scales. Especially if your version of humanity is already decades or centuries past our current technologically levels.
**Option 2: Both races have very different technology trees**
Another possibility is that both of our races have significant technological advantages over each-other, but just in certain areas so that one can not rightly be called more advanced than the other. They may have a functional warp drive, but maybe they have yet to discover computers or wireless communications or something like that. In this respect, both of our civilizations could look in awe on each-other's achievements, and neither have a significant advantage over all.
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> Ferengi technology is estimated to be generally equal to our own [...] We are no doubt (more) advanced in some areas, they in others.
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> *~Data : StarTrek TNG*
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**Option 3: Humans have a superior military tradition and infrastructure, despite being "less advanced" overall**
They could have many technological advantages over us, but they have no history of war on their planet; so, if push comes to shove, all their fancy engines and replicators and stuff don't actually put humanity at a disadvantage because only we have pre-existing military technology which we've spent a very long time perfecting.
The military societal capabilities of a modern nation can not be built in less than a few decades even if you already have a good idea about what it is you are trying to build. This timescale gets even longer if you don't already have a mindset for warfare. The aliens could probably figure out how to turn out some basic riffles and IDEs pretty quickly, but effective tanks, smart missiles, targeting computers, stealth paint, etc... these take years of RnD followed by more years of industrial organization just to build the manufacturing facilities for.
Futhermore, just because they have over all superior material science does not mean they will know the right materials to choose for each purpose. If your aliens tried to make a bullet using their strongest, most light weight alloys it would make for a much worse bullet than one made from brass and lead. They could use their hardest synthetic diamonds to armor their tanks, only to find that they shatter like glass when hit by a cannon because they don't know that they need to layer hard and soft materials or use sloped armor to aid in deflection; so, even their best materials could fare worse than human composites because we fully understand what it is we are creating the armor for. They will not know they need to fill their hand grenades with a shrapnel material. They will not know that guns need sights to help them aim. They will not understand how to balance rate-of-fire, accuracy, ammo capacity, and stopping power. They will not understand the point of combined arms. They will not know that their heat, radar, and radio signals can be tracked, or how to hide them. They will not know that their networks need cyber security. Their children have not grown up playing violent videogames, watching war movies, and studying military history in schools, so not only do they not understand strategy and tactics, but they don't even understand that those are areas of study.
On top of all of this, it will also take them time to figure out how to turn any of their advanced technologies into viable weapon systems that might surpass human technology. When they see a gun for the first time, they will see the most advanced killing machine their society has ever faced; so, even if they have the physics to make a phaser, it's not something they have considered making before; so, their best idea at first will be to try replicate the gun until they understand guns well enough to know that a phaser could be better.
By the time they begin to understand warfare well enough to fight back, they could already be fully enslaved... or at the very least, the humans will enjoy enough early military successes to steal enough alien technology that by the time the aliens learn to fight, humans will be on equal footing in non-military ways as well.
**Option 4: Humans are able to talk our way into equal footing**
For this option, it could be that they are more advanced than us in every way imaginable. They could be an all out post-scarcity level society with a stable global government and a fully automated economic system. But because of this, it means their current generation has no concepts of primitive capitalism; so, marketing, propaganda and information warfare, office politics, etc. are foreign concepts to them.
So we just flimflam and negotiate our way into equal footing very quickly because we have a whole world full of salesmen, marketing specialists, and con-men packing a plethora of skills that these aliens' mammas never warned them about. By the time they understand what a Nigerian Prince even is, they've already given away the keys to the kingdom.
**Option 5: They only packed for a "camping trip"**
The trip between the stars is a big one, even for an advanced alien race. This means that the alien explorers/colonists will have to leave a lot of the comforts of home behind when they make the long trip to Sol. If room/mass on their ship is limited, and the infrastructure to maintain a lot of thier more advanced tech requires proximity to thier home world, then they will only bring a fraction of the tech that their society has to offer. So, while they may appear to be about the same tech as us, this is a big misperception.
Think of it like this. If you plan to go on a long camping trip, you might bring some basic hand tools, a tent, a lighter, food, etc., but you would not have a computer, microwave, air conditioner, or Apache attack helicopter. So, if you were to plan a time traveling camping trip to the medieval period, people would see your technology as different from theirs, but you would not seem all that much more advanced than they are. Likewise, an alien species that is only packed for an exploratory mission may appear far less advanced than what that civilization is actually able to muster.
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# Desperation
You could have an alien race about the same technology as the Solarisians ("Earthlings" from the Solar system, working title).
The aliens were desperate to get out of their star system. The star might go to a different stage (destroying part of the system), overpopulation or seeing that they need to take risks for their species to survive the inevitable downfall of their star system. Their technology is similar to the Solarisians at the point of leaving. Either they start on their journey early in their domination of the star system, or they developed late in the star system cycle, or they just aren't as quick to learn. Whatever the reason, they left at around that point in their technology.
The interstellar travel is uncertain for them as well, but desparation or the drive to survive by spreading through the galaxy can make them take such risks. They are likely to send multiple ships in many directions, with possibly several ships to promising destinations/hopefully safer routes.
Though technology can progress during the voyage, the limitations of the ships might make it difficult to truly progress, or make the progress into reality.
From here you have many options open for your story. They might be excited to work with the Solarisians to exchange technology and make interstellar travel truly viable. They might not know if there will be a species if they finally arrive, but ready to cooperate. They might have scanned the place during the voyage or beforehand and know that the Solarisians are there. They might want to out compete the Solarisians, taking the chance their own technology might be outdated the time they arrive.
Whatever the reason, a ship or some ships have survived the uncertain journey, and have arrived at the Solar system. You might still call it chance or an accident, but in the grand scheme of things it is inevitable to happen *somewhere* in the galaxy you're describing. Possibly even with multiple alien races arriving at a single star system. If that is the case, why not the Solar system?
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While this is a bit of a “hypothetical” question, I will still endeavor to answer it.
One method of ensuring you avoid super technologically advanced aliens is to limit the technology development across the universe. This means that technology cannot advance beyond a certain point. Solar panels eventually reach a point where they cannot become any more efficient. It is a physics barrier, not something people can overcome regardless of how much time and effort they expend.
You could also say that space is dangerous and, while interplanetary travel can be predictable due to mapping local space, interstellar travel is unpredictable due to the lack of information and the speeds needed to cross the distance in any reasonable length of time. Look at the history of space exploration and how often projects failed. If you multiply that rate by a million, you could see how travelling to a new star system would be seen as suicide.
Space elevators could be limited to moons and other small bodies as no one ever discovers a super strong material needed for creating one in a gravity well comparable to Earth’s. They are useful, but limited to gravity wells which enable the use of steel and other similar materials.
AGI is in a similar situation. We are great at making special purpose AI, but one with a general intelligence is simply too complex and all efforts fail. The best anyone can do is develop AI like better versions of Chat GPT. Eventually your scientists might even acknowledge that AGI is technically possible, but that the computing power needed is so great that it is not economically feasible. Combine that with the programming complexity being such that it might take several lifetimes to get it right and few people would continue pushing for that tech in any real manner. At most you would have those who still strove to create AGI on their desktop computers or using local servers, which would never be possible. Not unlike the garage scientists with cold fusion.
We have already produced a few nanograms of antimatter, but not enough to really do anything with. Fusion would provide you with the power needed to run the colliders for antimatter production, but why bother. Once you have fusion power, your power needs are taken care of. You could also state that the power needed to produce antimatter is extreme, and that the handling of it is so dangerous, and its uses so limited, that people do not really see a need for it. Fusion power is cheap, plentiful, and safe so why pursue an expensive, rare, and dangerous power? If containment is also difficult, it would preclude its use as a weapon. Nukes are already destructive enough for most applications.
Technology could eventually reach a point where advancement is no longer possible, merely refinement until the limits of physics are reached. Electronics, mechanical, and other devices become more reliable and energy efficient, but their overall efficiency is capped at a certain level. Eventually, everyone figures out the most efficient manner to do something and the technology stagnates at that point.
Your aliens might have more refined technology in certain areas, but overall, they would hit the same limitation as humanity. In this situation, your contact with aliens would likely be through semi-automated probes. Probes sent to other systems which replicate and disperse new probes to other systems. Once the replication cycle is complete, the probe would build a solar-powered communications/science array. The array would survey the system and send the information back to Earth. Daughter probes would direct their information beams to their mother array and that information would get relayed. This bypasses the issue of dangerous interstellar travel while allowing humanity to explore the stars. Sure, messages sent this way would take years, but it is better than the centuries needed to travel physically from place to place.
It could be that humanity figures out that a multi-generation ship would never work due to the inefficiency of closed systems. Even a 99.9% efficient system would eventually fail or run out of resources. If cryogenic technology never really develops then people might be forced to stay inside the Solar system. There are plenty of resources here for making orbital habitats and other space-based structures. If people know that disposable space probes have a 90% fail rate when attempting to reach new systems, they would be leery about boarding a ship with even lower odds.
Other factors which could contribute to a lack of space colonization is that the effort needed to create a ship capable of reaching another star is so great it would take a combined effort across a star system. Humanity spreading out across the Solar system would likely result in a fracturing of identity as new groups established themselves. Why would a child feel loyalty to a country on a planet they have never visited, nor ever could due to the high gravity. If the effort needed would require the combined cooperation of several planets and dozens of asteroid mining facilities, it seems likely that it would never end up happening. Especially if it would take decades and any disruption of supplies could potentially stall the project for even longer. Mega-project become easy when automation becomes efficient and easy to use. If automation is limited due to a lack of AGI, it would limit the scope of construction projects to what could be managed by people.
This could also be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. There is alien life, but due to the harshness of space, and limits of technology, any intelligent life would be restricted to its own star system. Even technology like the automated probes and communication relays would eventually fail after a few hundred, or even a few thousand, years of operation. There could be ancient debris scattered across various system objects from past probes of similar function which is covered in a few centimeters of dust after a half a million years of neglect. Your probes might never detect it and send back data which shows a lack of alien presence.
Without magic Stargates to teleport people/aliens across the cosmos, you might be restricted to light-speed communications which take decades or longer to reach their destination. Questions are sent to the aliens, and your children hear the answers. If everyone eventually figures out there is a technological limit, and that colonizing other systems is impossible, they might eventually stop trying to reach beyond their own system. Heck, in that situation, the only thing of value two species could share would likely be stories and other creative intellectual properties. Alien artwork might become the new big thing. If nobody has advanced technology, then when a species reached that limit, there would be no need for a prime directive to avoid contact. If everyone else has a cell phone, there is no need to try and hide the technology from them once you invent it. Even if an alien civilization has been space-faring for a million years, they would not be any more technologically advanced than the humans. Their population could be much larger if they invest heavily in space-based habitations, but even that is not a guarantee. They might simply remain on their home world and import the metals/minerals they need from space, or get good enough at recycling that they do not even need to do that much in space.
Think about it. Alien medicines would not work due to different biology. Minerals like gold are plentiful enough when you are mining an entire star system. Food and other biological life are no-go due to the possibility of invasive species and other contamination. Land is obviously a non-issue. If technology is roughly equal, that leaves little else aside from products of the mind. Such a universe also negates the possibility of alien invasion. If colonizing other systems is nearly impossible, sending troops would be even more so. The defending system would have decades to detect and attack any incoming ship. Deceleration time alone would provide plenty of time to destroy pretty much anything sent your way. At most you could send high speed projectiles towards their planets, but the distances involved would make hitting anything unlikely. Plus, once a species is off planet in sufficient numbers, there is no killing them off. Why waste the time and energy on a non-threat?
I hope these thoughts/ideas help you with your story.
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**Neighbors from within our solar system**
this may depend a little on how alien they can be, since we haven't managed to find them yet. it also means their technology can't be *that* similar to ours unless it's several hundred years behind, since i imagine that while jetting around the solar system we'd struggle not to notice a planet of people using a radios for instance. but maybe they live under the surface of an uninteresting seeming moon and have technology that moves less energy than ours but uses it more efficiently, producing relatively few effects that'd we'd notice and identify as such. or maybe they live somewhere noisy, like [io](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon)#Interaction_with_Jupiter%27s_magnetosphere), that covers up their electromagnetic emissions for a while.
the major difficulty is for them to have reliable interplanetary travel before we notice them. it's a bit of a stretch, but maybe they've learned by watching us?
**Rogue system**
the scientific plausibility of this one is a little dubious i think, but they could be from a wandering star that passes by us relatively slowly, close enough that it's possible to get between with only interplanetary travel technology adapted to a specific unusual situation
**Stranded**
perhaps evolved intelligence tends to have a limit on handling large amounts of information that falls well below the point where that kind of thinking is useful. the aliens show up in an incomprehensibly advanced manner, but none of them understand how it works and none of them ever have, it's all invented and operated by computer. when, for some reason, they no longer have their big ship with its big computer, they can only sustain technology comparable to ours, the approximate point at which evolved minds can't really understand the principles required to go much further.
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# What's wrong with wormholes?
You state that wormholes and other methods of FTL travel cause paradoxes. But, AFAIK, for wormholes that is only the case if the two mouths of a wormhole are in each other's future/past light cone. If wormholes occur naturally, a society doesn't need to be able to create or manipulate them, they just need to discover them. Discovering a wormhole doesn't mean you are also able to move it around or anything. The universe might contain laws of nature that make wormholes collapse if a wormhole's mouths form closed timelike curves (i.e. enter each others forward/backward light cones and allow time travel), or there might not be but it is just practically impossible to move a wormhole mouth significantly.
This by itself doesn't explain why we find an alien civilization at the other end of the wormhole, but there are ideas in other answers or it could just be luck.
*Edit addressing the comment*
To be useful for the story, a wormhole must meet some conditions.
* First, it is not created by humans, it just exists naturally. If humans could create wormholes, they could also create them in a way that causes paradoxes.
* Wormholes need to be not like black holes in mass. If they were, traversing a wormhole in a ship (or any solid object) would be impossible as any ship approaching it would be torn to pieces by the immense tidal forces.
Wormholes, by their nature, are hard to detect. They don't reflect sunlight, instead any light that shines upon it passes through to the other side. You also cannot easily move a wormhole. There is no surface to push against. Pushing against it will only cause you to pass through it to the other side. Wormholes, like other objects, follow the shape of local spacetime as it is formed by gravity, so it can orbit the sun or other objects. In principle it is possible to move a wormhole by placing a large mass next to it, but moving a wormhole to another solar system in this way is entirely impractical at the OPs technology level.
Let's assume there is a wormhole orbiting the Sun somewhere out in the Kuiper belt, and the other end orbits another star at a similar distance.
Such a wormhole would most likely not have been detected by any searches done in reality so far. It does not reflect any light. It would be briefly visible if you look at just the right time so that you see a bright star at the other end, or the sun it is orbiting around, but the chance of that happening just when a telescope is looking are minimal. And searches for asteroids etc. are done by taking two or more pictures of an area of sky with some time in between, and looking for any object that has moved in the mean time. Even if you happen to catch the wormhole just when you can see some bright object at the other end, it most likely won't be visible in the other pictures so you won't be able to tell that it is something in the solar system, as opposed to some kind of flash from a distant background galaxy.
If a wormhole has a planet-sized mass, that mass could be inferred statistically from effects on the distribution of other Kuiper belt objects. If a wormhole as a small or no mass, that does not apply. In fact, if the wormhole has a small or no mass, it could easily be much closer to the sun without being detected.
Humanity finally detects the wormhole when a probe exploring the Kuiper belt accidentally gets close enough (on astronomical scales) and detects some kind of anomaly. Or perhaps there's a research project that has scattered a thousand probes throughout the Kuiper belt. Or a probe exploring the Kuiper belt notices gamma emissions from a fusion drive that the aliens on the other side of the wormhole are accidentally pointing at it.
There are still some holes in the story, e.g. why do both wormholes orbit in solar systems, and why are the aliens technologically similar to us, but those look solvable with some creativity if you don't want to ascribe them to chance.
## What's wrong with paradoxes?
You also seem to hold the possibility of paradoxes as a red line. But why not solve the possibility of paradoxes itself? Why not make the [Novikov self consistency principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) apply in your universe? That would mean that despite time travel being possible, it would not be possible to alter history because the timeline (including any time travel) is always self-consistent. Or alternatively, there is some physics that prevents closed timelike curves from being able to form.
*Edit 2*:
A few months later, but let me get back to how the Novikov self consistency principle is 'enforced'. The thing is, there is no additional mechanism needed to enforce it, the applicability of the mechanism is conjectured to follow directly from how quantum mechanics works.
For this explanation I will assume that the reader is familiar with the [Double-slit experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment). The double-slit experiment, among other things, proves that single photons are wave-like quantum objects. It shows that a photon, i.e. the wave that is the photon, can travel through both slits in the first screen. The wave packets that come out of both slits interfere with each other. At some places this interference is constructive, at others destructive. The result is a banded interference pattern on the detection screen, with the places where constructive interference is taking place having a high probability of detecting a photon, while at places with destructive interference the probability drops to 0.
What happens with a closed timelike curve is (theorized to be) the same. The quantum waves which are an object entering the wormhole from outside the CTC interfere with the waves coming out of the CTC / out of the earlier-in-time wormhole mouth. For some states and positions of the object the waves interfere destructively, which means the probability that we observe such a state and position drops to 0. For other states and positions the waves interfere constructively. That are the solutions that are consistent with both the object entering the CTC from outside and the object that is looped around in time.
I could stop writing here, but one thing that is good to know if you start thinking more about quantum mechanics and that is often simplified away in explanations (as I have done in the above two paragraphs), is that a quantum wave is not a single particle. There is, according to the math, a single quantum wave describing all the particles. And in fact it is not the position of measuring a photon (or any other particle) at a certain place that has a probability, the probability applies to an entire state of the universe, with all its particles. This is why according to the theory, not just individual particles can constructively or destructively interfere with themselves, but states of the universe can interfere with them selves, leading to states that are inconsistent with the pasts of all involved particles to cancel out and have a probability of 0 of being observed. \*
On the macroscopic scale this will result in us only observing timelines that are internally consistent. For a nice illustration, see e.g. the first part of [this chapter](https://hpmor.com/chapter/17) of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfic where a much more intelligent Harry Potter tries to understand time turners.
\* Disclaimer: This is at the limit of my understanding of quantum mechanics, so my explanation may not be entirely correct.
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Have them travel to us from so far away that they evolve to be on a comparable technological level en route. I guess for this to be feasible though they'd have to have some quirky "natural space-travelling ability" to begin, as they'd almost certainly upgrade their vehicles en route too. As in they'd have to just start as amoeba or something floating through deep space, even if by the time they arrived at Earth they closed the last distances by spaceship. How does one fish meet another fish? It starts as a single celled creature in the primordial ocean which it travels several times over until it evolves into a fish to meet the other fish (which has done the same).
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Sounds like you want something equivalent to the [Alderson Drive](https://fanon.fandom.com/wiki/Alderson_Drive).
This is a form of jump-drive described by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in [Mote in God's Eye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye). The odd part about it is that it uses a loophole in gravity to jump between specific points between stars. The points are a bit like Lagrange points, in that they are specified by the laws of gravity, and only exist between stars of specific masses at specific distances.
This means you have gates that aren't created by ancient aliens, but are usable if you know the math. You can redefine the conditions of how those gates form in any way you want in order to connect stars for effective narrative purposes.
What's more, you can generate a dynamic where, when races find better ways to get between stars, they have more stars to choose from, and may consider the jump-gate enabled stars to be the low-rent district. This dynamic has been considered as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, where the more advanced species are just hiding from us because they don't want to be bothered.
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# Singularity is the great filter
Alien life is extremely common, as are alien ruins, but most life that reaches a certain point, a few hundred years in advance of humanity, tends to leave. There are several common types of singularity
1. They ascend to become a virtual hive mind and retreat to computers.
2. They fuse with their local star and live on in stellar networks, generally living in a dyson sphere.
3. They fuse to become one giant biological computer.
4. They do one of the above, run out of power, and hibernate.
The main powers that be that watch over all will stop any hegomizing swarms, but otherwise encourage allowing younger races to explore and non interference, with many far more interesting tasks in their virtual simulated worlds.
As such, any races they meet will either be a similar technology level, or have left for one of the great filters. Scattered remnants, artifacts, and other rare things are all that's left of more advanced alien races.
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**Generational Ark Ships**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MggcX.jpg)
Humans already have the level of technology to travel between stars, it's just they haven't had the motivation to do so as yet but if Earth was to become uninhabitable, they could potentially build an ark ship/s and flee to another system.
Now a multi generational ark ship could arrive in our solar system full of refugees and the same basic level of tech as us if something drove them off their planet.
Alternately our ark ships could meet other ark ships when they both close in on a potentially habitable planet.
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# We are the one of the closest planets with an Oxygen/Water Vapor Atmosphere
We are not that far away from being able to detect elements in a planets atmosphere and if you reverse directions, we might be intrigued by a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and target that planet over others out there. The aliens are similar enough to us to also be oxygen/carbon/hydrogen with a need for liquid water.
They would be slightly more advanced than us, but could send a slow probe to verify if the oxygen means life and happen to get lucky in that there is us as well. If the distance was 20 to 30 light years it would not be unreasonable to be able to start a conversation. If you want more than that it could be that us or them is close to a breakthrough that would allow contact, or we even have been in communication for a while but finally meeting.
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You could start an endless debate right here right now xD
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> No antimatter production
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If you have Fusion, you have Antimatter production. Who needs efficiency when you have infinite energy ? Plus, from what i understand, the main issue is actually containment rather than production. Of course right now it would be very expensive to make any amount of Antimatter but its more of a incentive, use and cash problem, rather than a physical hurdle.
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> They will be vastly technologically superior to us if they can travel between the stars.
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I mean an Orion drive is not that advanced.
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> The other way is to make these gates form naturally,
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You might want to take a look at cosmic strings then. But note, Wormholes and the Gates from the expanse are on about the same level of BS. Same with Warp drives, let it be known kids just because something is a solution to General Relativity does not mean it is physical. Example; Schwarzschild black holes, they dont exist, all black holes rotate, and have some charge (So Kerr-Newman). Doesn't make Schwarzschild an invalid solution, just an unphysical one in the constraints of the real world.
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> Is there any other way to meet aliens different from just accidentally meeting them, while maintaining a reasonable technological level?
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Lots of ways, Interstellar travel capability implies a given species has vastly more money at their disposal than anything else. We could nuke our way to Tau Ceti right now without inventing one new piece of tech (hyperbolically speaking). It would just require a lot of resources and money and political will.
If we were to encounter a species with such a ship, that does not mean they could stack wipe us. Interstellar Ships only become civilisation ending when you get to the spicy stuff like Antimatter drives, Relativistic Thrusters or alike. Truth be told, even a Orion drive could glass the planet but they would have to get close and personal which is a bad idea.
There are other forms of interstellar travel as well which do not imply great technological leaps. If a civilization fled their home world on like an Asteroid and has been living of the rock for 50000 years, they probably wont have a 1st World army on standby.
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TLDR - Limited gates built on accident.
When a society achieves reliable interplanetary travel and a certain level of space industry a common construction project is a solar system sized particle collider. One side effect from certain high energy particle collider experiments is a rip or tear in space time that can spontaneously bond when another rip is present somewhere else in the universe, forming a traversable wormhole between the two solar systems. Something about the experiment is self limiting preventing other rips from forming nearby, so only one gate can be constructed easily per solar system. Your two societies would be at a similar tech level (i.e. able to construct the collider) and the wormhole only connects the two solar systems.
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There is a group currently designing very small robotic spacecraft with solar sails to be jump started by large lasers based on the moon. Add in some speed up by using gravitational sling shots and a not very advance civilization could be doing some exploring.
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It can be
* Meeting using robots. For self-repairable robots 10000 years travel can be like 1 day. (BTW : can it be the sense of humanity existence is to leave another civilization with much more life expectancy. In terms of universe we are like 1-day live moths on Spanish coast, where caravels float to America, but we are never going to see it even when we are onboard)
* Meeting using quantum communication. You don't expect physical contact? Can "meet" can be interpreted as communicate? E.g. some kind of a quantum camera, that will show pictures of other planets. Or quantum radio. (Of course if it is possible)
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## Probes + Lucky alien biology
Reliable interplanetary travel means we've advanced some beyond where we are now. It also likely means we've established a low-gravity base on some moon or asteroid, such that launching somewhat smaller craft could be relatively cheap.
In that context, it's reasonable to expect both species have some advanced version of our prior Voyager program, sending many more smaller probes with a planned life-span to get much deeper into space... possibly multiple hundreds of years.
Now let's say one of our next-generation Voyager probes mutually discovers one of their equivalents a couple hundred years down the road. Each species is able to find the trajectory of the other probe and from there locate their opposite's home system.
The logical response from both species would be to then send two more probes: one two the system itself, and one to the midpoint, in hopes of establishing communication. Each species would then also likely *capture the other species visiting probe*, and from there reverse engineer certain communication protocols.
This would in turn lead to a third round of probe, this time with a reasonable chance of success at establishing two-way communication... after perhaps as long as nearly a millenium of simply knowing they exist.
Finally, "Reliable interplanetary travel" still means accelerating and decelerating to and from a meaningful fraction of the speed of light. Such ships could also make intersteller voyages if designed to go for hundreds of years and if there is crew that could last.
Note I'm not talking generational ships, which is another level up. I'm just talking in human terms of, say, a voyage spanning more than 50 years with the same human crew starting as soon as they're old enough to run things.
Now let's say a lucky accident of biology means our aliens just happen to live long enough for the interstellar journey to last a feasible — but extreme! — timespan... the equivalent of sending a 16 year old human on a voyage where they would arrive when turn 70.
Until we we actually establish contact, such a voyage would never be a good idea. But now, maybe, just maybe, some among the aliens would think to try it.
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At one point in the history of the galaxy, all planets belonged to one of four powerful human alliances, each of which controls a quadrant of the galaxy.What these alliances were or how they formed or disappeared is wholly irrelevant, and nor are other species. Each solid planet has been inhabited by humans, with any other life being exterminated. Each was equally matched with the others, and war was seemingly inevitable. By joining with an alliance, a planet would benefit from its trade systems. It would also offer the planet protection from assaults by other planets.
Obviously, with war on the horizon, each alliance is trying to 'recruit' as many planets as they can. Whilst the planets benefit in the short term, their citizens will be conscripted for their alliance if and when war breaks. All the planets know this, but they still choose to side with an alliance. On the surface, they say the benefits outweigh the possible negatives in the future. However with each alliance being so powerful, most planets are surrounded on all sides by an alliance, and feel threatened into joining.
One planet, located roughly around the centre of the galaxy and hence at the intersection between the alliances, refuses to ally with any side. With war looming, they insist their policy is and always be neutrality. Perhaps most crucially, none of the alliances are particularly interested in recuiting the planet. To me, this seems unusual, as it would be in a key strategic location. It remains the only central planet, the only planet even, that is unaligned. In the crucial intersection, the alligience of planets is heavily contested.
It is fairly average, not abundant in resources but not lacking in them. It is a similar size to Earth, but has a population of less than 5 billion. It is, overall, not a particularly hostile environment. For sake of environment, imagine it like Earth, but if Earth had originally been inhabited by other species, all of whch are now extinct. The plant life is similar to the oversized life of the mesazoic era. In the galaxy as a whole, technology is roughly comparable to today's, except with superior spacecraft. Traditional weaponry (guns that fire metal bullets) is still the most favoured, although certain elements of the alliance have shifted their preference to heaver armour and hammers (this is because they can be used to break objects and terrain as well as injure people).
What political or other situation would cause such a planet to remain neutral, and for none of the alliances to want to control it? I begun by considering historical or religious reasons, but I didn't get very far.
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**This planet does not offer any military value**
A space war is far more like a naval campaign than land warfare. In the latter, you do usually try to grab any centrally located land\*. But in the former, things get more complicated.
Suppose a war between two naval powers located on others sides of an ocean, with some islands in between. Will both sides try to conquer any island they can? Not really.
Suppose an island that:
* Lacks a major dock (or a natural harbor to build one).
* Has no resources to host a large force.
* Doesn't have much population to recruit to your army.
* Has no industrial complex or any valuable raw-materials.
* Surrounded by a few great bases nearby.
Such place will offer nothing to the invader, so why bother? You have plenty of alternatives. Look at WW2 in the Pacific, Japan and the US did not fight for *every* island, just for the interesting ones (usually the larger and/or those with a good port/airfield).
It seems that your planet fits this criteria perfectly - small population, no large army/industry. Add that it does not have a modern spaceport or natural resources, and the alliances will stay away. Plus, being located near the center of the galaxy means that there are many planets around, surely some will prove a better base.
Another aspect that you might consider - possibly **space travel in this world isn't linear, but rather works with jumps/wormholes**. In such case, the military fleets won't be 'passing by' the planet (even if it's in the very center of the galaxy), and visiting it will require quite a lot of resources invested.
\*Unless it has a rough/mountainous/otherwise impassible territory, like Switzerland.
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Diplomacy. The fact that it's the only unaligned planet may just enough reason for both sides to keep it that way. With tensions rising, and war just around the corner, there will be a need for a neutral ground. Or at least, to keep the option open the (secretly) meet on neutral grounds.
As long as both sides believe there's more value in having a neutral place than the planet would be if it joined their side, neutrality may work out.
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Balance of terror possibly. None of the alliances wants it as annexing it would be the tipping point for the other three alliances and they would likely ally against the annexer.
Being in a central location the planet undoubtedly enjoys some trade relations with its neighbours anyways and as none of the alliances dare to attack it then what would the inhabitants gain from siding with one alliance over another ?
If it's in such a central location then maybe you can make it a transportation / trading hub ? Build something into the interstellar travel mechanisms that means most local galactic traffic would have to be routed through that system. So the locals have their niche as the major refuelling/maintenance hub and as a lot of ships are docked there anyways, why not trade while they're there ? The planet is equally valuable to all alliances as-is, simply put no one wants to rock the boat.
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Some thoughts...
**Bluff**
It's fortunate for Planet X that they are more or less bordering all the other polities. They are able to threaten each alliance, "pressure us and we'll immediately join [the alliance you hate most]".
**Trade and Diplomacy**
Again, location helps. The X-ians can offer their planet as a place where trade (licit or ... otherwise) can happen without all those annoying embargoes, restrictions, and taxes. Likewise, it's great neutral ground for diplomatic meetings between 2 or more factions, where the representatives don't have to besmirch themselves to go into the unholy [rival alliance] space. A little quiet diplomacy between Planet X and the four alliances might make them see the value of such a safety valve between the groups.
**Discretion**
Planet X might be where the "swiss bank accounts" of the galaxy are kept, as are stolen art, dissidents, and (koff koff) "playmates". Basically, this is where the elites from each alliance can stash their dirty laundry. If such a system gets started, it gets easier and easier for Planet X to maintain independence, as they now have possible blackmail material, as well as physical custody of these valuable items.
**Fanatical Resistance**
To back up those other options, Planet X might have a loudly announced policy that they will resist annexation ... bitterly. They might make it clear that they will never join any alliance without being invaded and fought house-to-house, and the victor will possess nothing but a smoking, radioactive wasteland. In other words, it's possible to overcome the X-ites, but it's just not *worth* it.
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**Do it the Swiss way (and then go a bit crazier :) )**
Switzerland has managed to maintain ***[armed neutrality](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Armed_neutrality)*** for centuries despite its important strategic position. Switzerland started as a highly militarised nation. At some point, [they were considered invincible](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Switzerland#/Old_Swiss_Confederacy). They also supplied highly effective mercenaries to all neighbouring countries.
[In modern times](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Switzerland#/Old_Swiss_Confederacy), Switzerland became an international banker that gave her a lot of leverage. The country maintains its military despite neutrality. The service is mandatory for all males. Women can join voluntarily. All people who went through military training can opt for [buying military issued guns](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gun_laws_in_Switzerland#/Army-issued_arms_and_ammunition_collection) (modifications will be made to convert them to non-assault weapons). The general population is relatively well-armed (about [30% owns guns; 0.5 gun per person](http://factmyth.com/factoids/switzerland-requires-citizens-to-own-guns/); data from 2011) and trained.
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**Supplemental**: It seems that the information about current gun ownership is incomplete since different sources report different numbers. The last decade also saw a strong [demilitarisation trend](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/bearing-arms_how-gun-loving-switzerland-regulates-its-firearms/43573832). However, you can completely disregard this. Just base your planet on pre-WWII Switzerland and disregard pacifistic trends of today.
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Your planet (poor in natural resources and not really a paradise climate-wise) could've started as a mercenaries/pirates/outcasts hub. Something like a space version of [Tortuga](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tortuga_(Haiti)) (let's use it as a name for this planet). As years go by the motley crew of Tortugans bring their families and riches. They also tend to retire on Tortuga since its the only place where the warrants and bounties on their heads result in nothing but healthy bragging and a bit of competition. Bounty hunters also retire here, since its the only place in the galaxy where no one will mind their past.
The Tortugans might enjoy this lifestyle for a while (a century or two). But eventually, there comes a time when it is more profitable to go legal. So, they keep their legendary military and go into 'security' business. They also create a very independent and militarised culture. Every single citizen (planetizen?) must serve in the military in one capacity or another. Every household has weapons and trains children from a young age to use them.
The Tortuga now is a good place for business. It is the most secure planet in the sector which prides itself on its ability to defend itself with word or steel as necessary. The big money comes. Tortuga bankers and merchants start to finance other planets and even planetary alliances. The Bank Council makes sure that the economy is diversified and Tortuga does not depend on trade and banking with any alliance or planet too much.
At the same time, they keep working on their military. They offer nice accommodations, top-notch salaries, and lifetime protection guarantees to all scientists and military experts. But of course, they can never have the military strong enough to defend their beloved Tortuga from a massive attack by one of the Alliances.
So, during one of the galactic wars (they sold weapons to all parties, financed all parties, and provided sanctuary to spies of all parties... but it is just a rumour, nothing more) they invited all the involved parties to sign a ceasefire agreement. Oh, and one of the clauses (in a very fine print) mentioned Tortuga's armed neutrality and sanctions for its violation.
Some Alliances thought about annexing or occupying Tortuga. However, that almost unnoticeable clause can be used as a *[casus belli](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Casus_belli)* to declare a war against the offender by very much anyone in the galaxy. And they will most likely band together and do it.
So, at present times, the warring Alliances try to trick each other into hostilities against Tortuga. And Tortuga does her best to provide the best possible intelligence to avoid this unfortunate course of events. In addition to its own highly advanced military, the planet also has a protection of every major military force in the galaxy stationed somewhere next to its borders. And all of them watch each other. And no one wants to be the first to attack.
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they could learn from Sweden, Switzerland and Thailand's experience in World war 2, most important is to be OUT of the way and to be EVERYONE's friend.
1. Out of the way
Simply put, don't block their fleet's way. Your main reason to be invaded is your strategic location, so just offer it to any passer-by. Sweden let German pass, so they were cool. Thailand and Belgium (in WW1) didn't, so they got invaded. Simple.
2. Everyone's friend
Again, look at Sweden and Thailand. While they let the Axis force pass, they also harboured Allies spies, so everyone just cool with them. Your planet could act like an espionage hub for everyone, a neutral ground for some secret diplomacy, a safe haven for refugees from all sides. You could also create some small organizations that align with different faction, but secretly be control by the goverment.
3. Summary
To put it simple, make they understand that your value as an independent planet is much higher than as someone's pawn. Give them what they want the most, then give some unique bonus that allow them to look over you.
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## Suspicion
You can't be sure if any of the other three has secretly allied with this planet. If they have allied themselves secretly to faction A, recruiting this planet to other factions will cause leak of information to faction A.
If this secret alliance happens in a planet between the border of faction A and B, you can guess to whom the information leaks to, but not in this particular planet. You can only guess right 1 out of 3 possibilities.
Thus, it's better to stay away from allying with this planet to prevent information leak.
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Be the planet where the most powerful people in all four alliances own holiday homes.
So, still Switzerland, but think Davos, not Zurich.
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My aliens have 2 thumbs for a stronger grip and the 2 thumbs are on opposite sides of the hand. However since there are 6 fingers total per hand and 2 hands my aliens naturally use base 12.
+1 for base 12
The humans on the generation ship use base 10 naturally because they have a total of 10 fingers except in rare cases.
+1 for base 10
Base 12 has more terminating decimals than base 10
+1 for base 12
Base 12 is hard for people to understand
+1 for base 10
Base 12 saves digits when it comes to really big numbers
+1 for base 12
Base 10 is confusing for the aliens
+1 for base 12
4 for base 12 and 2 for base 10.
Basically I can see a lot of arguments towards using base 12 and a lot of arguments towards using base 10. There is a lot of conflict in my brain going on as to whether or not I should use base 12 or base 10. I mean addition and subtraction are easy in any base but multiplication and division you would have to reteach to someone using base 10. If I could have a real earth-like planet all to myself and my family, I wouldn't mind teaching them base 12 arithmetic.
But I can't so I have to make do with what I have.
**Anyway, should I use base 12 or base 10 in my generation ship story? I have seen a lot of people say "base 10" but those people probably didn't even take into consideration the advantages of base 12.**
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Step back from the context of worldbuilding for a moment, and look at this from the context of storytelling. What purpose does the number system serve in your story? In-universe a different base might have advantages, but does the reader care about that?
Are you trying to extol the virtues of a dozenal system to your readers? Is the difference in number system a source of conflict between humans and aliens? *In-universe* you can use whatever system you like. Whether you use base-10, base-12 or base-π is entirely up to you and 100% opinion based. But *in the story*, giving the reader an unwanted math lesson and forcing him to do unfamiliar math in his head will just be frustrating, possibly frustrating enough to make him drop your story. Conventions are useful. Unless it's actually relevant, stick with the decimal system we all know and love.
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# Use Base Twelve!
There are [actual](http://www.dozenalsociety.org.uk/) [people](http://www.dozenal.org/) out there that think we, in real life, should count in [base 12](https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc). It's called the dozenal system. People have historically counted in other units, like [the Aztecs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal#Use) counting in 20.
A [Numberphile video with Prof. James Grime](https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc) claims:
* the number of factors that go into 12 make it easier for multiplication and division
+ Multiples of Three in Dozenal: 3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20, 23, 26, 29, 30 ...
+ Multiple of Four in Dozenal: 4, 8, 10, 14, 18, 20, 24, 28, 30 ...
+ See the patterns? Most of your times tables you learn as a kid are now easy!
* You "don't" have [.99999.... = 1 abuses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsOXvQn3JuE) and run into as many infinitely long fractions happening in dozenal (because 4/10 = 0.3)
* "Everyday" math becomes easier because of these built in factors
* Base-12 won't change the "serious maths" all that much. (The numbers just look different.)
* The dozenal system "would be easy" to teach to kids, it's just us who grew up with the base-10 who would be confused.
# More Arguments for Base 12:
The historic use of base-12 systems explains some of the oddities of the imperial unit system. (In dozenal) 10 inches is 1 foot? That's obvious! Why would you use some odd system like (in dozenal) 84 cm in 1 m? That makes no sense!
Also, English has words to count up to twelve. Beyond that we need special combinations for numbers. It was (likely) built on a base-12 system.
Count your [knuckles on your fingers](https://youtu.be/UixU1oRW64Q?t=33s) (on one hand), and you get 12. If we were supposed to use base-10, why don't we have 10 knuckles on our fingers? We'd loose two knuckles, and that doesn't seem natural at all.
Besides, Zommuter points out we already use base twelve for months in a year and hours in a day. Why bother with only occasionally using base 12, and just use it all the time?
I just included these arguments to impress upon you that many objections to base-12 systems can be turned around and used on base 10. The base of a numerical system is pretty arbitrary, although there are consequences when you do choose a system. The least of which is, you need new symbols for "ten" and "eleven." (See the numberphile video for some people's take on it.)
# Why Base-10?
We only bother with base-10 because of the [French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication) and [arabic (actual hindu) numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system). If history was a little different, then we may be counting in dozenal, or maybe some other numeral system.
***And the final reason to use base 12... people won't accuse you of being [uncreative](https://youtu.be/l4bmZ1gRqCc?t=8m9s) when it comes to the math and language of these aliens. You're building an work of science fiction, go for it.***
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Can't the aliens use B12, the humans use B10 and computers change their display depending on who is using them?
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The readers of your story are most likely going to be a regular user of base 10 (i.e. a human from Earth), so if you want your story to be readable you should use base 10 in any normal story telling, (i.e. the 23 aliens entered the room vs the 1B aliens entered the room), if you just start throwing out 1B ($23\_{10}$) or A ($11\_{10}$) as numbers you are just going to confuse people.
However if you were telling the tale from an alien's perspective a separate base could be useful for creating a definite sense of alien-ness in the narrative, but the numbering difference should be explained; have the human and alien characters have a *brief* discussion of the differences in numbering systems.
If you do choose to go base 12, for better readability I would recommend not using the normal method of showing alternate number systems (using letters to show numbers after 9 as I did above), but come up with names and or symbols to represent these numbers.
One, two... eight, nine, snarg, blart; or 1,2...8,9,Ԇ,מ... you get the idea.
A simple answer for which number system would dominate in the ship is whoever built the ship would have used their number system throughout, which could cause confusion for the characters using the alternate system and make a nice place for a *short* discussion on the uses of alternate numbering system in the story. Remember keep any explanation short, unless your story is really about the virtues of alternate number systems and not an actual story.
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What language are you writing in? What language is used on the ship, in universe?
The base of the number system is part of the language and if you are using English then you should use base 10. However if on board the lingua franca is that of the aliens then it would be understood that when a character says "15 days" it is actually a translation of $13\_{12}$ '27 hour activity periods'. Since on board, days are longer and base 12 is being used.
You can hint at the use of base twelve on board by making references to dozens and gross. "I'll need five dozen soldiers" "3 gross! Thats a lot of mycocakes"
For the inhabitants, learning to use a different base would just be part of learning a new language. However unless you are writing in an alien con-lang, just use base 10.
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# express base 12 within normal base 10 notation
You are writing in English (or some other human language) so everything is already translated. Look at words like “million” in languages that don’t group things the same way: Chinese will naturally [refer to](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Large_numbers), for example, 2 (units of 10000) but you can’t translate that *the way he said it* because English doesn’t have a common word for 10000. So you would just write it as the value 20,000 which is the correct *integer* but doesn’t give the particular flavor of how he said it: two wàn. Don’t forget, he didn’t say “two” either, but 二 which sounds like “èr” so you **are presenting a translation**.
I recall a Niven short story where a crew had a complement of “eight and five” which shows the way the captain (using base 8) was thinking about it. But 13 is the same integer, the way we normally write it.
I suggest that you follow the literary convention of writing natural numbers in the language you are writing in. So if 37 appears in print we know it is decimal notation. But “round numbers” give a feeling of roundness that we lose if you just write 288. **When that is important**, and often enough to remind people, espress base 12 using [the “round” units that English **does have** for this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_(unit)). So “2 gross”, not [12#](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Lexical_elements#Numbers)200.
So if you want to convey that 37 is one more than a nice round number (like if I’m buying donuts) espress it as “three dozen plus one.” But that is not necessary for every use of every number.
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# Use Base 10!
If you're worried about aliens using base 12 because they have 12 fingers rather than for plot relevant reasons, it's easy enough to justify the aliens independently developing base 10 arithmetic if you really need to bring it up. Here are two possibilities:
* They count on the spaces between fingers, rather than on the fingers themselves. [Some humans do this too](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Numeral_(linguistics)&oldid=754620141#8:_octal), and their language uses octal!
* It's awkward to manipulate all six fingers independently (e.g. physically uncomfortable to lower one thumb but not the other), so they can only count 0-5 rather than 0-6 using comfortable hand positions.
Or even more drastic approaches; if having 12 fingers isn't actually relevant to the story, make your aliens have 10 fingers, each hand having 3 normal fingers and two thumbs.
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You should probably go with whatever fits your story best. The reason we use base 10 is because it was the system used by mathematicians in the middle East during a time when the middle East was the greatest center of learning and culture in the world. One of the races must have been at least somewhat more advanced than the other at some point in the history of your world. You should use the base used by the race that had the most mathematical or scientific knowledge, as using that base would be a likely consequence of learning things from writings that use that base.
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# Use base 10, you will makes less errors
With writing and writing again it will be difficult to be consistent on numbers and dates, so keep it simple.
If you give few citations on base 12, with translation in base 10, I think it would be enough for the readers, without confusing them (and without confusing because some introduced errors)
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In this scenario a kingdom that has not yet invented black powder has been invaded by an enemy that possess cannons and matchlocks. Since the invaders are few in number the defenders managed to beat them back and steal a large cache of powder. They are extremely concerned that the invaders will return in force and wipe them out. Therefore they want to learn how to make their own black powder and manufacture it before the enemy returns (which they think could be a few years.) Here are some caveats:
* The defenders took no prisoners successfully, so they can’t learn the recipe through coercion or bribery.
* The defenders have no written recipe or manual from the invaders.
* The defenders have a tradition of intellectual curiosity and a pseudo alchemy/primitive chemistry but have not independently stumbled on gunpowder. They are however aware of all three components of gunpowder (but have no idea that those things together flash.)
So is it possible to reverse engineer black powder, and if so what method would be most efficient?
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Much of chemical analysis in the age of alchemy was done by taste and smell. Yes, this was very hazardous.
First thing is that anyone with a good sample will notice the sulfurous smell of gunpowder. The black color (and the way it leaves black dust when it's handled) would suggest charcoal is involved.
As @L.Dutch suggested, the taste of potassium nitrate is quite distinctive (to an alchemist, anyway) -- *sal petre* or "rock salt" was well known in Europe before the secrets of making gunpowder found their way from China to the west; it was used to make nitric acid.
Once those three ingredients are known, it would be a matter of testing known to alchemists (in our timeline) before 1300 CE to get a pretty close idea of the proportions.
Then comes the hard part. If you just mix the ingredients, even in perfect proportion, the product will just burn (sorry, Captain Kirk, if the diamonds didn't nix your bamboo cannon, the burn rate would). Instead, one must grind the saltpeter and sulfur into the pore in the charcoal, a process usually done with the "green powder" kept damp -- both to reduce the risk of ignition from friction, and as an aid to getting the saltpeter *inside* the charcoal. This makes what was called "serpentine" powder (probably because one of the early guns was a serpentine, referring to the shape of the holder for the glowing match).
Once everything has been ground to the point where the ingredients can't be separated, then one must press the powder -- again, done damp, this makes a hard cake which, when thoroughly dried, is broken up and sieved to size the granules. This is "corning" and produces powder that would serve well through the 19th century -- essentially similar to what's still sold today (except modern powder gets one additional step, tumbling with graphite to coat the granules, making them meter more smoothly and offering slight protection against accidental ignition by static sparks).
In our history, it took more than two centuries for powder (at least in the West) to progress from "fireworks" to gun propellant, and that was after Westerners in the late 13th century had learned from traders what the Chinese put in their powder (which, by then, the Chinese were using in war rockets and small bombs, perhaps even primitive guns).
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Burning it will produce an obvious odor of sulfur dioxide, showing it likely contains sulfur. Tasting it will show it contains some types of salts, likely immediately identifying saltpetre as at least a major component. This probably won't be a surprise, the substance was known from ancient times.
First, wash in pure water. Filter the solution and crystallize the soluble components. Taste, color, shape of the crystals, their solubility, their weight, their behavior when put in a flame...it'll be pretty straightforward to verify what you have as high-purity potassium nitrate, or saltpetre.
Then, the presence of some sulfur in the remainder will be easily identifiable by smell, and the appearance strongly hints of charcoal. Sulfur can easily be distilled off and recrystallized from vapor.
This leaves a black powder strongly resembling charcoal. With further heating, it burns without any odor (except maybe some weak sulfur residue), like charcoal would. Maybe it's charcoal?
You now have three probable components and their rough proportions. You can now mix them, and...find that the result doesn't work nearly as well as the black powder you analyzed. You can now waste a lot of time trying to identify the nonexistent missing ingredient (maybe it's coal, or some specific kind of charcoal, or treated somehow?), or work out that what you're missing is the manufacturing process that intimately incorporates the sulfur and saltpetre into the pores of the charcoal. A close examination of the original and noting that it's not just three separate powders mixed together, and is probably a lot coarser than the extracted charcoal, might put you on the right path. A microscope would help, if you have such a thing.
How long this is likely to take depends on how sophisticated the original blackpowder was and how sophisticated you need the reproduction to be. The actual history of black powder development spanned centuries and involved many different approaches of varying effectiveness, and quite a few fires and explosions.
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## They don't need to reverse engineer gunpowder at all
The concept of a gun is a far more important thing to discover than any particular propellant. Gun powder is just one way of firing a bullet using expanding gasses, but you don't need gunpowder. What you need is a rapidly expanding gas. To this end, what you are looking for is anything that burns, and a method for making it burn very quickly and any alchemist from any time period probably has access to at least one substance that meets that requirement.
To prove this point, when I was little, my 12 year old brother figured out how to make a gun that could fire a steel ball without gun powder. He read a book about how medieval cannons worked, and then within a few days of using what resources he had at his disposal, he designed his own powderless gun.
In his case, he solved the problem with alcohol. While alcohol does not explode like gunpowder, he's already observed that it creates a fireball when you first light it from the vapors in the air; so, he fashioned a simple hand pump attached to a screen to aggravate the alcohol inside a sealed tube to fill the tube with as much vapor as possible, then ignite it. Basically he got around the need for a rapidly self-oxidizing reaction by using a thermobaric explosion as the propellant. The result was a small gun that could crack plywood using a 1/2" metal ball. With a bit more refinement, the technique could be scaled up to a weapon of significant military value (at least compared to other early firearms).
And this is just one alternate solution. Maybe your alchemists can't figure out any explosives; so, your blacksmiths figure out how to make a compressed air gun instead. Or maybe they use honey or coco powder instead of charcoal which have both been used in certain historical gunpowder recipes. Maybe they come up with a working design for a [steam cannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon). Heck maybe their knowledge of chemistry is good enough they can skip straight to figuring one of the variations of cordite having just not had a good reason to want to make something like that yet.
My point being that if a 12 year old boy can figure out how to make a gun within days of learning how they work, then somewhere in your kingdom is an inventor who can look at a guns mechanical features and figure out how to make some sort of analog with or without an exact black powder recipe.
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Black powder is made by mixing potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.
First step would be to try treating the powder with water: charcoal and sulfur would not be dissolved, potassium nitrate would. The solution water could then be tested to assess the nature of the salt. A possible testing would be by taste, as it is odorless with a sharp, cool, salty taste.
To separate coal from sulfur, sour gas could be used, as sulfur it is well soluble in it. Sour gas is natural gas or any other gas containing significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Alternatively, other organic solvents might be employed.
Once the ingredients are known, it would be a matter of experimenting with the relative ratios until finding the right one.
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# Have a skilled alchemist look over it with a magnifying glass and taste it.
It's a mixture of a few common substances, not some fancy chemical compound. Just have a professional look at it. They should be able to see the distinctive components and get extra information by smelling and tasting them. Sulfur is very distinctive in appearance and taste and smell, so is coal, potassium nitrate is a bit harder since it's a white powder, but the salty sharp taste can be distinguished with experience.
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On earth, the skeletons of Osteicthyes and all their descendants are made of a mixture of collagen and calcium. We can do this because Earth contains food sources for all these animals containing vitamins such as Vitamin C and D, but there's no reason why extraterrestrial food materials would contain specifically those vitamins, especially since they would hail from a completely different tree of life.
So, my question is: **Is there any material that could be used to form an endoskeleton other than calcium and collagen that can be readily sourced on Earth, or at least could be without having major side-effects to life, ecology etc.?**
To explain the last part, if I was to give them copper skeletons, I would have to make sure that there were plants there that contained plenty of copper. And for that, I'd need to design an alternate biochemistry, which is *really, really* time-consuming.
So, basically, this is what I'd like to see from answerers:
* The material you think would work
* An example of where it can be sourced in real life
* The properties of such a skeleton I'd need to know about
I don't mind a material that isn't abundant in Earth food, as long as it doesn't mean alternate biochemistry. If you'd like to downvote or vote to close, please tell me why as well, as that's much more helpful.
Note: I have technically accepted an answer, but I'm still open to more suggestions. If you'd like to answer, go ahead by all means.
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You could replace bone tissue entirely with a "bio-steel", Iron with a small percentage of elemental Carbon and possibly Silicon, Nickel, Chromium, and/or Manganese to improve it's mechanical properties. The problem is not raw materials or even current biology, most life on earth already uses Iron as a basic component of our bodily make up, the problem is one of precipitating the skeleton in a controlled fashion because [this is what happens in humans when Iron precipitates in the blood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload). You'd need a new suite of [Bone Cells](https://depts.washington.edu/bonebio/bonAbout/bonecells.html) that control the process but that could be done.
Steel bones won't break, although an excess of carbon in the bone would be a new and interesting disease effectively changing them into Cast Iron which would break under heavy loads or impacts, they'll buckle like tube bent at too sharp an angle crushing the marrow and squirting it out through the blood supply vessels directly into the blood stream. Such injuries would be rarer than breaks in normal humans but with the potential for far greater harm.
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> Is there any material that could be used to form an endoskeleton other than calcium and collagen that can be readily sourced on Earth?
>
>
>
Well, if you want to go for something abundant, go for Silicon and Aluminum oxides.
They make up a large part of the rocks around us, and rocks are know to be sturdy and handle well compressive loads.
However, you cannot take rid of the Calcium in the bones without changing our biochemistry: Ca+ ion is fundamental for our cells, and bones are a large buffer for them.
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If you want a different material you're not going to get around a different biochemistry - the more different the material the more different the biochemistry.
That being said, you don't really need to completely invent a new biochemistry:
First of all "bone" is nothing more than organic tissue that was mineralized in a controlled manner - any organism that has minerals other calcium available could feasibly be able to use them to make bones (no further biochemical explanation needed up to this point, if you want/need more details just think about how the organism takes up and processes these minerals - it must already have biochemsitry to handle them).
Secondly there are some cool/weird animals on earth that do use [materials other than calcium and collagen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_(biology)): while replacement of calcium is a bit rare (mostly because calcium mineralises [and dissolves] relatively easy in the usual ph-7.2 enviroment; some organisms can just use any micro particles though) collagen can be replaced with lots of things (carbonate, chitin & cellulose among others).
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Fluid or air filled tissue or bladders, similar to erectile tissue. Goodyear experimented with inflatable planes a few decades ago. Not blimps, but heavier than air vehicles made of flexible material stiffened by air pressure.
An inverted chitin exoskeleton. Squids and octopuses are mollusks but they have a beak which evolved from a shell. An arthropod could evolve in a similar direction.
Keratin, like hair or nails, or rhinoceros horn.
Any solid material that can precipitate out of bodily fluid could conceivably be used after some evolution, so look into the composition of kidney stones, gall stones, gout, etc.
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look at what other biominerals are available. most hard parts are a biomineral in either a carbohydrate or protein matrix.
bones are made of calcium phosphate in a protein matrix, and the further you get from that the more you will have to change the biochemistry. I have tried to list these from the ones requiring the least change to the most change.
1. Many shells are made of calcium carbonate, often mixed with chitin and/or proteins for strength. this is probably the most likely material and will require little to no change in biochemistry.
2. A few rare creature use iron sulfide as the mineral component of their shells.
3. limpet teeth the strongest biomineral known is made of iron oxyhydroxide again with a chitin matrix.
4. Silicates are common in micro-organisms and plants, they are very slow to form so they would impede growth in animals however.
5. Some bacteria deposit copper sulfide.
6. metallic gold can be deposited by some some bacteria but the difficulty of getting gold in to solution will require drastically change your creatures biochemistry.
7. if you want to go hypothetical, Chalcopyrite, or copper-iron-sulfide could be biologically produced.
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**Found materials.**
Lots of organisms use found materials to produce exoskeletons. Foraminiferans make their tests out of sand. Hermit crabs scavenge shells from other creatures. Caddisfly larvae usually make do with sand, but these caddisflies were provided gold and jewels, and obligingly made do.
<https://featuredcreature.com/oh-you-facy-huh-caddisfly-larvae-construct-elaborate-cases-out-of-gold-rubies-and-other-precious-stones/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2EvC0.jpg)
So too the alternate endoskeleton. Your creatures use found materials deemed appropriate in composition, shape and size, taking them into their bodies and using them as bones. Like our bones, they are connected by collagen and ligments, and moved by muscles. These materials will of course vary in shape and size. Many will be rocks or crystals of appropriate shape and size. Some might be materials produced by other organisms, like coral or shells. Some of these found bones might be actual bones grown by a different creature.
Like a hermit crab, such a creature will keep an eye out for a better bone as it goes about its business. A bone which breaks or degenerated or is outgrown will be replaced when the opportunity arises, or other bones within the body rearranged to make do.
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Graphene alloys. Graphene is made from Carbon, one of the most abundand materials in the universe and what we ourselves are made off for a large part. It'll take a (possibly impossible) leap in evolution that will keep large bone-supported creatures from appearing for billions years longer and likely require extremely long growth times to become adults, but once you are there... Very strong bones, possibly exoskeletons depending on how much Graphene is in the alloy and how heavy the rest of the alloy is and the gravitational pull of the planet.
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I'm writing a story about a villain (as some would call him) or antihero (as he would prefer to be called), somewhat similar to Adrian Veidt, who needs to buy a few hundred acres of land to set up facilities and carry out certain plans.
He's from the US, but he needs a place where there won't be any nosy officials coming around to check on compliance with environmental regulations, or working conditions, or how he came by certain consignments of goods, or why his security guards are toting so much firepower.
At the same time, he needs to be able to fly home at regular intervals and do business in the US, so he can't have the FBI accusing him of doing business with a rogue state. Everything needs to look reasonably legitimate from a distance.
He doesn't yet have any connections outside the US, but he can pay a few million dollars in bribes if need be.
What would be the best country for him to set up shop in?
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It's risky but if you want to do business against the USA
* You could go to a [corrupted country](http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results). This is the perception of corruption and not the actual corruption but it's the only way to measure it. In such a places, the
corruption is endemic and it's an integral part of the economy. It is
possible to bribe and buy a lot of things. If you want the officials
to look elsewhere, give them some money. It is not possible to be
sure that you won't get caught because you know; there are still good
cops around but if things go bad, you could try to bribe an higher
official.
* Looking at the list of corrupted governments, you probably noticed that the ones in the bottom all have problems. Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Eritrea, Yemen and Syria are all in a civil war. This is not just a coincidence: a lot of things are allowed in time of war. There is a lot of opportunities there for a mean spirited person. Now, these countries are unstable and may prove to be dangerous for your ''hero'' since he could get killed but authorities could be more compliant, especially if you can bring revenues or more stability in the region. Personally, I would not recommend Syria, Libya or Yemen because the situation is too chaotic. Avoid Iraq: the Islamic state might kill you and their state could disintegrate, endangering your investment. I don't know Eritrea enough to suggest a good vacation spot. The 2 remaining countries could be good fit. They have been at war for a long time. We could say that their state of instability is pretty stable. That is actually a good thing for you.
* Lastly, I could also suggest Colombia. Some areas are controlled and have been controlled by the FARC for a long time. They are still fighting the government. You just need to convince them.
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Goethe said: 'Warum in die Ferne schweifen, wenn das Gute doch so nah?' (Why longing for the distance?) So I'd vote for Mexico. More precisely for one of the special economic zones right across the US-border.
Your antiheroic villain could start a company, rent some factories and build a complex tunnel system. Nobody would ask, why he's traveling abroad so often. Au contraire: he will be renowned for running such a big business.
Tons of cash on his bank accounts? Above suspicion. His men armed to the teeth? Hey, we all know about the situation in Mexico. He's buying plutonium or any other supervillain-related-stuff? Dude, he's just doing serious business. That's dangerous? Yeah, but he's working it up in another country.
So the gov will leave him alone as long as he's paying taxes (by the way: taking over the world has a tax rate of 15%).
Trust me, he will love it! :)
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I'd suggest United States.
Trying to be sneaky will just make you look suspicious and **attract** attention. It is much simpler to simply get those permissions and pass those inspections. You might need to fudge some details like just who will have control of whatever you wish to build when it is ready, when exactly will it be ready, and what exactly can it do. But if you have a legit government contract to build an experimental prototype of something very close to what you actually want, fudging the details a little shouldn't be that hard. Experimentals never quite match the original plan, anyway.
I can't really be specific without knowing what it is you wish to build, but here are some benefits of staying domestic and legit.
**No travel.** Obvious, but probably more useful than you'd think. Thanks to terrorists various governments are actually paying attention to people travelling to remote locations and spending lots of money there. And while I don't want to go to irrelevant politics, the US doesn't really have the best reputation at the moment overseas. In most locations suggested the locals would be very suspicious of the American with all the armed guards and heavy logistics. Not necessarily enough to cause trouble, but it would attract attention from people whose job it is to be suspicious.
**Improved security.** The US government would help you keep things you want to keep secret stay so. A legit project useful to your needs would probably be classified. So while you would still need to obey regulations and pass inspections, compliance would be overseen by people who **already know and accept** what you are pretending to do. As long what you want to do and what you pretend to do are roughly similar with similar basic requirements, this removes the issue of somebody accidentally stumbling on the truth. It would take an expert looking at the details to tell the difference. And experts are valuable, details easy to obscure. If it is something exotic, all experts good enough to expose you might already work for you...
**Government resources.** The government could provide staff like physical security (why hire armed thugs, when you can ask for soldiers to protect the facility?), background checks of personnel, and facilities and personnel for testing prototypes. Access to computing resources for simulations and experts useful for debugging any possible technical issues would also be much easier. And depending on what you want to build government would probably foot part of the bill. It is probably easier to get government contract if you make it cheap for them, but money is money.
**Easier logistics.** Removing or reducing the need for remoteness, makes people and supplies easier and cheaper to get there. And having a government contract makes getting any restricted materials and components much easier and cheaper. Even more importantly, it makes you much less likely to come to the attention of people whose job it is to make sure restricted materials and technologies do not get into wrong places.
**Getting caught hurts less.** As Lohoris pointed out in a comment what happens if you get discovered is different as well. He presented that as a downside, but potentially getting arrested and having a more or less fair trial in a country where you have strong political connections that can affect the interpretation of your actions is preferable to a highly secure location that can only be neutralized as a threat using air strikes or commando raids. At least if you value staying alive and your project is a serious threat to national security of one or more major powers. The US might do a strike from a carrier or allied base anywhere in the world if threat is real. Countries like Russia, Israel, China and even France and United Kingdom would strike a serious threat if it was within convenient reach. Or at least inform somebody who can reach it.
Seriously, hiding in plain sight is almost always the best policy when you want to do something complex discreetly. It might be different for your particular villain, he might need to use a front man if he is too notorious to get a government contract, or your particular project, but in general it is easier to camouflage something as legit than it is to hide it. Especially if it is something large and complex. And involves "red flag" suspicious things such as much of weapons technology.
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Russia would be a good place to start. Tonnes of land, and most of it is so remote that the authorities will never come calling. Hell, they don't even have to know. Placed somewhere on the edge of one of the rivers north of Okhotsk, he could have short travel times between the US and his secret lab, in a location that is both close to a lot of major industrial and technical countries, while also being almost uninhabited. By setting up a company or something in the region, he could legitimately do business (not good business, but people make foolish choices all the time), with a local workforce and little interference. Goods could be shipped up by river from Okhotsk to his secret base, so it doesn't even require road access from Okhotsk (which is good, because it doesn't have any).
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**First Condition:** The new facility should not get the villain under suspicion back home. The new site may be important, but the profits to pay for the plot are generated at the legit sites. Nothing like a billion dollar fine for evading sanctions to screw up your plans for world domination.
The US government is powerful enough to make and enforce their own rules on the international community. This is not necessarily according to international law, but the threat of being banned from doing business in the US is a strong incentive. (Cf [Banco Delta Asia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Delta_Asia), [Bank Saderat Iran](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._sanctions_against_Iran#Banking))
That excludes many highly corrupt and permissive regulatory climates, unless they happen to have a good relationship with the United States. Such a relationship can change on short notice. (Cf [Iraq](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War#Foreign_support_to_Iraq_and_Iran))
The most suitable places would be well connected in the international community, to resist unilateral US pressure. How about some of the [British Overseas Territories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories) or [French Overseas Departments](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_department)? But even they are coming under pressure, just like Switzerland.
**Second Condition:** Permissive regulatory climate. At a first glance, this directly contradicts the first condition. Reputable and well-connected nations have health and environmental inspectors.
However, it might be possible to find exceptions, especially if you know which inspectors you want to avoid -- some parts of Germany pride themselves in having fewer tax inspectors than average, but that wouldn't help with the weapons laws. Look at a place that needs foreign investment.
**Third Condition:** No nosy neighbors. You need a place that is physically secluded. Difficult in densely populated areas like Europe or New England. Australia, Canada, or US states like Arizona or New Mexico sound good.
**TL;DR** Are you sure you want to send your villain abroad? Find a county in the US where he would be the only significant investor, and where the old Sheriff and Mayor could be persuaded to retire with a fat bank account.
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While commenting, I thought of a place your anti-hero could go.
**Remote part of an under-developed or war-torn location; case-study: [Socotra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socotra), Yemen.**
Since there are many examples, I will use one I just went to, and you can extrapolate from there. We recently went there as tourists: it is the "Galapagos of the Middle East".
**Access:** Socotra (or your destination) had a flight from the UAE with a layover in the British base off of Al Mukalla on mainland Yemen. Once on the island of Socotra, we just walked off: nothing was even glanced at. Also, there is a small port. Bring in your items in small packages and nobody cares; larger items will require some small bribery. Pirates of Somalia have piped down now.
**Distraction:** Yemen is under great upheaval, and the focus is in the West of Yemen and will likely continue. In the opposite side of the spectrum, Socotra's 50,000 or so people are quiet, many without electricity or water, but not expressing squalor (rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty - plenty of food, etc.). Nobody gives a fig about what you're doing on that island, and if they did, it would be hard for them to get any attention.
**Communications:** Your destination should have at least this, and indeed even the most remote parts of the world are starting to all have access to mobile & Internet. You can easily pay to have the Socotra mobile and IT connections wired to your compound.
**Destination:** Well, when you're entertaining your wealthy investors, your destination has the most beautiful beaches and weather, as well as the most exotic flora I have seen in my life. Also, the friendliest people, and the best lobster. Nobody wants to visit you in Siberia for meetings. ;)
**Going to Space?:** Socotra is very close to the equator driving down costs of your undetected space launches (I have no idea what your anti-hero is up to).
So obviously, I just used an example, but find your remote place of choice that has access, distraction, is bribe-able, has IT & Mobile and sea/air connections; and you might want a desirable location for the story as well.
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I'm quite surprised nobody suggested... an island!
The guy could buy an island big enough to house a resort on the surface and a secret facility underground.
The resort would have an airport that McEvil can use to travel to US.
His fortune could be justified as earning from the luxury resort. Being the owner of the island-state he wouldn't have to pay any tax.
Officials would come to the island only for leisure (he could actually spy them to obtain useful information).
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A while ago, I asked [In what war would one modern military vehicle make a difference?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12219/in-what-war-would-one-modern-military-vehicle-make-a-difference) I have now come up with a sort-of sequel.
A modern, Challenger II battle tank has been sent back in time to a past war. It was decided in my last question that this tank would indeed have some significant impact on the war. What was not shown is how long the tank would be effective for.
That's what I'm asking now. In this question, I'm looking for comparison of how long my Challenger could last in various historic wars, assuming:
* No restocking on fuel *or* parts from the present; the time machine has been destroyed
* Unlimited *knowledge* of the tank can be taken back by its crew and shared with anyone else who might need it
* In-period manufacturing techniques and technology
* The tank is rendered ineffective when it can no longer move or shoot.
For example, it might last longer in WWII because the factories would be more capable of producing armor for it and it might be able to run off fuel from the time. I doubt it would last so long in a war before vehicles were invented.
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Probably the biggest factor in determining the transported tank's viability is going to be fuel availability. The [Challenger 2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_2) uses a diesel engine, so the tank will only be useable for about 160 miles (250 km) -- off-road operational range -- prior to the invention of [diesel fuel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_fuel#Origins) in the 1890s.
So we'll take a look at wars between 1900 and 1945, since you mention in comments that you want to know WWII and earlier. The Challenger carries 52 rounds with its main cannon. Since this is state-of-the-art ammunition, it can't be constructed with WWII technology, let alone WWI. While the Challenger's armor is classified, it's safe to say that even a [Tiger II](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_II) would have significant trouble, if not find it impossible, to actively penetrate the tank's armor. Eliminating the tank would have to be done by a specially-equipped team of infantry, specially-designed artillery, or aircraft.
Because tanks didn't see much use prior to WWII, there was no ultimate strategy for combatting tanks from the air. The typical plan was to drop standard bombs on the thinner armor on the roof. There's a pretty good summation of anti-tank tactics and weapons [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_warfare#Second_World_War). Since this is all still WWII technology, it's going to be mostly ineffective against a properly prepared Challenger 2.
In conclusion, a Challenger 2 transported back to the first half of the 1900s will probably defeat itself before it is defeated by the opponent, mostly by running out of fuel or ammunition. If by fuel, you'll get up to 6 hours of lifetime. If by ammunition, up to 52 shots; after which point you'll have to find an inferior alternative or resort to the mounted machine guns.
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### Fuel
For the most part, fuel is a non-issue. Diesels are generally quite forgiving when it comes to fuel quality, so you can run the tank equally well off of refined diesel or lamp oil. The further back in time you go, the more expensive it is to fuel it, but you can probably go back several thousand years before you lose the ability entirely.
### Ammunition
As others have mentioned, the main gun uses highly sophisticated ammunition. If you go back more than a few decades, you lose the ability to make more at any price. However, it also has a chain gun and machine gun, both of which use fairly conventional cartridge-based ammunition. You could mass-produce this clear back to the mid/late-1800s, although with an increased rate of jams from WWI on earlier due to sloppier manufacturing tolerances. If you're willing to pay premium prices, you could get hand-made cartridges clear back to 1820 or so, with the invention of the [percussion cap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_cap).
### Spare parts
This is the tricky part. The Challenger 2 is made using modern high-strength alloys and manufacturing tolerances.
The electronics are probably irreplaceable before the 1980s; the armor before the 1960s; but neither is likely to be damaged except in a combat situation that destroys the tank.
The most likely failure point is the engine, drivetrain, or tracks. If the failure is in a tolerance-critical part, trial-and-error fitting could make a replacement back to the early 1800s with the invention of high-hardness tool steels; before that, no amount of effort will give a good enough fit. If the failure is in a strength-critical part, you could probably make a replacement back to 1900 or so; before that, the lack of high-strength steels means that a replacement part that is strong enough won't fit in the available space, and vice-versa.
### Overall
Your fuel supply is good for about 250 km before needing to find a local supply, your ammunition will last you one to two battles, and you'll probably suffer an immobilizing drivetrain breakdown around the 10,000 km mark. If you're fighting in a recent enough war, you may be able to solve these problems.
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I won't address the parts/fuel/ammo part of the question as others have already done so.
How long a single armored vehicle would last would depend largely on the way you operated it, regardless of the war you time-traveled back to. Is it basically stationary, guarding a specific area and only moving as necessary to get line-of-sight on incoming enemies, or is it on the move every day to keep up with an advancing army?
In the first case, sitting basically stationary, it could last quite awhile. You could use spotters to sight incoming enemies (and shoot minor threats) and only fire up the vehicle as needed, to move to a better firing position or charge the batteries, for example. In a single position like that, especially if the crew knew ahead of time to prepare for such a role and packed accordingly, the vehicle would probably remain operational until it ran out of ammo or the position was overrun and it was set on fire (or it was pounded flat with artillery or mortars, depending on the time period).
How long the ammo would last is, of course, an entirely different question. Hours? Months? It's impossible to say without more information.
If the vehicle was on the move every day I doubt it would last two weeks, even making short daily movements with unlimited fuel. One of two things would happen: it would become immobile due to breakage; or it would become stuck with no possibility of recovery without other tracked vehicles to pull it free. Tracked vehicles are impressive off-road, but when they get stuck or break down it takes major effort to recover them. Something as simple as a thrown track in a bad spot with no other tracked vehicles to help could mobility-kill the vehicle.
Luck and the crew's competency both play large parts, but I honestly would not be surprised if a single tank or armored fighting vehicle mobility-killed itself on day one even with a skilled crew.
Source - 4 years as a mechanized infantryman in the 1st Cavalry Division. I worked with M2A2 Bradleys and M1114 HMMWVs for the most part but my company had an M1 Abrams platoon attached to it as well.
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With the support of a nation, the tank could be maintained as a devastating combat vehicle from roughly the mid 19th century onward. Far more important than it's ability to kill things, the Challenger 2 could turn battles and whole campaigns as ***the ultimate command vehicle***.
**Fuel**
As others have pointed out, fuel is not a problem. Diesel engines will run on almost any liquid hydrocarbon, though it might be hell on the filters, hoses, and gaskets. These could be replaced with natural equivalents (rubber, cotton, wool) but they would have to be serviced more frequently.
**Main Gun**
The main gun will be fun for a battle or two until you fire all 49 rounds of the standard load. It's possible shells could be manufactured for it, [modern brass cartridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartridge_%28firearms%29#Modern_metallic_cartridges) with [smokeless powder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder) begin appearing in the 1860s, but the materials and tooling to create them were known far earlier. Even black powder would work, but it would require extensive cleaning else it would foul the barrel. The lower pressure of contemporary manufacture shells would be a boon as it would serve to preserve the rifling.
It's possible to replace the main gun entirely with a breech loading cannon of equivalent weight starting with the [Armstrong gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Gun) in 1855. The existing [L30 gun weighs 1800 kg](http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product3632.html) which could handle any number of mid 19th century heavy [naval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_guns_by_caliber) or [field guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_field_guns). The ability to move a heavy gun around the battlefield with impunity would be devastating.
**Machine Guns**
The machine guns are arguably of greater utility on a pre-WWII battlefield to mow down infantry. They use [7.62x51mm NATO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.62%C3%9751mm_NATO) introduced in the 1950s. With examples to work from it would not be difficult to manufacture more. Depending on the era, the ballistics and charge might not be quite right. The biggest problem would be ensuring the ammunition is consistent enough to cycle to mechanism.
The commander's [L37A2 is a variant of the FN MAG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_MAG#British_subvariants), a [gas operated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-operated_reloading) machine gun. This is fortunate as the gas system can be adjusted for the differing power of the locally manufactured ammunition.
The [L94A1 chain gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L94A1_chain_gun), also using 7.62x51mm NATO, is even better for local ammunition if it can be kept powered. The external drive means it does not rely on the ammunition to cycle the gun. Any underpowered rounds will not result in a stoppage, the gun will fire as long as there is power and ammunition. As long as the batteries hold out, and the tank's alternator works, the chain gun will fire whatever ammunition fits in the gun.
Like the main gun, the machine guns could be replaced. The commander's roof mounted gun could be replaced with a [Gatling gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun). The coaxial gun, with only a small hole to fire through would have to wait for a single barrel [Maxim gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun).
**Drive train**
Here's the real maintenance problem, the drive train: the engine, suspension, and transmission. Tanks are limited by their drive trains. Since everyone wants to shove more weight onto a tank, more armor, more equipment, bigger gun... tank drive trains are notoriously overworked. They have to transmit power to move 60 tons at 60km/h. Worse, they have to *accelerate* all that mass. This puts tremendous strain on the drive train.
Modern tank drive trains are cutting edge technology. They require careful and lavish maintenance. And they are irreplaceable. Even if you know how to fashion the parts, it's unlikely the metallurgy is available to handle the stresses and heat of a modern tank drive train, as well as the milling technology to meet the required tolerances. Locally fashioned parts might work, but at reduced performance and increased maintenance. Once something really vital breaks you have an immobile pillbox. A Challenger 2 maintenance schedule would shed more light on this, but I can't find one.
Careful driving of the tank, keeping acceleration and torque low, avoiding high speeds, and moving it around on flatbeds (rail cars being the only thing able to carry 60 tons) as much as possible, would extend life.
**Optics**
Here's where it gets really interesting.
The Challenger's rangerfinder, optics, and night vision would allow it to scout the enemy from thousands of meters away, through smoke, and at night. Even if the electronics failed, the backup optical sights are still of extremely high quality. Once those failed, replacing it with a good telescope would be valuable.
**Radio**
It cannot be overstated how bulky and awful military radios were up until even the 1980s. The Challenger 2 uses the [Bowman system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_%28communications_system%29). Having a powerful, reliable, *multi-frequency* radio in a mobile armored box would be devastating. Even once the original radio failed it would have the space and power to carry a bulky [Marconi radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#Marconi). So long as there is copper wire, such a basic radio could be manufactured.
***The Ultimate Command Vehicle***
This is the most overlooked military advantage. Battles are won and lost on intel and communication. In an era where communications are still done with bugles and flags and runners, a mid-19th century commander who can be everywhere and know everything would rule the battlefield. Whomever has the Challenger 2 has the mobility, armor, and optics to scout the enemy with impunity, and communicate that information.
Imagine an army who has equipped their major units with basic, if bulky, radios. Their commander is in the Challenger 2 racing back and forth across the battlefield with impunity, getting first-hand information, disseminating it to their troops, and issuing orders in real time. They can scout any position, even though smoke, haze, fog, rain, and night. They can rapidly react to any change in the situation ordering their troops to react appropriately, concentrating where needed.
Even with no weapons, so long as the drive-train works the Challenger 2 can win mid-19th century battles.
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In one scenario, **potentially not long at all**.
In contrast to the other answers, a Challenger II battle tank in World War II (or I) would catch the attention of the opposition very quickly. It's location and vector could be very well known. Quickly a trap could be constructed whereby the tank falls into a deep *[trou de loup](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trou_de_loup)* and is rendered useless until the crew must expose themselves to firepower to try to dig themselves out.
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Other have pointed out what the weaknesses of this one tank are. But the big game changer here, especially when talking about the two world wars, is not the tank, but the "unlimited knowledge" about the tank.
Although it can be assumed to be impossible to re-create the challenger2 or a leopard2, or even an abrams, all that knowledge should still help the contemporary industry to build much better tanks.
So, while the individual tank will be rendered useless sooner or later, the side the crew chooses still has an enormous advantage.
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The easiest way to disable such tank would be, obviously, by attacking its weakest element: the crew.
Crew members can be tricked; the enemy lord may submit and offer a celebration dinner to his new Masters. Too late, the crew members discover that the cook has developed a taste for adding arsenic to the food, or that the guards have confused the crew with the meal, slicing them in little pieces.
Even without treachery, a patient enemy may wait until the members get out of the tank (to eat, bathe, and other necessities) and take them one of one.
A more drastic option is the use of explosives. I remember reading about Palestinians settings mines with lots of conventional explosives against Israel heavily armored Merkava tanks... when they succeeded, the tank was not affected, but the crew was killed due to the shock.
Of course, the more basic the civilization, the more complicated the trap is/the more time they need to setup it/the more risk of it backfiring, but they are far from defenseless.
Another alternative would be mining a gallery and letting it collapse under the tank; of course it needs being able to predict where the tank will pass through (or steer the crew towards that point).
Finally, a point that nobody has talked is how far the tank could move due to terrain. After all, I doubt that any bridge built before the 1900s (even if brand new) would have enough width and structural integrity to support the pass of a tank.
If you find a barge big and strong enough to ferry the tank, this makes for an ideal point of ambush; a single man with an axe or a torch may sink the barge and the tank with it.
So, yes, I think there are ways to defeat that tank. Many of them will involve lots of patience and effort, and a high risk of the attack being discovered (causing lots of casualties in the retaliation), but definitely there are ways to finish the tank.
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Multi fuel diesel engines can burn a fairly wide range of fuels, so if "unlimited knowledge" also means the ability to tune the engine, it may be possible to go farther into the past by burning vegetable or whale oil. With unlimited knowledge the crew might also be able to reproduce the reactions needed to create biodiesel as well.
Of course this creates a cascade effect, biodiesel, for example, tends to clean engines of deposits and the resulting mess gums up the filters. Recreating the specialized materials for engine oil and fuel filters could become challenging the farther you go into the past.
The real sticking point isn't so much the knowledge, but what sort of industrial base you will have access to. Going farther back than the 1980's you will actually have difficulty finding tooling that can repair or replace items on the tank, and going past the 1960's you are essentially looking for the tools to make the tools. As noted, much of the other equipment like the computers and ammunition will be essentially impossible to reproduce.
A bit of a historical BTW, the Germans had prepared a tank busting airplane in the form of the AEG G.IVk (k for kanone) for the expected battles of 1919, and British "Contact Patrol" fighters were equally capable of dealing with hard ground targets (although the Germans did not actually have much in the way of tanks). These, of course are capable of dealing with period tanks, but a well placed burst of 20mm cannon fire across the upper surface of a modern tank *could* damage the optics and make the sights ineffective.
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Tanks are designed with a limited amount of different screws, the purpose of that is in case of a breakdown one can take screws from a less important part of the tank and make a more important part working. This is really effective to make the tank move on even when it is almost totally destroyed.
Diesel tanks are able to run on different types of oil based fuels. Many trucks are running on bio-diesel and i think that MC. Donald's transport trucks runs of filtered deep-frying oil. Though it is sparse, oil is available for a long while back mostly from whales, used to fuel lamps - it could be possible to filter that oil to make it run though it would be terrible expensive none the less possible.
In the defense category, the tank is built to hold against an estimated of 50-100 times as powerful shot as a 12 pounder cannon, meaning The Monitors cannon (30lbs) would barely leave a dent, the most dangerous situation that would leave the tank in was if the belts was broken and the tank was siege'd waiting for the crew to get hungry or ambushed trying to get out to repair the track - though the crew might be a bit shaken and get some bruises from the shaking upon impact.
So the most "dangerous" variable in this case is ammo and money. If you got plenty of both, the tank can run for a good while.
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Choosing your war wisely is a useful approach. Even without refueling or rearming, any modern tank plopped down in the middle of England in the eleventh century, before the wide availability of gunpowder, 50 rounds from a cannon and a few hundred rounds from a chain gun would win the whole war.
When the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese at the end of WWII, they surrendered not because they were beaten in battle, but because the US demonstrated (with repetition) that they had the technology to wipe them off the face of the planet. As horrible as that situation was, it worked.
Park a tank outside a castle, fire three to five cannon rounds into it, mow down a phalanx of foot soldiers with a chain gun, then drive off in the direction of the next castle, and word is going to get around. Do that two or three more times, and they'll deliver the crown jewels in a box.
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In a modern tank, you have all these neat things like radar, and thermal vision, which would be really helpful for the first portion of battle. Any bows and arrows would be effectively harmless. The tank would pick off people in the opposing army before they actually arrive, and when that happens, one tank crewman would have to get up and use the machine gun(s) on top of the tank where he would become a target for any arrows or people who climb on top. Eventually the tank would run out of all ammunition (as well as the gunner on top being killed) They may open the hatch and kill those inside, disabling the tank. Not to say that this tank wouldn't put up a good fight though, it would have probably caused a couple-hundred casualties before being overrun.
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Depending on availability of spare parts?
A tanks as good as it's parts, no parts, no service.
A modern tank is really not all that different than a past tank, subtle differences in armor, the biggest change is sensor technology to find targets.
So your hypothetical, if a Abrams M1 went back to the Battle of the Bulge, against Tiger's it'd rip it to shreds. An M829 Armor piericing discarding sabot can penetrate 540 mm (21 inches) of steel rolled armor. A tiger tank, had 100mm of armor. A HEAT M830 round will go thru a Tiger or Panzer tank.
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All tanks have manual back up systems. Electronics is not critical. Furthermore, an Abrams will run on anything that burns. As long as the technology is available for a wood or coal engine then the drive train is crappy but replaceable. Cannons are also replaceable.
The real hold back is that there would be no reason. A horse drawn Cannon takes far less energy to move than a tank, which has essentially the same capability against soft targets. Tanks are a luxury and there was no incentive to build them despite being quite readily possible.
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I am building a world where the modern day has collided with fantasy, and I want a situation where firearms are useful against humans and technology, but not against magic and fantastical creatures. I like the idea of knights in kevlared plate with swords fighting these creatures, rather than with firearms.
However, I have a problem. Guns are good. Very good. Compared to melee weapons, a firearm is orders of magnitude better in every context. A single man with an assault rifle can mow down waves of swordsmen. So, what is the reason why firearms can't be used against these creatures?
Parameters:
1. Magic functionally does not exist for humans, only magical creatures. Some of these creatures may be inherently magical or able to enchant items that humans can use, but humans cannot learn magic.
2. The fantastical creatures are wide and varied in size, ability and temperament, and are from mythology, fantasy stories, and other sources.
3. Fantasy materials and general statements about the nature of these creatures are fine, such as "All creatures are weak to ...".
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# Monsters have a magical aura that makes them extraordinarily durable.
Monsters use magic to make themselves tougher. Chopping through monsters is like chopping through steel. You can do it with very heavy weaponry, but simple bullets tend to just bounce off.
Their claws will also rip through armor like paper, due to the magical enhancements to their sharpness and ripping power.
This is due to their legend. More powerful magical creatures are more powerful due to their long life and many great deeds, which empowers them. New monsters are much easier to slay, unless they have a very great parent which empowered them.
# Very old weapons have their own legend and magic.
Older weapons have a magical aura which can pierce monster flesh and resist their strikes. The older and more famous an object the greater the magic it has. Swords, armor, spears and other old weapons can be taken from museums and be used to slay monsters and resist their terrible weapons. Each monster they slay bolsters them, reducing any ancient damage and repairing them.
# Monsters are very adaptive to modern architecture.
Monsters have a tendency to hide near humans, using our buildings as nests. This makes using artillery an extremely expensive and extended method to slay them. Knights are a much more effective and humane solution, and the knights themselves tend to build a legend in their items by slaying monsters, and get more able to fight monsters.
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This is a slightly meta interpretation.
A 'collision with fantasy' implies that two separate planes of existence somehow merged (partially). We call that other plane 'fantastical' for a reason, and our physics and those of the other plane, while similar, are not identical. This can have consequences for the behaviour of metals.
For example, for metals to interact with entities of the other plane, they need to be grounded; that is, they need to be directly connected to our plane, through the body of a knight (be it symbolically, or physically, by means of an electrical current).
Bullets simply lack this continuation of our plane.
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Magical creatures cannot be seen at a significant distance. The masquerade veil can only be pierced by the non magical humans once a fantastical creature is within a few feet. This removes the main advantage of a gun, which is accuracy and killing power at a distance. Sure you can blast away at short range but up close the combined attack/defence potential of a bladed weapon means you have a greater chance of avoiding Mutal kill.
TVTropes link: [Never bring a gun to a knife fight](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverBringAGunToAKnifeFight)
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**Magical creatures evolved because the core of their magic is a field that acts against kinetic energy**
Let's have some outrageous fun with your magic system. Fun I say! Because *it comes with a consequence,* and that's the best kind.
Your fantasy creatures exist *at all* because they evolved to enjoy a passive benefit of magic: an aura or field that *resists kinetic energy.* This makes them susceptible to swords... but not to firearms... and especially not to really big firearms. The heavier or faster something is moving toward them the *greater the resistance of the magical field against that object.* Try to fire a Howitzer directly at it and the round will stop dead in the air a foot from the beast, then drop harmlessly to the ground. (Well, not so harmless to the dandelion beneath it... but you get my drift.)
But there's a consequence! Your creatures *live inside this field* which means that in a sand storm the sand blown against them piles up next to them. Yes, it's hard to see in a sand storm. *But your fantasy creatures can't see at all* because the sand is constantly layering up against that magical field. Your creatures could stand calmly in an F5 tornado... but they'd be blind as bats to everything around them. Until... *and here's the fun part,* the kinetic energy is reduced *and the wall of material built up against the field falls over on them.*
Which is a long way of saying your creatures have some pros and cons in battle! They can use this against their enemies by picking up some speed (a giant eagle is a great example) such that they have a temporary impenetrable shield! But it also means they would have trouble (for example) playing a game of baseball because the ball would bounce away or be deflected by the shield. It protects them and gives you the condition you want — guns can't be used against them — but they also can't do what normal terrestrial creatures do. Imagine a magic hart charging through the forest constantly being bounced around as the implied force of the trees due to the speed of the charge activate the field. Which is cool! Because the trees of the world they came from also have magic and, combined, it causes everything to be much more normal. Hah!
You can have a lot of fun with something like this!
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## Shooting always turns out like the machine gun scene in Pulp Fiction
It's not that a bullet wouldn't kill a fantasy creature, it's just that you get statistically completely implausible amounts of wobbles, misfires, tumbles, jerks, etc, and a bullet is only likely to strike true 1 in 500 times.
It's presumably due to narrative imperative, Discworld style; storytelling is built into the natural laws of the fantasy world, and hitting unicorns with machine guns is like a small particle quantum tunnelling through some huge potential barrier, or a very high energy chemical species resulting from a multiproduct chemical reaction; it can happen, it's just highly unlikely.
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## Misalignment
The mundane and fantasy worlds have collided, but they are not perfectly fused. This could be explained to the reader graphically, by someone standing at a table covered with puzzle pieces, some made from thin wood, some from thick styrofoam. If they abruptly jostle some of the pieces together, the smaller pieces of styrofoam will be kicked right up off the surface of the table.
The net result is that any *object* (cohesive physical force matters!) which is:
* Of Earthly origin (nonmagical)
* Small
* Very rapidly striking an object of magical nature
will be knocked sideways from any impact into the fourth dimension.
Note that this does not seem to protect against ballista bolts, missiles, vehicle ramming attacks, chemical weapons, etc. ... mostly just bullets.
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Option A: Dune-style magic shields which block fast projectiles.
Option B: For some magic reason you need “contact” with the creatures to kill them. Wielding a metal weapon bare handed works, but throw something and it harmlessly glances off the creature.
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**Some things came across. Some things didn't.**
>
> The elf leaned back in his chair, looking wistfully at his full glass
> of beer. “Ah, mirvoire,” he sighed. He strummed his lyre, a
> melancholy and poignant chord. “Had that only come across! If my
> lyre were left behind, I might make do with a guipar. But I so miss
> mirvoire.”
>
>
> “Guitar,” said the human. She turned down the Coleman
> lantern until its flame was a low gutter; saving propane.
> Shadows danced over the three of them. “So tell me about mirvoire.”
>
>
> “Alas, mirvoire!” moaned the elf. The lyre spoke – hope, dance, the
> green. “How can I tell you of that amazing drink?” The lyre spoke
> again – celebration and grief, the works of the Elves. The human was
> surprised to find a tear on her cheek.
>
>
> The dwarf finished his Lucky
> Strike in a long drag, wiped his eyes and took the beer from in front
> of the elf. “I’ve had mirvore. Its pretty good.” He drank half the
> beer and set the glass back in front of the elf. “This is good too.”
> He leaned across the table towards the human. His
> eyes glittered. “Now - what I want to hear about is guns!”
>
>
>
In the merger some things came and some did not. The fantasy world lost things that it had, as did our world. The lacking things are apparently random and one of those things is guns. The people from both worlds make do.
[Answer]
[TVTropes: Guns vs. Swords](https://tvtropes.org/Main/GunsVsSwords)
Perhaps guns do work, eventually, but swords are better because "Swords do more damage to people!".
Your magical monsters have some sorta regeneration / physical structure / lack of organs, that's good against relatively small volumes of damage, possibly even if dealt relatively quickly, but bad against giant gaps in their skins.
Sort of like an airplane, but smaller?
[Answer]
Lead reacts badly in the presence of magical creatures. It fizzles and then falls to the ground, as if rendered magically heavy.
It can be picked up after, but there are obvious problems with trying this with the creature close.
[Answer]
I can't imagine any way to protect a creature against firearms but not swords. But I may suggest making **magic creatures immune to any ranged attacks**.
In this case fighters will resemble knights (use melee weapons and some kind of armour); though not entirely - shotguns, mines and some other modern weapons will still do. You'll have a kind of schwarze reiters.
There're many ways to protect creatures from ranged attacks - it's already been suggested to make them visible at close distance only; you may give them a kind of anti-bullet sphere; some magical creatures may be full of holes (hence, hard to hit with a bullet but easy to swish with a sword).
[Answer]
## Fate magic auras
Magical creatures have fate-magic auras that protect them against attacks. If you shoot them from a distance, you're going to miss, because the wind wasn't right or someone bumped your elbow or an enemy snuck up on you or a hundred different reasons. It took a long time and a lot of lives for humanity to learn this lesson.
Humans have auras too, which don't do much for them normally, but wherever a human aura overlaps with a magical creature aura, the creature's aura gets pushed back. So you can hit them from melee range without bullshit fate magic interfering.
Why not just use a gun in melee range? Well, because it is necessary for your aura to include your weapon too. A human aura will extend over a melee weapon they are holding, if the human has enough affinity with that weapon. But it will not extend to a bullet fired from a gun, even in melee range.
[Answer]
My personal favourite variation on this was a fantasy book called "Grunts" (by Mary Gentle) where the early interaction was easily failed by a simple spell called "Fail Weapons". Wizards solved it and we ended up with the Special Undead Services (Yo the Snipers!), but in the short term the guns were useless.
It would basically be a chaos type spell where the more moving parts, the more vulnerable a weapon is to being broken by the spell. Springs/strings/pins/tensors/etc break as if under stress.
[Answer]
While there are many good reasons here, I thought I might add a few of my own. These are ideas I've used myself in more realistic story ideas, where magic meets the modern world.
**1. They're too fast/durable**
No one uses guns against superheros, and why is that? Because superhumans are too fast or too tough for bullets to work-sometimes, even both apply! Assuming monsters are magically enhanced, and that a weapon has to be of equal or greater magical power to wound a monster, guns just won't work.
Maybe the amount of magic containable in an item is limited by size; bullets are too small to hold the power needed for slaying a dragon, but can be used to kill the smallest kinds of magical vermin, like rat swarms or mutant bugs.
Or maybe magic can only activate and become useful when contacted by a living thing, which gives the magic purpose and direction. Without it, magic is like a hammer lying on the ground; useless until someone picks it up and makes a use for it. Bullets and other projectiles just can't 'hold on' to their given directive long enough after being activated to be useful.
**2. Magic shields the monster**
Magic is an extension of the creature who owns it, right? So that magical field will try to protect its owner, making every battle a literal grapple with supernatural force. Bullets and missiles simply can't tear through the flow and distortion of energy around the monster, anymore than a bullet can ignore winds between them and the target.
However, if one is up close and personal, with a weapon falling under one's personal influence, the Monster Field's influence is practically negated, as one can more effectively resist the efforts of the interfering magic. It's not magic per se, just physics!
**3. Humans Have No Say in The Matter**
Why did Irish respect the powers of the Fey, despite knowing they were weak to iron? Because the fairies were tricky and HAD POWER BEYOND THEIR OWN. Humans can't use magic, right? So, if magic is an extension of the user, and can be used to influence the world around them (turning heat in breath into fire for a dragon, or resisting gravity so an owlbear can fly), then the magic-users have a say in the way things work that WE DON'T HAVE.
It's like having no say in politics; the magical creatures are using their combined influence to manipulate physics to prevent the humans from overpowering them, much like how samurai once forbid the use of firearms so their swords and armor wouldn't become useless. They can't alter reality completely, but they can bend and twist and nudge enough to make guns useless against them.
But, this is good as well. Because what if humans have a similar influence? What if being from a nonmagical world allows us to somewhat negate magic around us? So just like we can find ways to work around or take advantage of natural laws, we can find ways to negate or twist magic? What if magical fields don't affect weapons within a human's small field of influence? What if glyphs and runes are still effective if broken, *unless* a human does the breaking?
Anyway, I hope these ideas help. Your idea is interesting, and I'm excited to see what you come up with!
[Answer]
All living exist on two overlapping planes simultaneously: the physical and the spiritual.
Humans and natural creatures are primarily physical, but are visible on the spiritual plane and can manifest a spiritual presence with force of will or intense emotions. When doing so, this typically extends to their clothing and held gear.
Fantasy creatures are the mirror of this, so primarily spiritual, but visible on the physical plane and able to manifest physically with force of will or intense emotions.
Bullets, arrows, and other ranged weaponry is strictly in the physical plane after it leaves the presence of the attacker, so will typically pass right through it, or leave it uninjured in any case.
You can have fun with this idea, coming up with exceptions and special cases.
[Answer]
## The Intent to Harm is what actually does the damage.
In a literal sense, "Guns don't kill monsters, people do".
It's the intention of the weapon's wielder to inflict harm that makes it do so against magical creatures.
The sword is the instrument of its wielder's violence.
A gun is also an instrument of violence but a bullet, once dissociated from the one who fired it, lacks something ineffable.
Perhaps it's simply that the bullet and the gun are not the same weapon.
Perhaps the wielder of the gun cannot intuitively see the bullet as something damaging and so it doesn't do the damage it ought to.
Perhaps one needs to form an ontological connection between the two combatants to harm the monsters.
Maybe bullets just don't have the same visceral impact as stabbing a monster with a sword.
Whatever the case. A sword can cut a monster, and a bullet just doesn't do the job.
] |
[Question]
[
Not much else to the question. I want a solar system which has a habitable planet with a pretty exaggerated elliptical orbit, one that's definitely going to need to be in a solar system with an oval goldilocks zone to remain habitable but I don't know if that's at all possible.
**Is an oval goldilocks zone possible?**
[Answer]
Yes, with **[more than one star](https://www.space.com/39676-alien-planets-habitable-zone-animation-tool.html)**. A single star produces spherically symmetric radiation so the habitable zone also has spherical symmetry. With more than one star, however, the contributions of all stars add and this does not generally produce a symmetric habitable zone (nor a *static* one).
Here is a habitable zone calculator for multiple stars with literature references for the methodology, referenced in the linked article above.
[Habitable Zones in Multiple Star Systems](http://astro.twam.info/hz-multi/)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M2em4.png)
Image from [Müller & Haghighipour (2014)](http://astro.twam.info/hz-multi/).
The example above is quite extreme to demonstrate the point, and this example would be obviously unlikely to allow a habitable world in a stable orbit.
Whether or not stable planetary orbits would exist for any given binary (or higher order) star system that would also fall within the (dynamic!) habitable zone would require either a lot of calculation or some degree of hand waving. We do know for certain that there are [binary star systems which host planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumbinary_planet) in stable orbits.
Binary and trinary systems are also extremely common in the universe, as far as we can tell, and new research even suggests that [all stars may be born in pairs](https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/13/new-evidence-that-all-stars-are-born-in-pairs/.). As for how many of them have [habitable planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_binary_star_systems) in stable orbits, this is currently a topic of active research.
One interesting idea that might fit a story would be a habitable planet which was [itself an L4/L5 trojan](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07339) of an orbiting binary star. There would certainly be some configurations like this which could be stable for a very long time and would allow the planet to receive reasonably constant radiation from both stars. Being a Lagrange trojan, however, does put certain limits on how eccentric the orbit can be.
[Answer]
I think Goldilocks Zone is inherently tire-shaped, circular, but as @L.Dutch says before me, a somewhat elliptic orbit can be found within it; since the "tire" part (not including the hub) is pretty wide.
However, what makes it "habitable" are reasonable temperatures. It is possible that an elliptical orbit that spends most of its time in the habitable zone, but makes excursions outside it, could still support life and civilization. They just have to be prepared to survive some wicked cold winters.
But that is possible, if the planet itself has a hot molten core and provides some warmth. Pressure and core temperature can provide warmth, we suspect that is the case on some moons of Jupiter (Titan, Ganymede, Io) that we suspect have liquid water oceans under the ice. There the temperature is provided by periodic gravitational flexing of the moon in its orbit around Jupiter.
But technology can also provide the heat to survive. Suppose our own star captures a rogue planet, in its own elliptical orbit, and it pulls Earth out of its nearly circular orbit into an elliptical orbit that will eventually bring us out of the Goldilock's zone for half our orbit. But this is happening very gradually, we have ten thousand years before we are pulled completely out of the Goldilocks Zone.
What do we do? Get busy building habitats and moving to solar and nuclear power that don't depend on a warm environment.
Where do we build them? Under the Ocean. In the part of our orbit outside the Goldilocks Zone, the oceans are going to freeze solid on the surface, perhaps a few hundred yards thick. A lot of surface fish will die. All the plants and animals on land will die. (That also mean no oxygen production by surface plants.) It will probably reach -60C,
But ocean ice is a good insulator, there are miles of liquid water under it, and it will be reasonable warm; at the boundary between ice and liquid about 28F. That is where we live and work; nuclear powered underwater habitats, for farms, ranches for our animals; artificial sunlight, luxury apartments, whole cities, with nuclear powered transportation between them. Technologically we need to produce our own oxygen and dispose of our CO2.
Note this won't work for an Earth ejected into the cold of space; it depends on periodic warming by the sun when we are IN the Goldilocks Zone.
Without any Sun, we need a similar self-sustaining closed habitat on the surface and a lot more nuclear power. We are just riding a rock through space.
But for the original scenario, part-time excursions, we've got 10,000 years, we can do it. Or some civilization could do it, and pretty much at our own level of technology. If not now, with a few hundred years, if we were so motivated.
[Answer]
If you look at our solar system, the habitable zone is a rather large belt, whose extension varies according to the criteria used for its estimate, below showing just 2 possible outcomes
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/o9SZI.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2sOma.jpg)
As you can see, due to its extension, you could have a planet swinging in distance between Mars and Venus orbits and still be in the habitable zone. That would be more eccentric than the orbit earth has, though not as extreme as the one of, for example, Halley's comet.
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The habitable zone is defined for orbits with rather small eccentricities.
Highly eccentric orbits (provided they are stable enough) can be habitable by plunging in and out of the zone, because the planet is thermally inert.
Be aware that high-eccentricity orbits spend more time near their apoapsis and less near their periapsis.
[Answer]
It is impossible to have an oval habitable zone around a single star.
If there are two stars, they could have two separate habitable zones separated by space. In that case any habitable planet would have to orbit around only one of the stars in only one of the habitable zones. That is called an S-type orbit.
Or the two stars could be close enough that their two habitable zones overlapped a little or a lot.
If the habitable zones of the two stars overlapped a lot, a planet orbiting around both of the stars in a P-type or circumbinary orbit could be within the combined habitable zone of both.
For a planet in a P-type or circumbinary orbit to have a stable orbit it's distance from the center of gravity of the two stars should be at least 2 to 4 times the separation between the two stars.
>
> The minimum stable star-to-circumbinary-planet separation is about 2–4 times the binary star separation, or orbital period about 3–8 times the binary period. The innermost planets in all the Kepler circumbinary systems have been found orbiting close to this radius. The planets have semi-major axes that lie between 1.09 and 1.46 times this critical radius. The reason could be that migration might become inefficient near the critical radius, leaving planets just outside this radius.[9]
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_binary_star_systems>
So the farther away a habitable planet is from the two stars, compared to the separation between them, the wider the circumstellar habitable zones of the two stars will be, compared to the separation between them.
So the combined habitable zone of the two stars can not be very oval, or the planet as it orbits would sometimes be outside of it.
Note that the quote says that if the minimum stable orbit of a circumbinary planet is 2 to 4 times the separation between the two stars, the minimum orbital period of the circumbinary planet will be 3 to 8 times as long as the orbital period of the stars around their center of gravity.
So since the planet will take longer to orbit the 2 stars than the two stars will take to orbit each other, the relative orientations of the two stars and the planet will change.
Sometimes the planet will be on the line between star A and star B, beyond star B. As star B orbits faster than the planet, it will move ahead of the planet. Eventually the line between star A and star B will be at a right angle to the line between their center of gravity and the planet.
As star A orbits faster than the planet, it will catch up to the planet, and eventually star B, star A, and the planet will be in a straight line, with the planet beyond star A.
So if the habitable zone is very oval, it will move faster than the planet, and sometimes move so far ahead that the planet will be outside of it.
The habitable planet can never have a orbit where it moves at the same speed as the outer point of the combined habitable zone of the two stars. And it would greatly reduce the habitability of the planet if it was sometimes outside the habitable zone.
So there is a considerable limit to how oval the combined habitable zone can be, even if the planet has a perfectly circular orbit. And if the planet has a more eccentric elliptical the habitable zone, moving relative to the planet, will have to be less oval so that the planet will never be outside of the habitable zone.
So while the combined habitable zone of two stars could be slightly or very oval in shape, depending on their separation, no planet in an P-type or circumbinary orbit, whether circular or elliptical, could stay within the moving combined habitable zone all the time if the zone was very oval.
So you might as well go with a single star with a perfectly circular habitable zone, and make the planet have an eccentric elliptical orbit that stays within the habitable zone, and so is reasonably but not highly eccentric.
And of course you could have a planet with an orbit that takes either closer to the star, or farther from the star, or maybe both, than the habitable zone, giving it short periods of intense heat or intense cold, or both. That could work if the planet spends most of its orbit and time within the habitable so its temperatures are mostly endurable for most of the orbit.
My comment at: <https://moviechat.org/tt0058824/Lost-in-Space/58c7261d5ec57f0478eea649/The-orbit-of-Plrplanus> is an attempt to explain how a planet with a highly eccentric orbit might possibly, repeat possibly, have comfortable temperatures most of the time.
[Answer]
## Frame challenge
The habitable zone is directly dependent on the amount of energy delivered to the planet from the sun. Energy famously radiates equally in all directions, so for a single star the habitable zone must be circular.
Because the energy is controlled by the inverse square law **the habitable zone becomes wider the further you get from the star**. So if you want a planet with an eccentric orbit to remain within the habitable zone you need a **really hot star** (i.e. emits a lot of radiation) and the planet to orbit far from it. I don't know if that does what you want.
[Answer]
How about an elliptical orbit with a reasonably long period, plus a negative feedback mechanism for greenhouse gases? Unlike our own planet, you'd need to up the greenhouse effect when things get cold: maybe a methane emitter that thrives at colder temperatures?
[Answer]
# Spin up the star, tilt the planet, use half of it
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ajvWp.png)
Your planet orbits a star with a *rapid* rotation. The star, being an ellipsoid, is substantially *brighter* when seen from above one of its poles, because it is *larger* in the sky when seen from that perspective. (There really are such stars) So the planet is hot at its closest approach, and also hot (maybe hotter) before and afterward as it passes over the star's poles. But in addition, we're going to tilt the planet so that one pole faces the star at closest approach, and the other faces it at a greater distance. As a result, the habitable side of the planet has two hot summers separated by a short dark winter and a long bright winter. But if its orbit were circular, the long bright winter would become a third hot summer uniting the other two in a searing siege, and the short dark winter would become a *long* dark winter like we have on Antarctica. Thus the habitable zone *must* be oval from the perspective of that half of the planet.
[Answer]
[This Article](https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/12/20/a-pulsar-habitable-zone/) references a paper that is now 404, but that considered habitable planets around a pulsar. If you expand "habitable zone" to include "habitable by life not as we know it", then you may end up with a habitable zone that is greatly extended along the sweep path of the pulsar's beam. I'm assuming that a planet that was receiving usable energy from the pulsar at all would obtain usable energy from the pulsar beam. And since this beam doesn't seem to require any particular alignment with the rotation (based solely on online animations), you probably get a really weirdly shaped energy density map around the star, along with a weirdly shaped subset of that that would be "habitable". So it would just depend on making your characters non-human, or living in artificial habitats capable of sustaining their environments off of the pulsar's energy.
[Answer]
If we instead keep the spherical habitable zone (so only one star), then we need to find a way to keep the planet habitable when its outside the zone. It that case make the planet a moon of a gas giant (where the gas giant is in the eccentric orbit around the star). The gas giant can then heat up the planet through tidal forces, keeping it warm during what will be the cold, dark winters.
[Answer]
Direct answer: No, not stable.
But planet's climates represent the average of their orbit. You could have eliptical orbit whose apistar inner edge was inside the GZ and whose peristar was beyond the outer edge.
Note: Review Kepler's equal area law. (The line connecting a planet to it's star sweeps out an equal area in equal time.) The planet will do the part of the orbit between ascending node and descending node (nearest the star) in much less time than the other end.
Your net result is short very hot summers, and very long cold winters.
You will need an orbital simulator to play around with to put numbers on it. My guess is that you could be 10-15% inside the inner edge and 20% outside the outer edge.
This could mean:
* Many animals will estivate during the summer, or hibernate in winter or both.
* You may have creatures that live out their life cycle in a season, and only eggs/larva/seeds last until the next season.
* You may have creatures that alternate generations. E.g the haploid form is very different in strucuture from the diploid form. Or they metamorphose into a very different form depending on the season.
See Hal Clement's novel "Ice & Fire"
] |
[Question]
[
I'm wanting to have two regions separated by a large mountain but do not want either side to become a desert. What would the conditions have to be on the desert side for this to be prevented? This is a medieval setting but one civilization is quite 'magically advanced'.
A couple ideas:
* a lot of springs?
* something that creates it's own weather system? I'd rather not have it be
some hardcore hand-wavy magic thing. Maybe the civilization pumps water from large aquifers underground and evaporates it to form clouds and rain.
The civilization has a source of energy they can use for this kind of process.
[Answer]
Deserts next to mountains are in part due to the [rain shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow). As moist air rises across a mountain range, it rains, and that happens on the windward side of the mountain. The leeward side becomes a desert.
So make sure that the prevailing winds are *parallel* to the mountain range, not *across* it, and perhaps that the land rises in the direction of the wind. Basically a **T**-shaped mountain range, which puts each area on the windward side of the cross of the T.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sHc5g.png)
(Pic from user [Althean](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/44449/althaen))
[Answer]
It's easy enough - the Highlands of Scotland manage perfectly well! The answer there is to simply have enough rainfall that no matter how much rain shadow there is, there is still more rain available. In the case of Scotland, the west coast is very much wetter than the east coast - but the east coast is by no means a desert.
[Answer]
Moisture comes from some large body of water and can feed even large areas, if unobstructed (as seen in the Amazon rain forest or Canada).
The rain shadow effect leads to deserts if there are *two* ranges of mountains.
In that condition the area *between* the ranges is pretty much desert.
This is what happens in the western USA and in most of central Asia.
Keep in mind this is *not* the only way leading to desertification. The ley factor to maintain a healthy blooming territory is *forests*. This is because forests keep ground cool, so you'll get circulation from sea (humid) to land (rain); if too many forests are cut then the hot air will go from land to ocean and rain there whatever humidity they got from land. This is what happened to Lebanon and Sardinia in ancient (but historic) times and what Mato Grosso(Brazil) is seriously at risk of now.
Bottom line:
* Have a single mountain range;
* Have heavy forestation *especially* on the side farther from sea (or other large water body).
You may further divide your territories by having two parallel mountain ridges which will contain a desert area.
[Answer]
The mountain creates its own weather system : on the upwind side, moisture laden air rises, cools, and the moisture condenses and falls as rain. So if the mountain is sufficiently large, the downwind side will experience a shortage of rain. (Though a mountain pass may allow moisture-laden air to stream through the gap, making it permanently cloudy, stormy, and not a fun place to cross)
However, if the wind periodically changes direction, then neither side need be a desert(though if one side has ocean and the other has only inland water sources such as rivers, lakes and forest or irrigated land, the latter side will presumably be drier.
So why would the wind direction reverse? Perhaps the daily cycle of sea breezes rushing onshore during sunlit hours, and reversing at night as the land warms and cools more easily isn't a long enough timescale.
Perhaps it's seasonal; the seaward side will maintain relatively even temperatures, while the landward side has hot summers (dry, thanks to predominantly onshore winds) and cool damp winters.
Or perhaps it's unstable, after a few warm days inland, the rising air forms clouds, cutting off the warmth and reversing the prevailing winds until the skies clear again and the cycle repeats. Or probably all of the above in a frustratingly complex and unpredictable pattern...
[Answer]
**Colliding winds can help**. The mississippi river watershed manages to be fertile (at least most of it) despite being between two mountain ranges, the collision of air from a warm sea to the south and cold lakes to the north means the air stays saturated enough to generate significant rain.
**Also impassable by foot is not the same as impassible to rain**. The appalachians are rugged and mostly impassable by ground traffic without being very high so enough rain makes it over them to supply at least the eastern part of the country.
note that a large enough expanse of land will deplete the rain without needing mountains, so how big your place is is important.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lCTyn.jpg)
[Answer]
Have a very large mountain range indeed, with a large desert plateau in the centre and exploit the continental/monsoon weather pattern to its fullest. So this does require that the mountains be more-or-less on the equator but as long as they're *the* major weather influence this model will work.
Large continents tend to have drier interiors than they have margins, this is because weather systems struggle to penetrate too far from the coast. Large continents also have almost permanent low pressures systems at their centre because they heat faster than the ocean around them, these draw bodies of moist air from over the ocean onto land and up to an altitude where the temperature is below the [dew point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_point) thereby producing rain. This is the basic mechanism behind the monsoons, now in the large mountain range model we go one step further and block these air masses close to the coast, the high mountain desert pulls moist weather in from the surrounding sea (on both sides of the range) and up the face of the range producing [orographic rain systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precipitation_types#Orographic).
The combination of orographic rain and a prevailing wind that brings moisture inland every day should keep the province pretty wet all year around. The desert plateau within the mountainous region is in the rain shadow of the mountains on all sides and never gets any substantial rain.
[Answer]
It's sufficient to have a narrow mountain range. The mountain range will create a watershed. Rain shadows are created by broad mountain ranges, because the first hills push up the air currents which then rain out over these hills before crossing the watershed. But with a narrow mountain range, the rain cloud forms over the watershed and drops some of the rain on the other side.
The exact course of the watershed can of course be altered by building dams. Block one side of a valley, and the resulting lake can outflow to the other side.
[Answer]
>
> I'm wanting to have two regions separated by a large mountain but do
> not want either side to become a desert.
>
>
>
Large bodies of water will do the trick. The [water cycle](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleice.html) can help avoid desert formation. If you have large bodies of water on **both** sides of the mountain range, bigger than a typical lake, you can effectively have a no rain shadow zone on both sides.
**Basically, it would work something like this.**
* Sunlight heats the body of water
* Water vapor rises on warmer air.
* This draws in cooler, drier air from the surroundings (including from the direction of the mountains) to the water.
* As that warmer air/water vapor rises it will also be pulled/pushed by the displacement of that cooler air.
* Some of that warm air and vapor hits the mountains and condenses into rain/snow.
* That water makes its way downhill (streams and rivers) and back to the large body of water.
This image may make what I'm trying to say a bit clearer.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H5g4I.jpg)
In that way, with rain and streams and rivers flowing through it, it is far more likely that the area will not be prone to forming a desert.
[Answer]
You say "large mountain" but not "mountain range".
If your mountain is fairly singular then there is no problem anyway, most winds will just transport moisture around the peak of the mountain, so both sides will have the same climate, no matter where the wind comes from.
If you want a long mountain range then the other answers are already covering that case, but one more comment about the possibility of springs.
Imagine a mountain range perpendicular to the prevailing wind direction so that moisture will most often rain out on one wet side with the other side being dry.
I can think of a mountain range where maybe half of the water that is raining down flows into large cave systems and through them to the other side where it reappears from many springs preventing the lands on that side from becoming a desert.
However that side would still have a different climate because rain would still be scarce, so it wouldn't be the same as on the other side. Vegetation will florish anywhere there is enough water, but most of the available water would come from below, not from above, so the overall conditions would still be drier than on the other side.
[Answer]
Have no prevailing wind... such that for some part of the year it blows one way, for another part of the year it blows another way...
For instance a mountain range that sits at around the line the jet stream would like to follow, fluctuations in the jet stream could mean that the side of the range that gets the rain would be changing on a irregular basis.
If you consider somewhere like the UK, some of the time the wind comes from predominantly the west, but under the influence of waves in the jet stream low or high pressures get held over the UK and wind instead comes from the south or the north west.
] |
[Question]
[
**Background**
---
Moonshot entrepreneur Elon Branson funds a migration to space. Instead of spending billions of developing safe space technology, he instead finds volunteers and shoots them in to space with no plan to get them down. If they can figure it out, they become a new civilization, if they can't they die. Being superbly human, and very interested in survival, the colonists cling on for years before mastering their environment and thriving.
The technological situation is this:
* There has been no great advance in space launch technology.
* Rockets are still very expensive, its hard to get things into and out of space.
* The colonists are almost completely self-sufficient by now.
* They drag small stray comets and asteroids to industrial stations for materials.
* They build habitation and agricultural stations, mostly in the vicinity of Earth (HEO, Moon orbit, Earth-Moon L-points) using the materials from the comets and asteroids.
**Details on capabilities**
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The colonists have perfected the engineering of plasma rocket technology like [VASMIR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket) or [MPD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoplasmadynamic_thruster), and developed effective, lightweight deep space radiation shields. They can make space tugs with ~10kN net thrust and a delta-v of over 100 km/s; they can move 1000 tons between Earth/Mars in about 200 days, to Saturn in about 2 years. They use 0.75g gravity by spinning habitation stations, and most of their agricultural/industrial production is done by robots.
Other than the stuff mentioned above the technology level is mostly the same as today. Computing power is greater but, having reached the limits of Moore's law, is not exponentially greater than today. The numbers of the colonists are in the hundreds of thousands. Habitat stations are in the 100m-1km range with a few thousand at most living inside. Most live in stations around earth, but colonists are spread around the solar system on various expeditions. They stay out of gravity wells, and try to avoid building/fueling the chemical rockets needed to get off even medium sized moons. Their industrial capacity is advanced, with lots of cutting edge 3-d printing technology. Their agriculture is self sufficient, but expensive to expand (since it means building more stations)
**The questions**
Launching things into space is expensive, as is sending things from space down to Earth (in way so that it survives its descent). In light of this:
* **What trade would actually occur between the colonists and the Earthlings?**
+ **What would the colonists most want from Earth?**
+ **What could the colonists make/obtain more cheaply than could be found on Earth?**
[Answer]
What can the colonists offer?
* Rare/expensive resources: Fancy-sounding metals, materials that can only be made under zero-g/vacuum conditions, ect. For example, solar panels are very difficult to manufacture on earth because they require a vacuum chamber to be forged in. Importing cheap panels via drop-pod would make sense.
* Space-services: Satellite construction and repair, observation time in observatories, scientific experiments, the works. Not hard to imagine them getting a multi-trillion dollar contract to maintain and upgrade our satellite network.
* Scientific outsourcing: Earth-borne researchers can request experiments to be run in space-borne labs. Compared to today, the experiments would be cheap, easy, and far more numerous because of their availability.
But what can earth offer the colonies?
* Information: New patents, Programs, basically anything you can send in an e-mail. Earther engineers can't build the ships, but they can design them. Earther programmers can make the software that runs the colonies ships and stations. Instead of outsourcing IT to another country they can outsource it to another Planet.
* Entertainment: Movies, music, games, TV shows, and VR tours of national parks. Basically anything to distract you from the fact that you live in an air-tight tin can. Constantly being on-guard for life-support or power-plant failure means spacers won't have the free mental energy to do this for themselves.
* Luxury food: Livestock farming just doesn't make sense in space - you can't afford to feed a cow 500 pounds of grain for 1 pound of meat. Spacers will probably pay a premium for delicacies with exotic names, like "Scrambled eggs" and "Beef"
[Answer]
Well, they have a literally astronomical amount of resources, but here goes:
1) **Space Porn** (extremely profitable). **Space sports**, such as Spaceball is also a decent moneymaker. (*Remember, the enemy's gate is down*).
When energy is abundant, when resources are sold by the megaton, people's attention will be the most valuable commodity. And space sex&sports are cool, we're hard hardwired evolutionary reasons to care for sex and "our" team. Heck, even uploaded emulations will probably want to watch sports!
2) A few **megatons** of gold, platinum, iridium (you name your rare material, it's abundant in space), with proper regolithic heat shielding and designated drop zones etc. One proper asteroid can supply Earth's current consumption of various metals for thousands of years. (turns out these cubic kilometers are big). For most metals, it's not profitable to export back to Earth, but they can be used in the Spacer industries to make solar panels, and the marginal cost of bringing 10000 megatons is only marginally larger than bringing back 1 ton (simplifying a bit, but you get the idea).
3) **Microwaved Solar** Array technologies for power supply. The sun is (as it turns out) always shining in space. The sun outputs $3.8\times10^{26}$ J each second, and virtually every Joule of it is wasted. We have but to reach out and partake of this glorious bounty.
4) **Science & Industry!** Without the Earth's gravitational influence (well, or at least when in freefall around Earth or Sun), and without the obnoxious (and useful) 100km of air, new scientific miracles become possible. New manufacturing technologies, space observatories beyond the dreams of Earthlings, all become easy.
[Answer]
* **Rare Earth Metals** and other rare elements. Today China supplies Earth with 95% of its need of [REM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element).
* **Rare isotopes**. Deuterium, Helium-3 and similar that form easily in space when there is no pesky atmosphere blocking all the neutrons and other cosmic radiation that makes such isotopes form.
* **"Glassy" materials** and crystals that grow easily in zero gravity and vacuum. [Glass metals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_metal) and [glassy carbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassy_carbon) for instance have some pretty awesome qualities.
[Answer]
There was a [similar question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/1064/2113) related to trade with a Mars colony. That covers many of the easy trade items like knowledge and media. Also unique items like asteroid rocks (part of a genuine asteroid from the asteroid belt!). So the real question is what things might be profitable to ship from a space station that weren't profitable from a planet.
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> expensive, as is sending things from space down to Earth (in way so that it survives its descent).
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I think that you overestimate this. If you maneuver something to relative rest compared to the Earth, you can just drop it with a [parachute](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27940/2113). The big problem that a meteorite has isn't the gravity induced speed but the relative velocity prior to entry.
The reason we don't do this is that currently we send space ships up and down. They already have engines and it is easier to reuse the engines than to switch to something else. But note how much more fuel and engines we use to send a space shuttle into space than back down again. Not only do we add two extra engines, we also attach a gigantic fuel tank that when full was six to seven times the weight of the space shuttle orbiter. On reentry, all the fuel is carried inside the orbiter.
The hard part is not dropping the stuff down. It's moving stuff around the solar system so that it's in position to drop down. I would think that the best way to do that is with a solar sail, but you put new technology out of scope of this question. If you think of a solar sail as existing technology, then that's the natural solution. The argument in favor of that is that we have a decent understanding of the theory behind solar sails. What we're missing is the need to actually use them. That's because we only ever go into orbit with manned vehicles. And unmanned vehicles only send back data, not themselves.
If solar sails (and ramjets, catapults, etc.) are not available, the obvious option from technology in use now is rockets. Rockets need fuel though. Where do you get that in space? Our current method is to bring it up from Earth with us. But that's so ridiculously expensive that the only things we do in orbit are experiments and satellites.
The kind of slightly improved rockets that you describe would move some luxuries into the realm of possibility. Some because they're better; some because they're marketed better.
* Alien Monster Cables, made with microgravity-enabled perfection.
* Space wine may not taste better, but its rareness justifies its expense.
* Dirty processes like smelting can just shoot off the pollution towards the sun.
* Giant space mirrors to block sunlight to counteract global warming.
* The next supercollider.
* Awesome telescopes.
* Maintenance of satellites. And new satellites. Don't lift up from the gravity well. Drop off in space.
From answers to the Mars question:
* Contracted research. Some things just can't be tested in a gravity well. Also, it's much easier to maintain a vacuum in space.
* Tourism.
* Movies. Don't simulate zero-g; use the real thing. Also low-g fight scenes with their seemingly impossible leaps. May be cheaper than green screen animation.
* Prisons. Try to tunnel out of a space prison.
* Prison colonies. Low security prisons could instead become prison colonies. Everyone who lives there is a prisoner or a prison employee. Prison employees would cover needed jobs that the prisoners don't have the expertise to do. E.g. doctor or teacher. Want off the sex offender list? Go to a prison colony instead.
* Immigrants. Make new immigrants to space supply enough Earth credit to buy the things needed to support themselves. Every ticket into space includes a ticket out of space.
[Answer]
Sell the future.
You are living in space, and have pulled it off in a relatively short time frame. This means your ability to grow is substantial, as suppiles for 100,000 people where not lifted on heavy-lift rockets.
The limits of that growth is large. If you manage to colonize the asteroid belt, there is enough cubic there generate living space for 100s of billions of people.
Finding unique things to export to the Earth is reasonable. But a society of 100s of billions is going to have huge amounts of export capacity even without unique things to export to Earth: just selling culture and science will do it.
You sell the future by somehow selling shares in that venture. An exponential robot-driven industrialization of the asteroid belt together with a population explosion among the existing 100,000 citizens places the 100 billion population point at about 300 years away. If you simply manage to maintain current wealth and export capabilities, that is a 4.7% annual growth rate.
So sell shares. Shares in asteroid belt robot factories, shares in colony factories or colonies. Dividends of those shares then shares in the *next* generation produced by the first.
Then use the money from the sale of shares to import needed goods from Earth.
You have a greenfield industrial revolution. In 1670 the USA had 100k people. By 1970 it was a world superpower. It did this on the backs of immigration, but much of its growth came from the fact there was an entire continent it managed to exploit over that time.
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Now, that is not the only way to do it.
You can export goods down to Earth. Aerobraking is quite reasonable, and it should scale, so you can send materials down to Earth far cheaper than the other way around. If you are accepting a rough landing (say, you are sending ore), it would be far easier.
The expensive part of rockets is the rocket equation.
Then there is technology. The technology you are describing is impressive, which implies that the orbital population is high-tech. They can sell technology and innovations. Now, as a small population, they won't generate much, which leads into the above exponential growth plan.
Other information, like entertainment, will have a limited amount of value. However, the space societies demand for Earther entertainment is going to be large as well, and ditto for technology, so this will probably be a net loss.
Next, they can sell security. They have the military high-ground, quite literally. Ground based societies will have to engage in a huge amount of heavy-lift technology to reach MAD, let alone counter it.
Imports from Earth are going to be expensive, unless you manage to boostrap to a T1 or T2 civilization. There is no way around it barring massive technological progress (space elevator etc).
Zero-G manufacturing may be useful for some purposes. With air-braking, exporting to the ground will be modestly expensive. You'll have little competitition: maybe it will turn out that mass manufacture of some wonder material in zero G is well worth the cost of heavy-lift.
You can sell the right for Earthers to become Spacers. Anyone joining you is going to have already spent a 1/4 million: the value of a functioning biosphere is whatever the market will bear.
You can sell satallite building and maintenance services. Not having to lift from Earth will reduce the price and increase use by Earthers. In effect, the current lift from Earth should almost completely belong to you, as you provide better service for less price which should increase total value of the demand. They pay you in 5 tonnes of Earth material lifted to orbit in exchange for 100 tonnes of satallites.
More conventional things, like services, can also be an export. But those will be overwealmed by your wish to import services from Earth.
Almost all of these problems are problems of scale. You can make up for your per-unit losses by volume. Grow, and sell growth.
[Answer]
Hardly anything. The other answers to this question enthuse about materials and access to space, but the economics is against them all. Even space porn.
The reasons couldn't simpler or more cost effective. It would be easier and cheaper to launch robots into space to secure materials and minerals, to make products in micro-gravity, to conduct research in automated laboratories. Ditto space services. Robots would be able to create the technological infrastructure to do all the things listed in the other answers.
Maybe not space porn. However, a combination of advanced CGI and rotoscoping would be able to supplant even space porn. Unless there's a global revival of hard-line puritanism, it's doubtful if space porn will be commercially viable, let alone profitable.
Squishy, soft organisms like human beings are not space-ready at the best of time. Hard radiation, vacuum, physiological failures due to micro-gravity, and the mass of payload wasted on life-support.
The economics of space technology dictate the resources of the solar system will be harvested by corporate and government robots, drones and automata. One-way space migrants paying a reasonable fraction of a megabuck to be shot into the wild black yonder to magically build a space-based civilization in no time at all, why they haven't got a chance of competing.
As for winning the race to settle space and make it economically successful, the spacers would be better off if they'd kept their feet securely planted on the surface of the Earth. Where else will be the launch pads and control rooms for the robots actually colonizing space be located? On Earth, of course.
Back in the days of yore Jerry Pournelle published an article "Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships", originally in *Galaxy* and reprinted in *A Step Farther Out* (1979), analysing asteroid based civilization. One things came as a surprise when he worked out where was the best place to put the centre of a society of inhabited asteroid settlements. It turned out to be good old planet Earth. Expect the same to be true for any spacer civilization too.
Also, expect Elon Branson to be arrested and charged for the scam of defrauding the gullible and space-happy of their millions or parts therefore and subjecting them to the cruel and unusual fate of being shot into space where they have to survive with scant resources. If they do happen to acquire the resources to build their space-based society and its attendant economy, where and how will they get them? From publicly funded space programs naturally. After all, what other institutions have the capacity to do so?
[Answer]
The allure of mining asteroids is the availability of rare minerals. Access to expensive materials and a zero-g environment allows experiments that would not be possible on Earth.
OP is halfway to the answer by recognizing these colonists would need to develop advanced technology to survive. **What is the source of that technology?**
When you know how they get to be so advanced, you know what products they can offer Earthlings.
Now, were all the colonists on board with getting themselves marooned in order to test themselves against Darwinism? My guess is there would be a prevalent strain of resentment against Earthlings for forcing them to live in exile, especially among younger colonists. For their part, the Earthlings would resent the prosperity of the colonists. Something to think about.
[Answer]
**"Insurance"**
So you could sell insurance against horrible things like asteroids falling on cities. Could happen, you know! Especially if you calculate their trajectories and then nudge them. By accident, of course! If only spacers had been motivated to make sure accidents like that didn't happen by having to pay out insurance premiums. Such a waste...
This wouldn't work as well if the spacers actually depended on earth for something, but the question stated they're self-sufficient.
[Answer]
Donald Rumsfeld, one of America's greatest philosophers, famously said:
1. There are known unknowns.
2. There are unknown unknowns.
[Rumsfeld's legendary quote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk)
(1) The *known unknown* is that they will almost certainly find rare earth elements (but which ones?) and discover new elements with unknown properties and in unknown quantities.
(2) The *unknown unknown* is analogous to the German theoretical physicist in the 1920s. They just explored physics. And something amazing came of it. They changed how war is fought and energy is produced. The colonist might change the world forever, or nothing world-shaking will come of it. But you won't know if you don't try.
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[Question]
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I am working on a game currently with some predetermined assets, and one of the areas I am developing takes place on a mountainous, lush jungle planet with low-hanging green clouds and a general green fog-like haze.
What factors could cause a planet to regularly develop these green atmospheric conditions while remaining habitable?
[Answer]
Algae.
You could simply state that on this planet there is some kind of micro- algae that lives in the tiny droplets of water that make up the fog and the clouds and that happens to be green.
[Answer]
Pollen. Planet has lush forests with plants spewing out green pollen year around. The pollen is carried by the winds and trapped inside water droplets and tint them green. The pollen on this planet should be lighter than our pollens or your world should have a thicker atmosphere for this to work.
[Answer]
* Aerosols of iron rust could produce a green haze or green clouds.
* Aerosols of chromium oxide (Cr2O3) do the same but look nicer. It is used as pigment.
* Among gases the only one I can think of is chlorine. But if it is concentrated enough to be green the conditions would not be habitable any more, at least not for you.
I would probably stick with the microalgae.
[Answer]
It would help if there were an artist's conception of what this greenish haze and surrounding landscape would look like, but one additional explanation I'd like to add is maybe light reflected from bioluminescent plants?
[Answer]
Aesthetics from some sentient life.
Some particular culture visited this planet and decided that green fog was better than plain fog, and so they decided to add green fog.
The normal, simple compounds that make a particular pigment are usually toxic, but some modern pigments are advertised as non-toxic, regardless of their shade.
As such, large fogs(presumable water based) colored by pigments similar to these should do no harm at all.
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[Question]
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Assume that the city is about 1-3 kilometers in diameter, built with relatively futuristic technology, and there are no plans to expand it further (If the need arises, they'll just build a second one).
What would better suit such a structure to be built from the engineering and resilience perspective - one large floating body, or a bunch of small interconnected but separated modules?
**What I have in mind when I say "monolithic":** A structure that looks more or less like a single object. It can have dampeners and soft links between parts if the city requires better flexibility of the structure, but visually it looks like one huge island-city thing, like Atlantis from SG:A:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nKMxP.jpg)
**What I mean by modular:** The city is more like a fleet of separate platforms that have some water between them, and are interconnected with bridges and anchors, like this:
[](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/04/05/17/11913910-0-image-a-2_1554483230879.jpg)
Especially considering the resistance to bad weather and storms. I have a hunch that a single large structure has the benefit of being just so huge and having great inertia, that any feasible waves short of a tsunami would be unable to affect it, so essentially it wouldn't rock at all even in storms, since even stormy sea's unevenness will be too small in scale compared to the city.
And if it turns out that a modular web of modules works better, what's the largest size you would want these modules to be?
[Answer]
Source: I've actually been employed to work on this very topic before.
Indeed if a floating structure is large compared to prevailing wavelengths it won't be rocked much by it, and there isn't much wave energy with wavelengths of many hundreds of meters. So rocking won't be your problem with a monolith of this size.
One problem with with a monolith is a not particularly intuitive one (that we usually don't think about because most of what we engineer is small compared to ocean wavelengths); wave reflection reaction forces. Objects that are big relative to a wave dont transmit, but reflect. The momentum imparted by a reflecting wave scales as the cube of the amplitude. For long wavelength high amplitude storm waves, the forces pushing you are really crazy, and no conceivable mooring system short of making this thing an island will keep it in place. Of course you could argue that's alright; have it be pushed around a bit by big storms, and have a form of dynamic positioning that keeps it where you want to be in the long term; but if this is to be a city where you'd want about 10x more space per person than a typical boat, and this thing is more than 10x less hydrodynamic than a typical boat (very generous), just staying in the same place against currents and winds is probably going to become quite an expensive affair. Putting it in a self-stabilizing location like an ocean gyre has been proposed; but there are many factors that dictate where you might want to place this, and this additional constraint isn't particularly welcome. Also if this gyre changes and your stability argument fails, there don't exist sufficient tugboats in the world to correct your error.
The simplest solution to all this: just go below the waves. Surface wave effects decay exponentially with depth. The static forces of going a few tens of meter below the water are an absolute walk in the park, compared to designing for the almost unbounded worse case scenarios on the surface. Also surface currents and obviously wind are much less of a concern here; though you will be displacing a lot more water per unit of usable volume, so the economics of dynamic positioning is still something you should keep an eye on. Also there are psychological issues; it just seems less appealing to live under water like that. You could imagine a system that sits on the surface most of the time when conditions are reasonable, but has the ability to flee under the waves when required though. Though the deck of a submarine typically also isn't that appealing of a hangout, so there are definitely open questions there.
If you want to be permanently on the surface, a loosely coupled fleet of elongated ship like shapes is a reasonable approach. They can orient their long dimension into the prevailing wave direction (typically there is such a thing; in cross-seas you are on your own w.r.t. comfort, but some geographies make them super rare) to get good stability most of the time, but are sufficiently hydrodynamic for dynamic positioning to be feasible. Probably you want a system of bridges/linkages between them; and maybe those could contribute some to stability in reasonable weather; but most likely you'd want to make that system retractable to prevent damage in worst case scenarios. If a single ship module was 1km long or so, it'd be so stable along the front/back axis that connecting them head to tail into multi-km structures would be relatively simple. (100-200m or so would be a very different story; that's right smack in the middle of the predominant wavelengths of big storms.) Longer structures have worse bending moments to contend with obviously; but that's a solvable engineering problem. If your ship gets longer, you need to make it higher to get good bending strength; and then also wider for roll stability reasons. So if the size of your module is say 1000x80x80 meters that's double the length and roughly 8x the volume of the largest ship ever built; big but not unthinkable, and still significantly modular compared to a totality of multiple square kilometers of area.
As alluded to above: linking floating objects together on the open ocean to withstand storm forces is an unsolved problem. Again, the maximum forces involved are insane. Even welding two halves of a boat together so it doesn't break in half in a storm isn't easy, so you can imagine how it is when you try and make it more complicated. Such linkages both need the range of motion to allow a multi-tens-of-meter wave to pass, and the ability to transmit insane forces. I am not saying impossible mind you, but how to actually engineer that system is to my knowledge an unsolved problem. Probably something involving huge hydraulic cylinders, with a very long stroke, but also the ability to output insane forces, would be required. I've never gotten deep enough into the details to figure out if its really feasible. If we are talking about a linkage this beefy, making it easily detachable sounds like a challenge if not impossible, so you really need to engineer it for worst case conditions.
[Answer]
The problem will be one of flexing forces which will only get bigger as the structure grows in size. Ultimately it would probably be better all round to have much smaller sized structures to counteract this.
One way partially around this would be to have some form of articulated linkage within the structure to help relieve stresses that would otherwise build up. For example see here at 4:24 mins:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7xkdL0EdOA>
This type of construction (and other variations on this theme) would enable much larger structures to be built. However I suggest that 1-3km might be too much even for this type of structure and it would be better to use this technology to build multiple medium sized structures possibly linked by universal couplings to allow relative motion as well as passenger travel between them.
edit:
A lot of questions arise when you get more into the details. How important is it to be monolithic? How much money are you prepared to throw at it? How long does it need to last for? How much regular maintenance is acceptable? How much risk of destruction or damage is acceptable? How long is available to build it? Where does it need to be built?
Assuming it has to be monolithic and there are no constraints other than those imposed by nature, a very large structure such as you describe might be buildable. However it would be beyond the scope of existing structures so might encounter unexpected engineering challenges.
Versabouy has deliberately focused on “small” installations that are capable of being built in fabrication yards that can deal with 4000-5000 ton structures in order to appeal to a wider customer base. But some larger construction yards can deal with structures ten times this size or more.
Given sufficient time and money I’m reasonably confident that a versabouy like structure could be scaled up significantly perhaps 4-10 times. In addition I suspect that meter for meter a city might require less load than an oil platform, so fewer versabouys would be needed. But even with versabouys the platform is unlikely to be able to be safely extended to far beyond the 100-200m a side as a monolithic platform (versabouy currently supports a deck size of 250 x 500 feet with eight bouys.
This is because small differences in height will magnify across the deck causing tremendous stresses and strains. So some form of flexibility would still be needed. An additional layer of adjustment with sensors, couplings and pistons connecting to an upper deck might help but at huge additional complexity.
See also
<http://www.vbuoy.com/About_Versabuoy/whitepaper.html>
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A ring of 1-3km is pretty big. In any case, there is no such thing as a 1km long solid structure. Even if you, somehow, forge a 1km long "solid" iron boat, it will still bend like hell and eventually break apart. And I highly doubt you want to create the base for your city that way.
So since a large structure will act like it is made of smaller components anyways, you might as well build it that way. Not only does this greatly increase the amount of force the city can sustain, but it is also not stupid to do.
Look at modern ships, they are build to bend and follow the flow of water. At least to a certain extent. It is really not smart to build something with the intention of resisting every force. With this mindset, no skyscraper would be above 200 meters or so.
The same goes for your city. No matter how big it is, you only increase the area in which forces can act. So in a sense, the bigger you build it, the faster it will fail.
Thus the goal should be to build a city that deforms and doesn't resist the flow to a certain extent. This can easily be achieved by building the city with lots of small Interconnected platforms.
For your edit: The size of the tiles depends on what you want. I would guess that a hexagon-like shape would work pretty well with a radius of 100 Meters or so. Remember, the goal is not that the tiles start to deform. They should stay in their shape for the most part. So smaller is better.
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Consider a typical offshore oil & gas rig. The amount of structure that is above the waterline may look unweildy and awkward, but it is kept very stable by the supporting section beneath the surface which is typically ballasted with concrete and maybe some additional saltwater ballast tanks. It's also usually anchored in place by long subsea steel cables to maintain position over a wellhead.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U191f.jpg)
I see this as a good starting point for a permanent offshore habitation. You'll need a desaliation plant for instance to make more freshwater and those ballast tanks could store potable water instead of seawater. You might have one auxilliary rig who'se entire purpose in fact is to process potable water and pump it via subsea pipelines to the main city module. Other auxiliary structures might include oil/ natural gas extraction, refinery and power generation. A typical offshore oil field can include lots of wellheads connected by subsea data / power cables and pipelines to one or several terminals. They don't have to physically touch each other to move materials back and forth.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tWYhN.gif)
So I think your city is doable. Either way, it's going to take a lot of divers, ROVs, helicopters, subsea cranes, boats and mainland support to keep this engineering marvel running.
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This is possible if in the future people will discover a source of pretty much unlimited metal, namely iron.
A ship-like design that has like a hundred meters of **solid** iron as the city's base.
Here is an unrealistic scene that works perfectly in fiction stories:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vhEoj.png)
I made [an animation](https://media.giphy.com/media/EXMGsMdGUB3SoMWoet/giphy.gif) as give you a better insight at this future floating city:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mcjvG.gif)
I had to scale the gif *way down*, as the maximum size is 2MB. The link above provides the large animation.
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Modular is safer, a factory fire or explosion could sink your monolith.
The largest off-shore construction to date is the Prelude FLNG at 488 metres (1,601 ft) long and 74 metres (243 ft) wide, while the longest self-propelled vessel would be Knock Nevis oil tanker at 458m. There are aircraft carriers and passenger ships over 300m long.
So modules of say 500x100m should be quite feasible with only slightly better than current tech. That's more than big enough for a suburban housing block, sports or recreational complex, manufacturing plant, shopping mall, park, vegetable farm or orchard.
You would only need 60 modules to match your 1×3km monolith for surface area.
You could connect them using retractable bridges or tubes or just use boats (think Venice but with more waves).
You could even construct a circular reef say 1km out to act as breakwater, with gaps for your ocean-going vessels to get in and out
[Answer]
**Monolithic and submersible.**
Your floating city can be enclosed and duck beneath the waves, riding out bad weather at safe depth. It is self propelled and can move from place to place to provide the expertise of its residents and capabilities of its infrastructure to local populations.
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See Savage's book "The Millennial Project" The first stage of this is "Aquarius"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project>
<https://tmp2.fandom.com/wiki/Aquarius>
In a nutshell: Large floating cities, powered by the temperature difference between tropical and abyssal water.
Cities are fairly large -- about 10 km across, but a large outer fringe are hexagons several hundred meters each that act as 'farm land' and as energy absorption. Abyssal water is high in nutrients. It's discharged into the hexagons for fish farming. Other pads are black and act as solar energy aborbers to increase the temperature differential of the OTEC systems.
Ponds raise fish, shellfish.
Waste water is released creating a plume of plankton growth that fosters a local wild fish population.
Under side if hexagons are set up as artificial fish habitat.
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[Question]
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I'm the CEO of the Soylent Corporation, and we have a problem. Some cop just revealed our secret: Our premiere food product [*Soylent Green*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723):
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*(sigh)* We're going to lose business. It seems that people — no matter how hungry — are disgusted by the thought of eating other human beings. As word spreads about what the Corporation has done, we are going to lose customers. The stock value will drop, and shareholders will start asking questions...
I can't stand by and let the Corporation slide into bankruptcy. *Green* is very profitable for us; we can make this work. The question is, **What can the Soylent Corporation do to continue selling human remains as food**, in spite of market disapproval after being caught\*\*?\*\*
Please try to support your answer with comparable real-world examples of corporate behavior.
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*Disclaimer:* This question is about the movie's company and product. The company and product of the original book as well as a [real-life Soylent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement)) are *not* made of people.
[Answer]
I agree with answers that people will eat anything if they are hungry and do not have options. Cannibalism is a thing, and it did even happen in modern countries, e.g. during wars.
I would like to propose two more strategies to discredit the message itself:
1. Whistleblower is wrong. He was upset over a death of a lifelong friend, and maybe also on drugs (fake the test results), and then he saw that body disposal facility is operated by Soylent Inc., and confused processed pellets for soylent.
2. Bodies are used indirectly, e.g. as fertilizer for plants or algae. So this is no different than growing food plants on a cemetery. In fact, it is a good way for a deceased person to give back to the society.
[Answer]
**The Same Way It Already Works**
I’m typing this answer on a device made with minerals extracted by slaves, which were then sold by warlords to a totalitarian state where it was built by a person who works 16 hours a day in a factory so awful that they put up suicide nets on the roof.
If you’re a socialist/anarchist/communist than you essentially believe that we’re just a little ways shy of the Soylent Green scenario, as they view the entire world economic system as inherently oppressive and odiously wicked, but yet the vast majority of the world won’t take up the red banner.
If you’re a vegan/ethical vegetarian than you believe that we basically are in a soylent green situation, and that 99% of the world thinks it’s perfectly fine and you’re crazy for thinking otherwise.
Multiple times in the 20th century common people tolerated or assisted their governments in committing atrocities. The Nazis pawned off Jewish property to citizens who knew damn well what happened to the owners, the Soviets had children betray parents to the secret police, Mao had the people take part in mass executions, the Iranian Clerics hanged people from cranes and instituted strict religious laws whilst the people cheered.
I don’t think man has a limit if he can be persuaded he has a benefit. The people will embrace cannibalism as many historical cultures have in the past. They will come up with rationalizations for why cannibalism is permissible, after all, they’ve already taken part in it, and they don’t want to consider themselves evil. Soon Soylent Corporation will see greater market share.
[Answer]
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> It seems that people -- no matter **how hungry**
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Really?
Three weeks of no other soylent but the green one (so no "Soylent Red" or "Soylent Yellow") on the shelves and they will buy and eat it or they'll became a *cheap source* of soylent green. Either way, the profit is ours.
Another 3 weeks and those alive will no longer have qualms - they've had it already.
So, boys, start building those refrigerated warehouses. Next month we will stop producing anything else but soylent green for one quarter.
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[Context](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green#Plot)
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> In the year 2022, the cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution and some apparent climate catastrophe has caused *severe worldwide shortages of food, water and housing*.
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> Soylent Industries, ... , *controls the food supply of half of the world*
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[Answer]
**It's fake news.**
Fake news by people who hate our country and want the worst, because their mothers raised them wrong. Or maybe they were just born bad and their mothers did the best they could; probably that second one because mothers are good. Fake news in any event, just like the ocean being dead and monsters coming out of cracks in the earth, all that. It would be funny if it weren't so mean and sad. Mean, sad, lying little people. I feel bad for their mothers.
I'm telling you, don't believe a bunch of lies. They have been lying the whole time about this and lots of other things too. Look now, look; Soylent green is fine! It's made of ocean plants, ok? Little ones that grow right back - the ocean is full of them. I eat it, all the types of Soylent. Probably too much! But there is absolutely nothing wrong with the stuff that some Tabasco sauce can't fix. If I like it you'll like it too because I'm pretty picky about what I eat. But please people, please - don't believe a fake bunch of scary lies. Its only scary if you believe it.
[Answer]
Marketing to the rescue!
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> ***Soylent Green, nothing more Human***
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[Answer]
In a movie resolution, the is simple. People don't have an option. They need to eat the soylent.
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> But people cannot eat people! It's bad!
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As we learned from [The Miracle of the Andes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571) Rules and ethic goes out the window when you need to survive. So maybe 2-3 days of fasting and then back to normal.
In our world solution (not like the flight 571 wasn't in our world) - when you caught the company refreshing rotten meat. Washing sausages in chlorine to remove mold. You change company name. And never admit to it. "Sell" everything to your wife. Change the owner. No one will remeber in 3 months.
In our world solution number two - Hi, I'm Jamie Olivier and I will show you how chicken nuggets are done. It's disgusting, it's skin and "mechanically reclaimed" meat and bones and tendons. With chlorine and acid. And the kids still want to eat that. While they watched how it's made. [Jamie Olivier is dissapointed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-aKqp1kzKg)
[Answer]
Ultimately, taste overrides many other considerations in the populace, and there are few flavour enhancers out there that have proven to be as effective as [Glutamates](https://foodinsight.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-glutamate-and-monosodium-glutamate/). One of the most popular (and controversial) of these is MSG, or mono-sodium glutamate. Many foods are laced with this substance and it leads to people eating more of that food than they otherwise would, whatever the known nutritional deficiencies of that food.
Example? Well let's start with the Romans and one of their key delicacies, [Garum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum). This was, in essence, 'fermented' salted fish. By fermenting, what is meant is that the fish was pretty much salted and then left in a bucket in the sun. I call that being left to rot more than left to ferment, but that's me. Personally, I don't find that all that much appealing, but it was eaten in volumes in the Roman Empire that required factories to produce the stuff. Believe it or not, it is still produced in certain quarters of Italy to this day, even though it is far less popular.
The point being, that if you add glutamates to your Soylent Green, all you do to keep selling it is emphasise the taste. This has been working for the snack food industry for decades. Most people today know that chips (for example) are not high in nutrition, yet demand for them is [growing annually](https://www.statista.com/outlook/40110200/100/potato-chips/worldwide) and they are very nearly a US$44bn dollar industry today.
Now, it is true that potato chips are not known to come from a dubious source, but taste is still a driving factor in their sales growth. Arguably, the same would be true of your Green product. Besides, even the name Green means it's good for the environment, right?
Right?
In any event, I recommend a two step process. First, make it taste really good; glutamates are good for that. Second, make that the thing you saturate the air waves with every chance you get. You might be surprised how little the source matters after that.
Want even more proof? Well, start watching what the Japanese are doing in [creating artificial meat from human feces](https://www.livescience.com/14669-poop-meat-safety.html). If they can do it and make it a really salable commodity, then you will have your answer.
[Answer]
There are already some good answers, but I'd like to add an angle which I don't think has been covered yet.
How do you get people to accept anything? The answer: change popular opinion.
The only way this could work I think it a full scale push for *Soylent Green* by every major facets of society.
1) The goods and virtues of *Soylent Green* must become a constant present in all forms of media. The fact that it is made from people must be turned into a positive ("it's the natural cycle of life", "Humans who contributed to *Soylent Green* are heroes"..etc). It must be endorsed by celebrities, Experts of all sorts (scientists, lawmakers and politicians alike).
2) Going of off part 1), Part 2 is the incorporation into popular culture. There need to be movies about *Soylent Green* (the brave founders of the company fighting overwhelming odds and evil caricatures to save the day..etc.). Books need to be written and songs sung extolling the virtues of the concept of consuming humans. In other words it need to become "cool".
3) The inverse must also become true: those who are against the product must become evil. Arguments may include something like "if you are against *Soylent Green* its because you like people starving and suffering...you monster!". Other unpopular opinions must be linked to hating the stuff.
4) The narrative of human consumption, since this is the core issue, need to be carefully controlled and shaped using the three above facets. A scientific and historical basis must also to be established; The human parts of the product might become "Advanced Biological Components" and then only dubbed as the ABCs there after. All trivia on when humans have been consumed throughout history needs to become documentaries, Television Specials and constantly displayed in articles on the Web. It is important to constantly cast the concept into a positive and normalized light.
Once the above has been done long and well enough, then the final coup-de-grace:
5) Legislate it: Once it becomes legal (perhaps eventually required) for consumables to contain a human biological component there is little that can be said against it.
And there you have it. Now everyone has not only accepted *Soylent Green* but it has become a normal part of life and you couldn't imagine a world without it.
[Answer]
Soylent Green is just playing a part on capitalism without those pesky state regulations and laws against freedom prohibiting normal business to make honest money and employ people. This is just business.
The state is inherently evil, so the less state we have, the most freedom we have. We need a free market economy where the state don't interfere in private enterprises, like as dictating draconian laws that says that we can't consume human flesh. Forbidding that is tyranny! We are free to do whatever we want because this is a great country! The state should take care of military affairs elsewhere and nothing more!
Sure, we are waging war and spreading death, terror, misery, destruction, violence and chaos elsewhere in the world just to grab civilians cast as enemies against their will and turn them in food, but what really matters is that our country is great and the people of our country enjoy freedom and we fight for freedom and for our country! We are patriots, so we don't care about people in other countries because those aren't people at all!
Long life to our country! We are the country of freedom! We are the only country that matters, and as so, we are entitled to screw up the other countries as hard as possible and do whatever we can in order to enslave and steal the rest of the world for the sole benefit of ourselves. We just found a good way to use a resource that was being wasted (i.e. the bodies of those <insert word here> that insists in resisting our country invasion and the way that we exploit and steal them just because they hate freedom).
This is Soylent Green business: We are patriots supporting our troops in making a world better! We are the best country in the world, where we are free! We support freedom!
Soylent Green is a gold sponsor of the Army! By buying Soylent Green products, you are being a patriot and supporting our cause of fighting for freedom and for our country!
[Answer]
I would suggest a different approach for the Soylent Corporation - go non-profit and declare themselves a religion! Endocannibalistic societies usually practice this not for the calories and nutrients, but because the essence of the people is returned to their families and communities. (Munch) "Grandpa sure loved us a lot, signing (Crunch) that waiver." Practitioners of the faith would still have the tangible (caloric) advantages of the practice, but you'd blend it into a cultural practice that would make people feel warm & fuzzy about their dead loved ones.
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Simple people can not feel empathy to people outside of there immediate social circle. So everything else is subject of itense manipulation by media - story or mob-behaviour.
Just tell the world its only criminals, that become food - and then put stories of the crimes on the package. Works perfectly in the real world too, with enslaving often innocent humans.
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For story purposes, I am building a world where all life exists on the moon of a non-habitable planet (the moon is not tidally locked). How can I explain this in a convincing and mostly scientific way? If not, how can I handwave it?
For the moon to have an atmosphere and oceans it must be quite massive; this would require the planet to be even more so. The planet must be rocky so that the moon-dwellers can attempt to land things on it. How can I explain the lack of an atmosphere on the planet? Or, if this is not possible, how can I explain a poisonous or inhospitable atmosphere?
I am not addressing the issue of magnetic fields just yet, so any comments on this are off topic.
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What exactly is the problem? Titan in our own solar system is an example of a moon with atmosphere and (small) oceans. Admittedly, it's a little chilly for humans, but other life forms may not be so picky :-)
For a more human-friendly instance, consider a system where the moon is Earthlike, while the planet is a super-Earth: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Earth> The higher gravity & denser atmosphere could cause a runaway greenhouse effect, so that the planet is more of a "super-Venus".
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It's a commonly held misconception, but **you really don't need a lot of gravity to retain an appreciable atmosphere.** Conversely, gravity alone is no guarantee that a body will have an appreciable atmosphere. There is a lower bound which is dependent on atmospheric composition and temperature, but it's not *that* high. Wikipedia has [a handy chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature.svg) of escape velocity versus temperature and what this means for the ability to retain various gases; it shows that by gravity alone, at a temperature of a warm 300 K, you'd need an escape velocity at the surface of about 5 km/s to retain an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.
[jamesqf has already](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/122093/29) mentioned [Titan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)) which, as per Wikipedia, has a surface gravity of 1.352 m/s2 (less than that of Earth's moon) and an escape velocity of 2.639 km/s (about half of what you'd need to retain an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere at 300 K as per Wikipedia's chart linked above), yet a surface atmospheric pressure of almost 147 kPa (over 1.4 times that of Earth). Now compare this to [Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars) (3.711 m/s2, 5.027 km/s, 0.4–0.87 kPa) or [Venus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus) (8.87 m/s2, 10.36 km/s, 9 200 kPa) and you can easily see that there is no simple, direct relationship between atmospheric density and surface gravity. Other factors dominate. For comparison, Earth has an atmospheric pressure of 101.325 kPa ([international standard atmosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Atmosphere)), a surface gravity of 9.807 m/s2 and an escape velocity of 11.186 km/s.
Addressing the (good) point made in comments that the low temperature is what allows Titan-as-we-know-it to hold on to so much atmosphere, that may very well be a part of the explanation for how Titan can hold on to its atmosphere, but it can't be the entire explanation for what is required for such a body to hold on to an appreciable atmosphere, or Venus would realistically have much less atmosphere than it does in real life. Note that I'm discussing using Titan for inspiration, not as the full answer.
Once you have a rocky body that is able to retain an appreciable atmosphere and has moderate gravity, the ability to support even Earth-like life pretty much comes down to just atmospheric composition and temperature. Titan is, again, slightly on the chilly side, but I don't see any reason why a Titan-like rocky body couldn't exist closer to its host star with an atmospheric composition more similar to that of Earth, which would result in a warmer climate.
Try putting a Titan-like, slightly more massive and possibly smaller (both of which will increase surface gravity), rocky moon in an orbit around real-life Mars or Venus, both of which would support landings (the only thing making Venus particularly difficult to land on is its noxious atmospheric composition); add some oxygen and carbon dioxide to its atmosphere (which is almost entirely nitrogen, at over 95% by volume; to match Earth, you want that down to about 80% by volume); and you'll probably be pretty close to what you need. As a bonus, adding the oxygen to Titan's atmosphere will also almost certainly get you a little bit of water vapor when the oxygen reacts with the hydrogen and methane in Titan's current atmosphere, which should itself help warm it up a touch — water vapor is one of the most potent greenhouse gases around. Titan has a few percent methane and around 0.2% H2, which, when it reacts with oxygen, should give you somewhere on the order of a percent or two water vapor by volume, which is comparable to [that of Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Composition). All you'd need is to add some 25% oxygen to the existing atmosphere and let chemistry and (Earth-like) life do the rest.
You can also give the moon an active, liquid core and thus a magnetic field, which will help it retain its atmosphere over astronomical time scales. Orbiting a massive planet should help here by introducing tidal effects.
And if you're willing to stretch the definition of "moon" a little, also compare the masses of Pluto and [Charon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon)); the latter is so massive that the two can more accurately be described as a double-planet system than as a planet and a moon. (Technically, the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside of Pluto, meaning that the two orbit a common point between them, rather than Charon simply orbiting Pluto.)
There's no real reason why such a moon can't orbit an uninhabitable planet. While a bit of a stretch for your specific question, consider that Europa orbits Jupiter; while Europa is at least semi-potentially inhabitable by hardy life, Jupiter is squarely uninhabitable.
Hence, really, **no significant handwaving required.**
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Both bodies in the past were capable of hosting life. Then one day, for a lucky coincidence, the system was invested by the gamma ray burst emitted from a close supernova, and the main planet was in the line of sight from the moon to the supernova.
While the main planet was stripped from most of its atmosphere, losing the ability of supporting life, the moon was protected by the main body and didn't suffer any damage.
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Isaac Asimov's oeuvre contains an example of this involving our very own planet and satellite. Humans terraformed the Moon, and then later a nuclear war left Earth uninhabitable. If high radiation levels on the planet are a problem, you can make this have happened in the *very* distant past, such that they've now dropped to habitable levels.
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The easiest way to meet the requirements you've stated is for both the habitable body that your characters are starting from and the uninhabitable body they're travelling to, to both be satellites of a gas giant.
There are all kinds of ways to make this work, including scenarios where the second moon used to be habitable and no longer is. Right off the top of my head, a coronal mass ejection would be the simplest explanation. If you hypothesize a planet like Jupiter with two habitable moons, one of the two could easily be shielded entirely by the bulk of the gas giant itself, while the other could be completely stripped of its atmosphere.
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If you want to have the moon and the planet be explorable by your race instead of having a moon and planet may I recommend a binary planet? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet>
Effectively this is a system where two planets of similar mass orbit around their combined center of gravity. This way you can have your planet and "moon" be close to the same size so you don't need to have your inhabitants worry about radically different gravities. Since your moon is allowed to be quite massive under this model you can easily have it be the size of earth.
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One way to do this would be to have the planet and moon be near the inner (hot!) edge of the system's habitable zone, such that the primary's thicker atmosphere was enough to tip it into a [runaway greenhouse effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect), whereas the secondary, with its thinner atmosphere, stayed habitable; think of a bigger, wetter Mars orbiting a super-Venus. This probably works best if the secondary is *fairly* dry compared to Earth (to weaken the positive temperature feedback from water evaporation and lessen the chance of the secondary undergoing a runaway greenhouse); it doesn't have to be bone-dry, but you'll maybe want to think of having small, confined seas rather than world-spanning oceans.
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The planet took a major hit in the last billion years. Any life it had was wiped out.
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The question popped into my mind when I read [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55049/could-you-populate-a-hospitable-planet-with-only-a-vial-of-dna).
Since we know our scientists are searching for planets which might be capable of supporting life; most of them many light-years away, could the reverse be possible? ie: Some advanced civilization discovered the secrets of creating life, then looked into space and saw a bunch of planets that could in a few million years become habitable, and then shot out vials of DNA or some life-forming-tech toward those planets (one being Earth) so that by the time they could build spacecraft and reach Earth, the Earth (and other planets) would have got populated with life and become habitable? (if this sounds like a nice story idea, please do take and write about it or make a movie. It'll be nice if the credit could be shared with me and the person who asked about the DNA vial :-) ).
So the question is would a civilization find it viable to do that? Perhaps even our civilization. We've obviously populated Mars with micro-organisms from Earth already. Would it be practical for us to shoot out life-forms into other planets and a million years later actually travel there? (Ideas for [NASA](http://www.nasa.gov/) and [ISRO](http://www.isro.gov.in/)).
***EDIT:*** For those of you mentioning the fact that equipments sent to Mars were sterilized. Well, think about it. Could you really remove each and every one of those bacteria and viruses from every nook and cranny of those highly complex scientific equipments? If the organisms ended up on Mars and died because of the atmosphere, that's another thing, but they also do tend to form cysts to protect themselves.
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I'm going to throw my hat in the ring with an answer different than the others. Simply, yes... there are some reasons. I think the [reality-check](/questions/tagged/reality-check "show questions tagged 'reality-check'") tag makes this a tougher argument, but you also inquired as to whether ANY civilization (presuming intelligent life on other planets) might want to do this. And, of course, there's plenty of reason.
### Prime Directive
First, let's counter this. We have something akin to a prime directive when it comes to launching spacecraft and considering life on other planets, but even that doesn't encompass all of Earth. Russia, for instance, does not always hold the same beliefs that Americans do, and if North Korea were to truly get in the space exploration game, there's no telling what their motives may be. With a country like that, they could simply do something like this for the *glory* of saying that they had. If we throw in the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, an intelligent and evolved species is only marginally likely to have the same mindset we do with things like this. A warlike people, or a strictly intellectual people may simply not have the same ideas about compassion for other life that we do, or may value spreading life more than surveying it.
### Feasibility
Surely it's been stated that DNA itself is simply programming. But, given enough vessels shot out in enough directions (obviously trying to hit planets in a Goldilocks zone of other stars), it's entirely plausible that life could take a foothold on an otherwise uninhabited planet. It's still incredibly unlikely, and even if it did, we would likely send bacteria and other microorganisms, so the resulting millions of years of evolution may not look at all Earth-like anyhow.
### Cost
While in contemporary Terran terms, this would be cost-prohibitive, what's to say that society may not come to a point where cost isn't really a thing. Or, again in the case of North Korea, cost isn't a factor so much since the government just takes what it wants/needs from the people. So really even in modern Earthly terms, cost may not be such a big issue in the long run given the right circumstances. A self-contained economy in a totalitarian state can "fund" many, many things given time and resources.
So, it's extremely unlikely, bordering impossible, but yes - there are feasible ways to make this plausible in a very remote way.
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Bearing in mind that the only reason DNA exists is through Amino Acids and a nitrogen-rich atmosphere that allowed it to exist; I'd say the answer to your question is:
## Not Likely
Firstly, as Green wrote in his answer on your linked question;
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> DNA in and of itself is just information. It contains the coding for cellular machinery, it is not that machinery itself.
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Secondly, and here's a big kicker.
## Space is BIG
Unimaginably big! The nearest star to the Earth other than our Sun is Proxima Centauri, and even that is still 4.2 Light Years away.
If anyone's interested in maths:
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> the speed of light = $299\,792\,458\ m/s$
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> multiplied by $3600\ (60\times60) = 1\,079\,252\,848\,800\ (\approx 1.08 \text{ trillion})\ m/h$ (metres/hour)
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And that's just the distance light would take in the time it took the Earth to complete one rotation about the sun, it's got to do that 4.2 times.
Even with our fastest currently active spacecraft ([Voyager 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1) at some 17050 m / s) it would take well over 70,000 years to reach [Alpha Centauri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri), even if it were pointed in that direction.
Put bluntly, by the time any kind of probe containing genetic information would make it to Earth from another star system, it would probably have been overhauled by colonizers in faster ships expecting to find a populated world and ending up finding that they'd beaten the genetic pod to the destination by some margin.
Then there's the little thing I mentioned at the start of my answer. You have no way of knowing if the target planet even has the right conditions for "life" as you know it to exist on its surface. Even with our technology, we can only guess at distant planets' compositions and need to send probes to make closer analysis of the planets' surfaces. (see [New Horizons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons) / [Juno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)) / [OSIRIS-REx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx))
## Intelligent Life
How can we define intelligent life? Is it something resembling humanoids? Is it Homo Sapiens Sapiens? (Us?) Either way, life, you'll find takes a rather long time to take hold on any planet, even one such as Earth.
I'm ignoring the first **500 million years**, approximately, of Earth's life as it was too inhospitable for life to form.
On Earth, for approximately **600 MILLION YEARS** the most complex life found was single-celled life (Hadean Era)
For approximately **1 BILLION YEARS** (1 thousand Million, not 1 million million) after that you had algae and photosynthesis, but still no multi-cellular life.
Then, for the next, approximately, **1 BILLION YEARS** Eukaryotes dominated the early Earth.
Finally, 1.5 billion years ago, multi-cellular life began to form; they were still simple algae, but now they had multiple cells, and it stayed this way for another **1 BILLION YEARS** approximately.
Now, we're at 500 Million Years Ago and finally we enter the Cambrian Explosion, where the largest amount of land animals and plantae evolved rapidly (**20-35 million years** is pretty rapid in planetary terms) Now things are really heating up!
Swiftly following the Cambrian era (**541–485.4 million years ago**) are as follows:
* Ordovician Era (**485.4–443.8 million years ago**)
* Ordovician - Silurian Exinction Event
* Silurian Era (**443.8–419.2 million years ago**)
* Devonian Era (**419.2–358.9 million years ago**)
* Late Devonian Extinction Event
* Carboniferous Era (**358.9–298.9 million years ago**)
* Permian Era (**298.9–252.17 million years ago**)
* Permian Extinction Event
* Triassic Era (First dinosaurs as we know them - **252.17–201.3 million years ago**)
* Triassic - Jurassic Extinction Event
* Jurassic Era (**201.3–145 million years ago**)
* Cretaceous Era (**145–66 million years ago**)
* Cretaceous - Paleogene Extinction Event (Extinction of the dinosaurs)
* Paleogene Era (**66–23.03 million years ago** - Mammals evolved mostly here, but still no humans)
* Neogene Era (**23.03–2.58 million years ago**) - Finally! at **2.58 MILLION YEARS AGO**, more than **4.5 BILLION YEARS** after the formation of the earth, we have the first, true hominids, early humans coming out of Africa.
* Lastly, the Quarternary Era (**2.58–0 million years ago**) somewhere in here, modern humans come into being, we invent the wheel, electricity, plumbing, the internet, computers, cell phones, cars, planes, buses, trains, cities, skyscrapers, buildings, etc, etc, etc.
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If by *"DNA and life-forming technology"* you mean single cell microorganisms, then there are reasons. Idea to terraform Mars by engineering algae that can live and prosper (and pump oxygen) isn't new. Example articles about it:
* [DARPA: We Are Engineering the Organisms That Will Terraform Mars](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/darpa-we-are-engineering-the-organisms-that-will-terraform-mars)
* [The Key to Colonizing Mars Could Be These Tiny Green Microbes](http://gizmodo.com/the-key-to-colonizing-mars-could-be-these-tiny-green-mi-1731268670)
* and immortal [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars)
* Probably many more
Reasons? To make planet hospitable if / when we need it. Even if it takes time.
So **yes, in reality this was considered**, on much smaller scale than you ask for, but it was.
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With your [reality-check](/questions/tagged/reality-check "show questions tagged 'reality-check'") tag on this question, I would say "No".
There's going to be a huge cost in resources creating multiple craft pointing at multiple planets without any guarantee that they'd land.
Then you factor on top of that whether the conditions on the planet are in a fit state to use the DNA by that time (assuming they hit the planet intact and deploy their loads).
On top of that, you have the "why", when it would take thousands of years for the vials to hit their target.
And you have the moral "Prime Directive" aspect. If the planet has already evolved life by that point and then your tailored, aggressive, DNA comes along and wipes out the dominant species - is this an ethical thing to do?
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According to [RNA-world hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world), the abiogenesis involved RNA molecules as original self-replicating molecules. RNA can act as both catalyst, like other enzymes, and data-store, like DNA. RNA-world hypothesizes that DNA and specialized enzymes (and everything else) evolved later as specializations.
So if you wanted to populate a remote planet with living chemistry, to make sure that there were "raw materials" of some sort when you got there, you probably wouldn't send DNA. You would probably send RNA, and amino acids if they weren't there already.
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You could no more bootstrap an ecosystem by sending a vial of DNA than you could bootstrap a robotic civilization by sending a printout of the blueprints of a computer.
You need something capable of creating life. Luckily life is really good at self-replication.
A vial of bacteria might do the trick but you'd need to be sure of a hospitable environment (a planet in the goldilocks zone with liquid water, a magnetosphere and an atmosphere) and a lot could go wrong. Your fridge and your stove are basically bacteria killing machines and they operate on a scale dwarfed by the conditions of space. You might need to put some thought into the process but a single automated mission could probably bootstrap an ecosystem. This could be replicated on a vast number of planets.
Of course Faster Than Light travel is impossible given our current understanding of physics, so visiting any of these places would be impossible, also it would take thousands of years for the missions to get where they're going and billions of years to bootstrap interesting ecosystems so I'm not sure what's in it for you.
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Space is big. And space travel is slow.
Fast space travel runs into the problem that the insterstellar medium becomes rather nasty radiation at significant fractions of c, and into the problem that the energy budget gets ridiculous.
A K1 or K2 civilization can afford to do interstellar travel with at least small ships. Large ships (that carry actual people) is far beyond any reasonable reality check: there is every reason to believe that storing instructions on how to rebuild a person with a given personality at the other end is far easier than transmitting live people (not that rebuilding is easy, just easier than the quite ridiculous idea of generation ships).
Live crew on something faster than a generation ship is very, very ridiculous.
You could imagine a K1 civilization being able to send out micro-probes which could (A) land on a planet, (B) analyze the conditions, and (C) build a set of a microorganisms that could possibly survive there.
Such a task would be preceeded by solar-system sized telescopes that resolve the target planet down to a scale they can see the markers of life and get a good idea asto the conditions.
The star wisp would be accellerated, then maybe brake and navigate in the target system using a solar sail. An energy source capable of lasting 10,000+ years would have to be included somehow, and some reason to think it could survive and function after that long a period. Navigation would be ... challenging ... as at reasonable speeds, stars move, and galactic gravity is rough, and propulsion is impractical.
The "later" ship would be larger, even slower, and would intend to exploit the biosphere to build its economy up from scratch. It wouldn't carry "people" (definitely not organics), but planet-wide "terraforming" would somehow help its mission (at the least, it would have more organics to work with).
That ship could be designed to modify existing organics to surve its purposes. Maybe accellerate evolution towards macroscopic life.
Actually getting organic people there is hard. You could send encoded people, and somehow bootstrap an entire industrial machine civilization, and then build people-builders, and then build the people. But at that point, being "incarnate" in organic form would probably be a strange quirk.
A biosphere is probably still useful. But at the level of difficulty of insterstellar colonization, it seems like not that important an act. Maybe as an act of philanthropy to other systems.
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No one has yet mentioned that [DNA has a half life of about 512 years](http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/).
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> Based on their calculations, the team predicted that even under perfect conditions for DNA preservation, it would take a maximum of 6.8 million years for every bond to be destroyed. And even before that time—after around 1.5 million years—the remaining strands of DNA would be too short to be readable.
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So even before the questions of motive or the practicality of hitting a planet with your DNA payload or how you get the DNA to fertilize the planet, (rather than burning up on entry or impact, etc.), you have the problem that DNA degrades too quickly to survive an interstellar voyage... unless you have the technology to travel there anyway.
So a definite no. You can't seed life across the cosmos, at least not with DNA, because DNA degrades too quickly.
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Microorganisms are the key to terraforming. Machines require maintenance and when they break on another planet, it is probably unfeasible to send a tech. I think your question as to whether or not we would send out DNA is actually a fruitful way to frame the question because DNA itself is a set of instructions for replication of organic machines.
The key to these precursor injections of simple organic life is to identify the current elemental and chemical composition of the planet and craft a cocktail of organisms that can leverage the most commonly available molecules into other molecules which will be necessary for organisms in all other directions of the nascent ecosystem of the planet. Notice, this isn't really about a *"food chain"* at this point. You *could* pre-emptively send small amounts of predatory organisms that will feed on the base level converters, or you could simply create a mutually beneficial non-predatory circulation of byproducts and just stockpile.
To accomplish any kind of time-delay in the introduction of novel organisms you'd have to package the delayed organisms in either a state of simple cryostasis, dehydration, or hibernation, or have a technologically advanced and robust "seeding station" equipped with field-containment technology that creates a true anti-entropic field. (Hey, its sci-fi, right?!) However, again, that's a machine, and you're crossing your fingers exponentially with each layer of complexity/delicacy.
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I would like to dig one level deeper from the answer of Jesse Williams and to go against all other answers.
We are life. You cannot even say that we are obliged to do this; or that we need to think of reasons; we *are* this. If we don't shoot life to other planets at one point or another, we *are not life*; we demote ourselves to level of rocks.
Let me elaborate on this. A gedanken experiment: you have a universe with a star (high entropy source). You put rocks and some other unspecified matter there, you wait some time. What do you have? Rocks of equal mass, right? Instead you place the chlorella there, wait some time, you get *more* chlorella. You wait some time, the mass of chlorella increases even further. That's it. This is how life differs from non-living mechanisms. If you talk yourself into *not* acting like chlorella acts, you have talked yourself into being non-life like a rock. You have showed that all the evolution and all the brainpower, drove you to act similarly to a rock and to be possibly overridden by chlorella. You can "duck" temporarily, to hide yourself as a civilization; or maybe to conserve the environment until you learn what it is to learn from it. This is what we do for Mars today, I think. But ultimately (and I mean in a short time) you do colonize *every damn planet* you can.
I wouldn't colonize the inhabited planets, because diversity is important. It's not a strong argument. Chlorella would beg to differ, maybe future humans would decide otherwise, too.
## Reality-check tag, part 1
The first topic to reality-check is that other civilization planted us. We don't have data that would support or deny it. Occam's razor doesn't cut away planting hypothesis. If it's normal for life to emerge, there should be more of it nearby. If life is extremely unlikely to emerge, the first civilization shot at very large distances (better to shoot large distance and good environment than to shoot nearby for many crappy environments, the life will spread itself further if it has room). Sounds familiar?
## Reality-check tag, part 2
The second topic to reality-check is: can we shoot DNA. At this point, not. Trough recent history, we set our civilization to have today one primary goal. The goal is to childishly consume more and more stuff, have more gadgets, see more nice moving pictures. Until we come to set our civilization to act maturely, we would have "economic" (or rather, systematic) problem to plant ourselves.
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# Disease
Sending out something, which is meant to evolve, to be DNA life-compatible and letting it stay in unknown environment under varying conditions - is just asking for trouble, and may be long-term fatal.
At least, a secure-contain outpost should be set on any planet with a possibility to sterilize the whole planet complete if something goes out of control. Or the "evolution" should be actually preprogrammed to result in providing a terraformed environment with totally safe lifeforms.
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This is similar to European sailors dumping coconuts, pigs and goats on tropical islands, as a depot for when they came past again. They could only do this because there was already earth and greenery there. (One presumes there are cases where the animals did not survive.)
Shooting vials of stuff isn't enough. There has to be infrastructure to make sure your DNA will survive, maybe with some tailoring to local conditions, and covering all climate zones, not just one.
Then pop them in the right place (temperature, humidity). To achieve simulated and accelerated evolution the process would need constant monitoring and adjustment. You'd need not just a backup ship in orbit, but probes on the ground, zipping around and gardening.
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Humans colonize a new earth-like planet that they thought uninhabited by sentient life. After a few years, they discover the sentient race living underground in a highly advanced civilization. The natives are peaceful by nature, and their conflicts have never amounted to a war. The civilization is a singular nation with all individuals filling out a role, (no caste system, all individuals are equal and treated the same). After some conflict with the main government from the humans, (more complex than that, but for the sake of a shorter question) the two races become enemies, and a war begins.
Since this race hasn't fought for thousands of years, their only technology for weapons are old relics and captured human weapons (at this point, humans still have projectile weapons, not energy weapons like lasers). The natives have the technology for strong lasers and plasma propulsion, as well as advanced robotics and advanced biotechnology with many of their vehicles and machinery being a melding of organic and mechanical features. With this technology, and well preserved archives of their past conflicts, what would their weapons be like and how fast can they develop them?
Edit: more info-
Point 1: I forgot to mention that Earth is gone, or at least uninhabitable, which is the reason the humans left. The starship was built in haste, and therefore had only the essentials to get to the planet and colonize.
Point 2: While having large amounts of resources in the capital, the rest of the human settlements are small villages and towns (the armies are stationed in the capital and some larger neighboring towns). The starship they used is in orbit, but all the power left on it was taken to establish the settlement. after a major collapse in economy and resources due to an alien plant infestation (destroying earth crops and food for livestock), the civilization was reduced to what it is now. The humans had to adapt to husbandry of the alien life instead of earth life, which was not a fast change.
Point 3: As requested, I'll elaborate on the native nature. The natives actually have a sort of link between individuals, not a hive mind, but a sort of overall will of the people. This link isn't in control of an individual, they have their own thoughts and the link does not have a voice or sentience itself, but it has a goal, which is the preservation of the population. the past conflicts (or perhaps war as I'll mention later) were caused by two separate populations having two separate links, with different goals. The peace was formed when the political powers attempted to merge the links, realizing that the best option for preservation was one population, this attempt was successful and the link hasn't split since, which is a large reason they are so peaceful.
Their view towards nature is what brought them underground, seeing that their development and spreading of population would eventually cause them to retreat from the surface, to let nature continue without sentience. Their link doesn't technically extend to the wildlife, but they do feel a sort of connection to them, as many of the wildlife also have primitive versions of the link.
Point 4: As this story is written by two people, me and my friend, we discussed the whole 'conflicts that never amounted to all out war' and decided that could be tweaked to a great war. At the climax of this theoretical war, the previously stated melding of links would have happened. The destruction from the war could have also fueled their moving underground to preserve the surface.
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I'm going to go a different route and say that they should *not* produce any advanced weapons. Instead they should copy what the humans have and produce shielding against projectile and explosive weapons only. There are two reasons for this.
First, they have no idea how to conduct a war or what a good weapon is. They're going to have to learn the hard way from the humans, and they're going to have to buy themselves some time.
Humans have honed warfare over thousands of years of deadly competition into a coordinated, rapid, and extremely deadly art combining technology, intelligence, command & control, training, tactics, strategy and game theory. Human weapons have similarly been honed by endless trials, modifications, tests, and use in combat to be light, cheap, durable, and effective.
The natives, in contrast, have not only forgotten how to conduct war, they probably can't even conceive of how destructive a human war is. For example, [during WWII the idea of bombing a city was so feared that the Germans could use the mere threat to force cities and whole nations to surrender](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz#Aftermath).
A society does not learn this from books overnight. The history of military weapons is littered with bad ideas from well meaning people who have no idea what makes a good weapon system. If the natives start producing weapons now history tells us they will be fragile, over-complicated, and impractical.
If the aliens try to fight with no idea how to conduct a war, they will be rapidly defeated. When once side markedly advances the art of war, the other side will lose. Examples through history include...
* [Shaka Zulu's conquest of an empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaka#Shaka.27s_social_and_military_revolution). Extra Credits has [a good video on Shaka's tactics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUpaZ0hMso4).
* Germany's use of combined arms, radios, and blitzkrieg tactics to defeat a superior Allied army in [the Battle Of France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#Army_tactics)
* Coalition's use of stealth and GPS to outflank the Iraqi army in the [First Gulf War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Early_battles).
* [Stormtrooper tactics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Offensive#Tactical_change) finally succeeding (too late) in a breakthrough on the Western Front in WWI.
* In [Stargate: SG-1](http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Stargate_SG-1) the humans demonstrate again and again their prowess at combat using "inferior" technology against [a foe who has forgotten how to fight a real opponent](http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Goa'uld). (I realize this is sci-fi, but I think they depict the situation well)
Second, they do *not* want their advanced technology falling into the hands of the humans. As soon as humanity gets their hands on lasers, plasma weapons, robotics, and biotech they *will* reverse engineer it, create a much more practical weapons, and turn it on the natives.
So, the aliens want to buy as much time as possible to learn how warfare works while taking as few casualties as possible. They should hide and shield their cities. They should shield and armor their warriors, *but only against human weapons*. Then they should march out and get some practice fighting humans, using human weapons, while keeping the humans from capturing any advanced technology or doing any serious damage.
Only once they've learned how warfare works should they consider building advanced weaponry and conducting an offensive.
Unfortunately for the natives, they likely cannot even conceive of what humanity is capable of in war, and would likely be defeated before they even realized what was happening. They will likely be deceived into allowing the humans deep into their defenses and then be destroyed from within. As [the Aztecs welcomed the Spanish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_Empire#Cort.C3.A9s_welcomed_by_Moctezuma) or [the Trojans accepted a gift of a horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse) so too would the natives be lulled into a sense of security... and then the nuke goes off.
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The line between a tool and a weapon is very *very* thin. Many tools can be used to harm other individuals. A garbage truck is a tool to help keep society going. At 45mph, with a little road rage, it becomes a weapon. A sickle is merely a tool for cutting grasses for the harvest, until the day it isn't.
I would expect much of the plasma tech and robotics to provide quite the frightening mobile assault force. I think their biggest issue would be that they would cost a lot. Typically we assume our tools will not get destroyed by nearby opponents, so we are willing to put more into them (there's some funny counter arguments with the US military's approach, but that's another story).
In the end, true weapons would be forged. Eventually they would create devices which are designed to permit you to extend one's will over the life of another human being, and extinguish them. I think the particular details of this will be deeply wedded with the particulars of the humans above them. If we are highly dependent on networked weapons, they may target weapons which disable radio networks. If we send infantry, we might see the fabled Heat Ray of War of the Worlds. The transition from tool to weapon is one of thrift; one would not make weapons to combat an arbitrary foe. One crafts them to defeat the foe at hand.
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**Psychological warfare.**
Schwern's answer covers the problems the aliens will have facing humans in war. Their inexperience will put them at a disadvantage in combat.
*However*, they do have one great advantage at their disposal: their superior society will be very attractive to humans. Their more advanced technology would likely be transformative to human life (for example, curing disease), while their culture of equality and peace is an embodiment of many humans's highest ideals. Therefore they should try to avoid the battlefield and fight in the realm of ideas instead:
* Convince humans that their warlike ways are wrong and peace is superior.
* Welcome any human who wants to defect to their side as generously as possible.
A counterpart to this strategy is creating fear by demonstrating their superior technology. While they may have trouble actually making effective weapons, they can easily display their technology in ways that will terrify any human who has to face them in battle.
Overall I think **they should hold off attacking as long as possible, instead communicating the message "We really think fighting is a bad idea and don't want to oppose you, but if you force our hand we have the capability to easily obliterate you.**
In the face of this message, it will be quite hard for humans to maintain commitment to war among their population.
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They have advanced robotics and also nanotechnology.
They can use this to spy on the world and the technology it uses. Furthermore, they can create nanobots (or modify their existing robots' programming) that can enter a human being and kill him/her from the inside (even a tiny spark will do). If even a few million of these are manufactured and are effectively concealed and transported, humans will be considering a surrender. By the time a billion civilians are dead, humans will have no choice.
Humans will simply be incapable of protecting the entire world population from such a threat, even if they figure out how to detect these robots.
The only possible problem is that we are already assuming that there are large-scale nanorobotics factories that are operational within the species' compund, otherwise it may take a few months to meet such a high demand.
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To encounter a civilization which is that well advanced and has gotten there without conflict is a bit of an improbability. Take an oversimplified example of two goats. We have goat A the passive contender in one corner of the ring minding its own business, and in the other corner we have our obstinate, adamant raging goat B that wants nothing more than to harass goat A.
B moves to A with aggressive intent. A is passive doesn't move.
B bites A. A doesn't like. A Moves away as solution.
B follows. B Bites A again. Moving isn't a solution. A dodges then moves away again. B follows...
Take this far enough (avoidance becomes increasingly more complex and costly in the face of seemingly cheaper aggressive solution) and once all options are exhausted either "violence" or its contextual kin remains as a permanent solution or further ingenious solutions are found which completely avoid violence AND solve problem.
As mentioned a war-free civilization is a bit improbable as war is almost instrumental in the construction of civilizations - but this is completely off topic and another debate altogether.
Let's consider the existence of the illusive solution by considering this civilization already existing. They got to this stage with minor conflicts, but understand their existence even with little relation. Their conflict resolution was superior and didn't necessarily itself involve conflict.
The solution i think lies more in the logical/reasoning/intellectual capacity of the native civilization rather than in their technological superiority. Their understanding of technology and their proficiency is definitely a bonus and could be used as a catalyst to realize their intellectual ones.
One of the best ways to remove a great and powerful enemy is find what factor causes your rift, find and realize the common ground which sews it shut, and you will find yourself with an equally great and powerful friend.
Enemies of enemies are friends and making the humans quarrel internally isn't difficult to begin with. Sowing discord with plague and subsequent healing with superior medicine, or general "bribing" or buying of defectors are common (human alas inherent from the author) ways of going about this.
Even plants in nature (seemingly peaceful and defenseless) better violent animals by secreting substances and pheromones which attract other bigger animals/insects to deal with their immediate threat. Perhaps this sentient race could appeal/drive more primitive and destructive (inherently peaceful but manipulable) lifeforms to fight their war.
A species that doesn't display aggressive nature probably got to this point of evolution because it was doing something right to not be eliminated. It it wasn't "war and aggression" you are left with spiritual, commercial, technological, magical, intellectual or other means that they would have to be proficient in.
As @Schwern pointed out and along with my, admittedly crude, goat example the species will probably try avoidance followed by shielding or other passive means. Should these get exhausted and options dwindle, either the creative or warlike ones remain.
Also along with what @CortAmmon pointed out the line between a tool and a weapon is thin. Their tools as you've stated are well advanced. They could have a hypothetical wind generator for pleasurable breezes in their underground cities, which move large volumes of air. Overclock these to an nth degree humans can't anticipate, focus them in their direction... you get the point. More creative tools, more sinister weapons. All of which would probably be as @Schwern mentioned, initially clunky and rudimentary but probably accelerate in efficiency at a much faster rate than the history of our warfare with their available resources. Humans could even be winning the war (should at start) only to find they lost because the natives superiorly LEARNED, everything humans know and then more to completely gap and dominate the humans.
Interesting topic by all counts. Many many available futures
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I'm unable to comment as I just started here, so I'm going to make a few assumptions:
* This alien race experiences no desire to fight over resources. Therefore, they appear to have enough. This could be explained through technology they use. Perhaps their technology is capable of harvesting energy from the surface. Therefore, they get more than enough.
* Human beings have never been particularly well adapted at navigating underground. Projectile weapons would be of little use in fighting an underground enemy. Even on Earth with our current technology, the deepest mines in the world still reach such a limited depth and cover such a limited portion of Earth's underground.
* The aliens' intense love of nature would lead them to view the humans in one of two ways. They may view the less advanced humans who came from the starship as a sort of pest based on the way they damage the environment, or they may view them as part of the nature, based on their diminished presence and significant lack of organization.
* The humans are not well organized or unified by any means, as in your Point 2, and in general given they likely have very limited communication technologies at this point. They are not really capable of launching an organized coordinated war effort.
Based on these assumptions, I present the following scenarios in order of likeliness:
1. Very quickly. Although the aliens have no understanding of warfare, they have been battling pests on the surface for millenia, and are very protective of nature. They will do anything to protect and encourage it, and view the humans as another pest to be eradicated. The alien plant infestation was simply their first attempt to fix the human problem, succeeding in removing a large amount of foreign matter from the ecosystem. Humans would rapidly have to adapt to the increasing range of pest control methods in order to survive, with no real way to hide from the alien technology.
2. Very slowly. The aliens view the humans as just another part of nature and have no motivation to eradicate them. Humans occupy a weak presence on the surface, so form such a minor nuisance to the alien race. Aliens can move and erect underground barriers faster than humans could even reach them. Both humans and aliens would exist for a long period of time, with the aliens not having to alter their way of life considerably, and the humans unable to reach the aliens due to their inferior technology. Once human technology expanded and human populations became larger, the aliens would attempt to balance the ecosystem with increased threats, however never enough to completely kill the human race.
Hope that answers your question. If you want to clarify anything, please feel free! I will be happy to update my answer accordingly.
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First, since the aliens have no real experience in warfare it would take monumental hubris to attempt to wage war with the humans. I doubt the aliens would see the point to make the effort. Instead they would simply seek to exterminate the humans as fast as possible while involving as few people and social changes as possible.
The fact that aliens live underground and have advanced technology makes this relatively easy. Just use mass produced nuclear weapons. Any aircraft can be shot down by high yield nuclear weapons. Surface units are also vulnerable to nuclear fireballs. Agricultural and residential areas can be dealt with radiological weapons saturating them with radioactive isotopes of toxic heavy metals. Any humans who made it underground either in human built shelters or captured alien facilities can be dealt by with nuclear bunker busters collapsing the structures. Such systems can be even be integrated to remaining alien facilities to assure that if the humans capture them they will have no benefit from it.
This can be supplemented with biological weapons attacking humans and imported agricultural crops. Chemical weapons can be used defensively. If your tunnels get flooded with dioxygen difluoride on capture, the motivation to capture them will be quite low.
Robotic weapons can be used to defend installations effectively. "Shoot anything that fits target criteria" is well within their technology and sufficient to give some real defense against attacks. Especially in the underground where tactical options are limited anyway.
Since the aliens have the superior technology they should have good ability to mass produce such weapons. The correct tactic would probably be to first to build a large stockpile of the systems and then attack by surprise with maximum force. A one hit knockout should be the goal.
The reason this would be a good solution to the aliens is because it avoids actual warfare and substitutes overwhelming destruction and huge logistic challenge. Which should be more manageable to the aliens. It also minimizes the ability of the humans to use their superior warfare and even uses it against humans to some extent. Humans **expect** disputes to be solved by fighting and wars not extermination. So there would be a very real chance of catching the humans unprepared to your attack.
As a bonus such large scale use of nuclear weapons would cause large amounts of dust and sudden cooling of the climate. This would be relatively harmless to aliens in their underground shelters, but quite problematic to your typical human colonists. And there would be no real defense against it.
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I would suggest that they would *fight* with more subtitle weapons. Economic pressure, political power, hearts and minds, all that. I don't think the peaceful alien race would fight a gun v.s. gun, tank v.s. tank battle. I think they would fight guns with ideas and tanks with embargoes.
It's hard to think of a embargo without a blockade of some kind to back it up, but a race of aliens that has not had a fight in thousands of years has had to develop some pretty extreme peaceful measures.
I would suggest that the *core* of the alien people would follow something like "the way of the leaf" from the Wheel of time series. The leaders and government of the aliens would probably be very skilled in politics, intrigue, spying, and such.
For example, the humans start the invasion of a city. The city is protected from orbital attacks because the people are more then willing to die to protect their idea of peace and the buildings and what not "re-grow" harder each time. So the first attacks makes a nice crater but most of the city just regenerates, with a kind of bio armor as a natural reflex. So they send in the ground troops. Again lots of aliens die, but they are ok with that. They evacuate, run and hide, and such. Yes a lot of them still die. The aliens seeing this start a deep plot to "assimilate" the human attackers. Perhaps by being subservient for a time, but eventually providing the humans with what they want. The humans stop their attack, but the aliens keep trying to "convert" them their pacifist ways. At first the humans reject it, but in time, our greatest strength becomes the way in. Humans can adapt to anything, and we do, until after a while the humans and aliens live a more symbiotic relationship. Finally, after a long time there are no humans or aliens just humens. The aliens win, as their ideals are preserved.
Bonus, as the idea of death before viloance spreads, it spreads back to earth, and the large population. Thus the aliens could "gain" another planet (Earth) in the same manor.
Or the aliens could transmit data to Earth that makes it seem like the humans are infected with something that cuts off supplies stranding them on the alien planet.
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One thing many of the posters have overlooked is that the Humans have arrived on this planet, so therefore have the capability of using space and space resources.
As a minimum, vehicles orbiting the planet will be moving at pretty impressive velocities, which is easy converted into kinetic energy. To give you an idea of the magnitude, imagine you are standing on the end zone of an American football field with a .45 cal automatic pistol. As the ISS passes right over your head, you fire the pistol towards the other end zone. By the time the bullet reaches the 10 yard line from you, the ISS has already cleared the length of the field.
So any time an alien wants to come to the surface, playing "whack a mole" with a kinetic energy weapon becomes an option. With some engineering, large penetrators can be designed to deorbit and attack even deep underground bunkers. I believe Jerry Pournelle suggested a rod of tungsten or other dense metal the size of a telephone pole dropping from LEO would be sufficient to crack the armoured cover of an ICBM silo and destroy the missile slumbering within.
Going even farther, the Humans had to get to the system, so they have a starship or two in the system. The amount of energy needed to achieve interstellar travel will be so immense that the starships will actually be weapons in of themselves. The drive systems will be capable of releasing terrawatts of energy (under some sort of control), and a fully fuelled and equipped starship travelling at relativistic velocity will have literally planet busting amounts of energy. Even non standard devices like the Alcubierre warp drive are mathematically thought to require dealing with stellar or planetary mass amounts of energy to create the warp effect, focusing that sort of gravitational energy on a planet won't be good for the people down there.
Larry Niven called this the "Kzinti Lesson" in a short story where the warlike Kzin encountered the Humans for the first time. Humanity was peaceful and disarmed, but when confronted with the Kzin rapidly turned their space systems and ship drives into cosmic sized blow torches and the Kzin were rapidly defeated.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uTnUO.jpg)
So I'm afraid that the Humans hold all the high cards, and can call down a terrifying rain of fire and metal on their opponents if they feel the need or are threatened enough.
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It would be very easy for such a technologically advanced race to develop weapons or to weaponize their technologies.
*Unless* their race has gone down the path of replacing all engineering/design with computers/robots and society no longer requires the species to think in those terms for a long time and have thus either devolved physically/evolutionarily or devolved in their methods to teach themselves the required skills and knowledge to undertake such efforts.
Most likely, they will start with construction and "farming" equipment repurposed for military use. Then as they develop real weapons and military vehicles, they will replace them and will continue to dominate.
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Several avian species such as African grey parrots or the New Caledonian crow have demonstrated tool use, the ability to use new information in separate contexts, and other types of cognition that approach or surpass the level of a human toddler or young child.
What event or evolutionary pressure would lead such species to bridge the final step towards something approaching the cognition of an adult human, or to develop another kind of equivalent intelligence? I am assuming that they retain their basic bird-like morphology as much as possible in this scenario.
I see that there are previous questions dealing with a 'Planet of the Aves' and a crow-based civilization, however my focus here is strictly to have a semi-hard sci-fi reason for an intelligent avian species to emerge in the first place. The nature of such a civilization doesn't matter to the story I'm building, at least for now.
Edit: The previous question [How can we influence our own future world by encouraging evolution of non-human intelligent species?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12939/how-can-we-influence-our-own-future-world-by-encouraging-evolution-of-non-human) does not answer my query, please stop closevoting with it. I am looking for non-directed evolution only.
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## Incrementally more complicated food in an otherwise-forgiving environment
There's obviously any amount of debate over what led to human intelligence, but if we follow Joseph Henrich's *The Secret of Our Success*, the number one thing is the requirement to build long mental sequences, in order to make tools and process food.
You could situate the crows as immigrants to an isolated continent without predators or close rivals, and place them in an evolutionary arms race with various complex food sources - armoured plants and prey animals. Successful crows learn ever-longer series of manipulations in order to manufacture tools, pry their food out from its defences, render it digestible, etc.
The mental sequences become too complicated for one crow to invent by itself, so they evolve for culture: observing their parents and teaching skills to their children. This leads to theory of mind and unlocks cooperative behaviour. In time, the long mental sequences and the need for communication combine to create language, and then we're off to the races. The food sources can no longer keep up the pace, but the crows keep getting smarter through social competition.
We'd imagine the crows getting larger and larger to support bigger brains, losing the ability to fly, and gaining dexterity with wing manipulators. None of that is clearly essential, though - we have no idea how intelligent a small flying animal could become with the right incentives.
(I've only addressed crows here because they've already got a good start on this complex-extraction path. Parrot intelligence seems altogether different.)
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## They need to first evolve humanoidism
Birds evolved advanced brains before apes did, but birds don't have the bodies for advanced tool use. The niche of advanced civilization in humans came after 2 key features set us aside from the other mammals:
1. Hands: Because birds have to do all of their manipulation with their feet and beaks, it limits their ability to perform certain actions. A human can pick up any tool, walk to where they are going, brace themselves with their feet, and perform powerful, full body actions like chopping, hammering, etc. while maintaining a fixed gaze on their work for precision. While the beak itself can be a powerful and precise tool, it lacks the surface area to control a created tool for heavy labor, and a tool in the talon cannot be followed through with the full strength of its body. This means there is no advantage for a bird to ever make something like an axe, hammer, etc. If most tools don't improve on their natural abilities, then there is no point in investing in complex tool use. No bird alive today has a body plan capable of tooled blacksmithing, mining, etc. So, birds can not really move past mezolithic tool use at their current morphologies.
2. Upright walking: The big difference between a monkey's body and a human's body is our posture. While monkeys are proportionally stronger when it comes to grasping and ripping strength, their body plan is terrible for carrying heavy loads over long distances. When humans went upright, it was the difference between being able carry a simple tool, and being able to carry a large bundle of sticks, boards, etc. which made fire working and large scale construction many times as practical. In other words, if you can't walk or fly with a heavy load, you can't do neolithic work.
[Answer]
Start with the hoatzin instead. It still has claws on its wings when young.
Put a breeding population of hoatzin into an environment where retaining those claws gives a distinct survival advantage. Wait until those claws are not lost at any stage of life.
Then put the handsy hoatzin into an environment where the bodily flexibility and upper body strength required for picking up stuff with those claws gives a reproductive advantage. Wait until they can bend over and pick up food to eat it. They'll probably have to stop using their wings for flight. This is not a problem.
Then put your proto-bird people into an environment where the smart ones have more children than the stupid ones. **Edit:** Let's say that there are predators who are bigger, stronger, and/or faster, so that fighting them or outrunning them is not an option, but outsmarting them is.
Then wait some more.
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You need to realize that:
* Humanity is only scratching the surface of understanding evolution. We do not have a scientifically rigorous understanding of how any specific thing could evolve (such as alternative intelligent species).
But we do have a growing understanding of the general pattern.
**1: Problem solving opportunities**
Evolution is a somewhat random process of small, incremental changes over vast amounts of time. When those changes favor survival, that change survives into the next generation. Therefore, your species need challenges to overcome and problems to solve. Challenges are often passive and require little to no "intelligence." Problems tend to require the evolving species to react to something, and react well. All these can take the form of climate, predator, breeding, eating, and a thousand other opportunities.
**2: A window for survival**
Predators can't be *too successful.* The environment can't be *too extreme.* It's not enough to have problem solving opportunities, those opportunities must also have a "reasonable" chance for success. What do I mean when I quote the word "reasonable?" There isn't a hard-and-fast rule for any particular opportunity that decides whether or not it is (\*ahem\*) too hot, too cold, or just right. But the window for survival must exist. Is the temperature too hot? Your evolving species must adapt to finding shade — or using water to stay cool. Do the predators have long tongues? Your species must adapt to digging deeper — or learning how to sting the tongue. Did a solar flare raise the temperature too high? Your species is dead. Did the predator develop a longer tongue faster than your species could learn to dig? Your species is dead.
**3: A means of surviving or avoiding extinction-level-events**
In many ways, Earth's story of evolution is a story of dodging the proverbial bullet. Meteors, exploding calderas, ice ages, shifting plate tectonics, de-oxygenation of the ocean.... life (and, particularly, specific chains of life) had to dodge those bullets to evolve into human intelligence. But, to avoid burning a number on a duplicate, you need a balance just as you do for problem-solving opportunities. You can't avoid all ELEs or you don't weed out the casually successful chains of life from the "superior" chains (and I say "superior" tongue-in-cheek... we created the Austin Powers movies after all...). So it's not the events you're looking to minimize, its the strengths of your evolving life that you're looking to support and propagate.
**4: Spread like a ~~virus~~ successful species**
Back in college I had to write a program called "sharks vs. fish." Maybe they still have people write it today to study recursive subroutines. (How far back was that? I wrote it in Fortran....) While the point of the exercise was recursion, the goal was to write a program that simulated the predator-vs-prey relationship. Predators propagate slowly and only in relation to the food supply. Prey propagates like the proverbial rabbits. Predators consume prey on a logarithmic scale (the greater the numbers of predators, the faster they eat the prey). What's the point of all this? Your species must propagate fast enough to ensure there is a next generation. All those evils propounded by anti-human-population-and-expansion activists? Yeah, they're the evolutionary strengths that got us to the point where someone could complain about it. Without those strengths, we wouldn't have made it to the point of complaining about it. *However,* you can't spread too fast or you no longer have the most powerful compulsion for change: predation. Why have mosquitoes never evolved beyond what they are? Because there's no need to change. They are *completely successful* in their niche.
**5: Availability of dietary requirements**
The evolutionary chain that brought the world Humanity in all its glory included the foods necessary for a changing diet brought about by the changes necessary for our evolution. Over-simplifying a LOT, we started with eating oceanic organics, graduated to leaves and grass, moved on to fruits and nuts, then came the need for proteins and fat-rich food sources (yeah... meat..., especially bone marrow), until we ended up today with the ability to complain about people who frequent all-you-can-eat BBQ. Your birds are most likely fruit and nut eaters, maybe a bit of meal worm... but as they evolve, they'll need access to foods that can fuel those changes — notably that can fuel the changes in the brain. But that also means *they must change* to handle consuming, processing, and expelling those kinds of foods.
**Now for the real problem...**
At the beginning I said that evolution is a somewhat random process of small, incremental changes over vast amounts of time. It is. The problem is that you're likely looking for a magical summary of the top five events that justify human intelligence and, thus, could justify avian intelligence (or similar). The problem is that *it doesn't work that way.*
When I say "small" and "vast" I really mean it. Just contemplating how the human eye (and the ability to "see, involving nerves and the brain") evolved is *breathtaking.* So many eons making small, almost meaningless changes until, boom! *Michelangelo.*
In other words, no matter what any of us say in response to this question, you're stuck with a worldbuilding problem. If you're trying to map out a "realistic" evolution of anything, you're kinda doomed to failure. Lots of small, incremental changes over vast amounts of time. You'll be stuck with creating a (very) short list of "big events" that will rationalize your end result — an avian species both sentient and sapient. And what, specifically, that list is has more to do with storybuilding (the needs of your story) than it does worldbuilding (the rules underlying the operation of your world). Thus, I've given you the outline of a bunch of potential rules — but it'll be up to you to craft the specifics that your story needs. (I'm assuming a story, I apologize if that's not the case.)
Don't feel bad about that! Worldbuilding is often the art of simplifying things. Even massive worldbulding projects like [Orion's Arm](https://www.orionsarm.com/) are, for all their cool and amazing glory, massive simplifications. Just remember, you should be looking to rationalize your creation, not fully explain it. You'll sleep better if you keep that in mind. Cheers.
**One last thing...**
If what you're looking for is something that looks like a modern parrot who can competently discuss quantum mechanics with Stephen Hawking, you're going to need to change your paradigm. The changes that must occur to the bird you see sitting on a branch today may result in something that has bird-like characteristics (in the same way that you can kinda see the primate in humanity), but it won't be the parrot of day anymore than we're the chimpanzee of today. I don't entirely agree with @Nosajimiki that your birds would be required to evolve into humanoids... but I completely agree that they'd need to change to accommodate everything I've discussed.
Keep in mind, we don't have fur all over our bodies anymore *because we've evolved to no longer need it.* But we didn't need or use it for mating, either. What would a bird's plumage evolve into if it no longer needed it for warmth, etc.? And how would that hang around (kinda like human hair...) if a colorful display (not necessarily plumage!) was still needed to attract a mate?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0FndS.png)
To conclude... what you want to design is more important than the Real Life processes that *might* (maybe) lead to its design. Start with a little science... but don't be completely bound by it or you'll have to go where the proverbial evidence takes you. Which might very well be the flying cow @Vesper mentions. I liked the flying cow!
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# None (need bigger brains)
First of all, many avian species are smart. Their brains generally have an overall high density compared to any other brain. They demonstrate an incredible ability for several areas, like language an tool use.
Something approaching modern human intelligence is right out. Even early humans is a stretch. The described birds current brains have already been optimised. Without enlarging the brain and thus the whole bird, you cannot get a further leap to adult humans.
While the intelligence of birds is often stated as phenomenal, it is still important to note it is compared to their weight. Their demonstrated intelligence also happens to coincide with things we deem important to intelligence. But even those are limited and narrow. Put any bird into a scenario an average modern adult should face. From obeying traffic laws to just understanding why you need to work, the complexities of our current civilisation is simply beyond the capabilities of your described bird species. This is regardless of however much further evolution you give them. If a container is full, you can only do so much rearranging to cram in more before you need a bigger container. A physical limit. With bigger brains the the often stated square cube law would demand further changes to their basic bird like morphology. You could still claim them as birds, but it is probably out of scope of your question.
Without bigger brains, no human tier intelligence.
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There seems to be a ton of requirements for intelligent avians. Starting from deepest:
**You need hexapods to dominate early ground**
An intelligent avian needs hands, or else his tools would be limited to beak-appendages which would obstruct his ability to communicate verbally, as well as his head's free movement mid-air, after all. the best tools humans have are weapons, and weapons are required to be available to be drawn in every possible moment. For avians this includes mid-air attack from the clouds, for example, they need to be able to deter airborne predators which would be aplenty. Therefore, an avian would have to have at least six limbs: arms, wings, legs. (Aka dragon, just with feathers) For this to happen, their ancestors should be hexapods that would evolve wings out of one pair of limbs.
You might be able to achieve this by implementing a heavily tectonic world, at least in the past, where and when four legs were not enough to maintain equilibrium, so any four-legged creatures were outpaced by six-legged ones. Eventually tremors ceased or diminished, yet dominant lifeform structure won't get easily altered into four-limb configuration, so everything ends up having six. (Hey, this allows centaurs below! Quite a civilization war might happen if both would develop intelligence)
**Avians have to fly in dense atmosphere**
Brains are heavy, and to lift a creature with a brain the size of a *Homo habilis*' would take quite a structure just to support the weight of it and the life-support system required. The big brain would have to evolve from a smaller one, yet the smaller brain would need some complex problems to solve in order for bigger-brain creatures to dominate the skies. This can be achieved by adding high turbulence and obscure vision mid-air, so that specimen that would be able to discern the sound of an attacking falcon (equivalent) would have adaptation advantage. Perhaps those species' forelimbs would develop feelers that would detect aggressive wind swipes prior to them knocking the avian off balance in flight, or something, also they might get better hearing like owls, that would help both to hunt and evade predators. Anyway there needs to be a use for higher processing power in flight in order for the brains of avians to ever become big enough. The high atmospheric density should be retained over the course of their evolution to not force the now-too-big birds to land and forfeit going airborne again. Their eyes might also evolve unpredictably, perhaps towards viewing in a spectrum that's not obscured by atmospheric events (NIR or UV? Maybe both, making them have more eyes than just the two we have), this would also add requirement to signal processing power, so brains would grow.
**There must be relative predators in the skies, perhaps even those that never land**
A bird in the sky is generally safe from land-based threats, yet it has to land somewhere to lay eggs or rest, where land-based predators might disrupt their proliferation process, ending their existence. The dense atmosphere required for avians to fly with big brains would also allow plants and other life to float, granting a possibility for an entirely sky-based life to exist, that never comes down to unstable ground (if it's still unstable), but is constantly tossed by high winds, both up and down and in all directions. Such a system would still have its plants, plant-eating animals and predators that eat them in turn; avians could enter such an ecosystem soon or late, so that airborne ceratures might follow a different evolution path like flying by flotation. Yet since the mineral supply is scarce in midair, there would be both high food concurrency and a possibility to find rest in mid-air on top of those floaters, for example. Having a big brain would let avian predecessors to accommodate to ever-changing nature of the sky turmoil, allowing to take unobvious opportunities to hide, hunt or make shelter for children that won't be available to those with less organized brain, letting them sustain their existence for enough time to gain enough intelligence to start thinking about tools, finally employing their hands for actual job insteda of maybe using them for self-defense in air clinch combat.
PS: all this is a very thin ground, yet I've tried to make it look plausible and still science-based on what we know about our own evolution as species throughout the lifetime of the biosphere. And there should be enough quirks in between these stages that might turn the course of avian evolution, say beaks vs teeth, shaped skulls, brain location, overall form, flotation capability etc etc., so in the end you might not even get an intelligent avian, but instead an intelligent flying cow.
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It is not obvious that birds traded intelligence for flight. Our brains are heavy. It does not follow that a much lighter brain cannot exist. Some birds can use tools and language so they can get into the same intellectual region as us. Some birds are born with with instincts to survive from the egg. 'Crow funerals' suggest a communal memory or 'hive mind'. These together might save a lot of weight.
It seems reasonable that birds traded wing claws and fingers, teeth, and other features for flight. It is a good trick, and worth trading a lot for. Their arms/wings are strong but specialised. They no longer have fine manipulation skills, so these actions have passed to their feet.
Birds have become flightless independently several times. This may have been when there were no significant predators, and becoming larger was a better strategy than flying. Dodos, penguins, ostriches, kiwis, emus, and turkeys probably stopped flying. In all cases, they seem to have lost the strength of their wings. If you want upper body dexterity, you have to somehow keep the strength of the wings, and recover the use of the fingers. No birds have managed this yet.
This leaves you with a slightly odd creature. It may keep its wings for flight. It may tuck objects under the wings to hold them. But the wings do not recover their agility, and the dexterity has passed to the beak and the feet. This puts at a disadvantage when it meets bipeds such as ourselves with teeth that bite and claws that catch, etc.
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**Change the Landscape of the world to suit intelligent birds and be unforgiving for most other species.**
Maybe there is no human intervention building the world, but it still has to follow the principle that birds are best suited, and it pushes attributes indicative of bird intelligence.
Picture a world with stone steppes like elaborate coral structure with litle trees and vines growing on plateaus near the top, high up in the sky. In this world only the birds are capable of reaching the micro climates at the top where the food supply is.
In this world the *flight pattern recognition, bird song, mimicry, nest building, and constructing crochet like tools* that birds make are necessary skills.
Flight pattern recognition-
In this world the seasons change in an unforgiving way. Routes to food sources must be strictly adhered to. Perhaps their seasons change more rapidly than they do on earth.
Only the best and most adaptive singers survive by co-operating with birds that have other dialects, in order to evade the other animals on the world.
Only the most architectural nests get safely to the highest fertile areas.
Only the birds that build nuanced tools can eat the grubs or whatever animal they feed on.
This whole world is almost like a complex platform game, where only the best and most clever flyers will win.
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Although I agree with the idea that evolving human-like traits such as hands and an upright posture might be necessary, I can't help but think that a **natural catastrophe** could render the environment so inhospitable that most birds perish, leaving only a very small group of more intelligent birds.
These survivors would be forced to devise collaborative strategies to locate food in a challenging environment, potentially developing mental capacities for social collaboration and language. Subsequently, they would need to invent ways to create advanced tools, which circles back to the argument that they would require hands or evolve their beaks and feet to manipulate objects with greater dexterity.
So I think language (written and spoken), social collaboration, and tool-handling dexterity are a must. Something along these lines.
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**Avoiding predators, or becoming predators.**
Onde possibility is an arms race. If their predators gain an advantage by becoming smarter outweighing the disadvantage of becoming heavier (bigger brains), then the crows or parrots will have to up their own game to avoid being eaten. Since the least smart ones will tend to become lunch for these predators, the evolutionary drive is strong.
Alternatively, I have read reports that in parts of the world, ravens are overcoming their pair-solitary nature and coming together in groups to hunt sheep. Some hold the sheep's tail while others try to wound it or put out its eyes. It's hideously "cruel" since they aren't well-equipped by nature as predators. On the other hand, I don't imagine that early hominids using blunt sticks and stones on herbivores were any less "cruel". The need to cooperate in groups may well drive intelligence higher.
In passing, ravens already have human-tier intelligence, estimated around that of an average human 7-year-old. They are the largest and smartest of the corvids.
[Answer]
# Potentially Nothing
It is true that we humans have observed crows and parrots to be less intelligent than humans: However, this doesn't mean that this is the be all and end all of our knowledge of nonhuman intellect
Believe it or not, but neither parrots nor crows are human beings: Their mind, culture, and history are entirely different. And if intelligence testing within a single subspecies is so often biased towards as granular as the testmaker's culture, why should we imagine that a test of an entirely different class would produce perfect results?
In summary, there's no good reason to believe that crows aren't already perfectly smart enough for civilization
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[Question]
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So my character (16 yr old girl) got a deep cut (inches across) from a dagger across her torso and is knocked unconscious. (She falls onto her back) She had just enough time to contact her friends before she got knocked out.
Minutes pass (not sure how many) and she loses a bit more than 2 liters of blood. This is where her friends find her. I'm pretty sure the blood loss would be enough to make her go unconscious at this point. (Is it?) But if they gave her a blood restoring elixir (Au where there are like healing herbs made into medicine) to keep her stable until reinforcements arrive, she would survive, correct?
If the elixir wasn't present/possible, how would (and could) she survive?
[Answer]
# The Scenario is UNLIKELY
## As the query stands edited & clarified:
Your character should actually be in relatively good shape when her friends reach her! She will almost certainly survive, no RL, no magical herbs needed.
The wound you describe is entirely superficial. A slash across the abdomen that does not enter the peritoneal cavity has basically cut through skin & subcutaneous fat, with those layers' relatively small blood vessels.
It's a little unclear what you mean by a "deep cut" measuring "inches" that doesn't involve the internal organs. On a healthy and not terribly chubby girl, there's only about an inch of everything until you get right down to the wobbly bits inside. So I'm guessing the slash is inches long, which makes sense, because skin and muscle and even fat are not easy to slice through.
## Reality Check:
You didn't tag it, but your question begs for one. The reality is there just aren't enough major arteries or veins on the belly to cause a blood loss of two litres. That's an awful lot of blood and to lose that amount, you need some very serious arterial damage. A nick in the vena cava or one of the renal vessels will do it; but you say there's no internal organ damage, and the great vessels are too deep.
Short answer: the amount of blood loss you want doesn't jive with the injury you describe.
**I suspect:** that she passed out due to a vaso-vagal response. The sight of blood --- and to your character, a dagger slice will burn and seem like she's being gutted, and blood will be everywhere no doubt --- may be enough to make her faint. (The very thought of being stuck with a needle and/or losing blood is enough for many to faint!).
She landed on her back which is good. Keeps the wound clean. There's a 33% chance she'll land with her legs slightly elevated above her head, which will help conserve blood in her head.
Her friends arrive after a few minutes (say five) and find her to be a bloody mess. Those that don't faint or hurl their breakfasts immediately can do some basic shock and injury first aid to stabilise her wound and her overall condition.
[Answer]
You actually don't need to give your patient a magical elixir, there's already a product out there that is used in the field that does exactly what you want to do; it's called [Ringer's Solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringer%27s_solution). This needs to be given as a transfusion, but once that is done the body can survive that kind of loss.
To get into the basics, 2 litres of blood represents around 40% of the average human's blood supply. Sure, transfusions get blood back into the system, but in battlefield conditions (I'm thinking the dagger attack here) typing blood and getting supplies for transfusions into the field is time consuming and often just not possible if the patient is to survive. But, at 40% loss, your concern is not the lack of haemoglobin, but the lack of volume. Your patient is going to go into shock (hence the unconsciousness) and die due to the heart trying to pump around fluid that just isn't there.
This is where Ringer's Solution comes in. It's basically there to expand blood volume and can be added to anyone's blood supply, regardless of type. There is even some scientific evidence to say that patients treated with Ringer's actually recover *faster* because the lack of red blood cells in their now diluted blood triggers bone marrow to work overtime to replace what seems to have been lost, whereas with a full blood transfusion the bone marrow doesn't get that message.
I don't have the facts at hand, but my understanding is that there are used to be1 a lot of battlefield medics that actually carry this solution for impromptu transfusions in the battlefield to give wounded soldiers a fighting chance. This would be the same for your patient as well. Of course, none of that matters if your patient is still bleeding profusely so the use of something like Ringer's should always be in concert with pressure bandages and the like to stem the bleeding so that you don't end up supplying needed volume only to dilute the blood below the level that can support oxygen transport through the body.
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1. It turns out my knowledge was a bit out of date on this and this practice has been discontinued because the use of volume expanders makes coagulation harder and therefore increases the bleeding. Thanks to JSM for pointing this out.
[Answer]
Losing two liters of blood in and of itself is life-threatening but would not necessarily cause someone's death (assuming this is an adult human or someone with a similar blood volume).
>
> Exsanguination is losing enough blood to cause death...People can die
> from losing half to two-thirds of their blood. The average adult has
> about 5 to 6 liters of blood in their body (women, and people who
> weigh more, have more blood). This means a person can die from
> losing 2 1/2 to 4 liters of blood. To compare, this is five to eight
> times as much blood as people usually give in a blood donation.
> Children and babies have much less blood than adults, and can
> exsanguinate by losing much less blood than adults. Exsanguination is
> often called bleeding to death or bleeding out. It is a medical
> emergency. ([ref](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsanguination))
>
>
>
If your character is still alive when her friends find her, and they are able to completely stop the bleeding (not just blood that goes on the ground but internal bleeding too), that should be enough to save her life. Especially if the elixir also restores her blood to its full volume. And assuming that there are no other injuries that are life-threatening in and of themselves (for example, if her heart was damaged or the blade went into her lungs).
If the elixir didn't exist, her friends would have to stop the bleeding with pressure. This would not be possible if the injury was to a major artery, not without surgical equipment. If the injury is to a limb, you can use a tourniquet, but obviously that doesn't work on a torso. This will stabilize her for a short time, enough for paramedics to take over, if they are available quickly.
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The most important question is not if she has died, but what is the ambient temperature?
If it is very cold (below freezing) then death is not an immediate issue. The curious case of [Anna Bagenholm](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jan/28/colinblackstock1) proves our understanding of death leaves something to be desired. Anna had the misfortune of falling through ice and drowning. Her body temperature then plummeted and she was on face value clinically dead. But given the ambient temperature doctors managed to resuscitate her hours later.
There's the awful case of [Frank Gardner](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/real_story/4455057.stm), a BBC journalist shot and left for dead in Saudi Arabia. His life was saved, although he is now disabled and suffers chronic pain. Gardner's survival hinged upon the skill of the South African gunshot specialist surgeon in the hospital he was rushed to. Along with a number of drugs which were used to both stop the flow of blood from the wounds, and to stop his blood generally starting to clot (which occurs before death). The latter prevented multiple organ failure from concluding.
Gardner's injuries included multiple gunshots which had caused devastating internal injuries to the stomach and intestines. Surgery ended up removing some of his intestines and other organs. The severity of the injuries led to immediate complications, various infections which took weeks to heal with intensive care. In your case the injuries sound less problematic.
So long as she can get medical attention quickly the blood loss in itself is not a problem. There are various [blood substitutes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute) whose purpose is to carry oxygen instead of blood. But there have also been trials for new techniques which seem as exciting as ghoulish. One [2014 trial](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623-000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death/) conducted by UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, is worth mentioning and further reading.
The gist is that the patient who has suffered severe blood loss from violent trauma has all of their blood replaced with cooled saline solution. This drops their body temperature, which puts them into a medical coma and reduces metabolic function, essentially preventing the onset of decay, thus putting them in 'suspended animation'. Once they are in this state, they can be moved to a medical facility, their wounds fixed up, and then blood transfusions can occur and they can be resuscitated.
If the patient has access to the correct climate, drugs, medical techniques, then survival is very possible yes.
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As part of the story I am writing, an individual has been frozen with relatively crude cryogenic technology, then preserved as well as possible. Given the constraints of biology, what would waking them up entail in terms of real/current (or hypothetical/future) technology in order to be successful?
[Answer]
Well, we can't do it now so the only answer we have is 'more than we have now'.
Alright, this isn't *strictly* true, insofar as we can cryogenically freeze embryos and the like, and we can then thaw them and bring them to term so depending on your definition of 'someone', arguably the minimum technology someone needs is the ability to create and maintain liquid nitrogen. For full fledged human beings however, the problem is a little more complex.
When you get down to it, the problem is that around 70% of the human body is water. That may not sound like so much of a big deal - we freeze water all the time, right? Well true, but it's the stuff around the water that presents the problem here.
Ever wonder about the Titanic? Why it was possible for it to hit an iceberg in the first place? I mean, water is a liquid and most liquids are less dense than the solid made of the same material right? But icebergs float. So do those little cubes we put in our Scotch drinks other than Scotch. That's because water *expands* when frozen, unlike most other molecules and compounds. Suffice it to say that freezing a complex human body actually causes massive damage to the cells because the frozen water actually damages the rest of the chemical compounds in the cell. (This is a simplification, but functionally correct.)
So; either we find a way to freeze water in a way that doesn't cause it to expand while the compounds around it increase their density, or we replace the water with another compound that doesn't react in that manner.
The first is simple - we simply don't have that technology and our understanding of chemistry leads us to believe that without some new breakthrough discovery in science, it will never be done. Therefore, it's not a simple engineering problem we can throw money and other resources at. It would rely on a scientific discovery to be made that we simply can't predict.
As for the second idea, most of the liquids we can think of that would behave in the right manner as they freeze are actually toxic to us, so while it's possible we wouldn't suffer cell damage, we'd still most likely die.
Bottom line is that in order to successfully cryogenically freeze a person with a high probability of bringing them back, we would either need to be able to replace all the water in all the cells of a human body with something that is both non-toxic AND subject to density increase during freezing; or, we need to find a way for water to react differently to freezing and increase (rather than decrease) in density.
Both are currently outside our known science, which is evident by one simple observation;
We're not doing it yet.
[Answer]
**[Daiquiri cryonics](https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Daiquiri_20Cryonics#1187978185)**
This is my favorite low tech method. Blood sugar and blood alcohol (and also acetone) are driven up in tandem. Way up. The person does not die of diabetic coma because her blood alcohol is so high, and does not die of alcohol poisoning because she is so cold that brain metabolism is slowed. You want the body no colder than the freezing point of alcohol. Before she goes to sleep, a [left ventricular assist device](https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-treatments/l/lvad.html) is implanted; you can use the same line for a dialysis access.
When you revive her, you need to reverse all three in tandem: lower sugar, clear the alcohol and gently warm the body. Oxygen is going to be depleted too so you will need to bring that back artificially until the lungs come on line.
You could do that with current tech using ECMO dialysis.
[Combination of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and continuous renal replacement therapy in critically ill patients: a systematic review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4277651/).
Turn on the LVAD because the heart is too cold to do any work, and will probably not do much but quiver for a while. With the LVAD, blood starts flowing. Dialysis will clear alcohols in the blood and also glucose. You can gradually warm the blood in the machine too. With ECMO you can oxygenate blood on the return circuit but the high sugar content will support anaerobic metabolism for a little while. Lactic acid produced by anaerobic tissues will also be cleared by dialysis.
Once she is warmed up the heart will hopefully take over and you can turn off the LVAD. If not, gentle electricity will be salutary.
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As Tim B pointed out it isn't technologically feasable yet to bring someone back from cryogenic sleep (sleep is a marketing euphemism since for all intents and purposes you are dead when frozen). As already said water needs to be removed due to it's freezing causing massive cell damage and other antifreeze fluids it could be replaced with will still cause a lot of damage. Additionally there is a limit on how long someone can be frozen due to the accretion of radiation damage in the body, which is caused by background radiation and the natural decay of radioisotopes within our bodies. In a living person the damage gets repaired naturally, but these repair mechanisms won't work in a (cryogenic sleeper) frozen, mummified corpse.
On that cheerful note let's discuss the technologies which would make (waking up) the reanimation of a long cold body plausible. Since cell damage is the issue at hand any technologie capable of fixing it quickly and on a large scale is fine. The obvious candidate would be medical nano-machines [1], be they biological or mechanical in nature. When we'll have these on a level capable of performing the complex tasks required to bring someone back from (a winter night dream) the land of the dead is yours to choose. Noone could argue against it if you place this level of sophistication somwhere between 2050 and 2200.
Consider that this level of medical technologie won't appear in a vacuum as beeing able to repair damaged cells at the rate needed for successful revival of a (sleeping beauty) slightly rotten corpse will make extreme longjevity or outright biological immortality possible. Going over Aubery de Grey's SENS approach [2] [3] medical nanotechnology will fix all of the issues.
Finally this video by Youtuber Isaac Arthur goes into furtjer detail on cryogenics [4].
A good overview of the modern state of cryogenics is given in this article [5]. There are frogs in nature which use glucose [6] as an antifreeze to replace dangerous water. While somewhat successful experiments haves been done with frozen rat organs none of the possesses is completly safe or reaches the temperature of 77 Kelvin where all biological processes would stop.
[1] <https://www.microscopemaster.com/nanobots.html>
[2] <https://www.sens.org/our-research/intro-to-sens-research/>
[3] <https://youtu.be/RDpjv2z3dyE>
[4] <https://youtu.be/fM-JHvg-ZCM>
[5] <http://discovermagazine.com/2005/feb/biology-of-cryogenics>
[6] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose>
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# Possibilities:
There are many possible developments in tech which would allow this, (OK , first, going along with the question's assertion that the freezing process has already occurred - thus excluding some modification akin to the adaptation in some [frogs](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2007/02/frog-antifreeze-blood-winter-adaptation/) re. antifreeze in their cells):
**Scanning tech close to the atomic-level - coupled with the ability to reproduce matter.**
Basically, as soon as we develop teleportation tech, (and a high level of software editing to repair freeze-related damage) then we can focus those beams on the frozen individual, upload their physiological data (eg. all their brain's grey and white-matter data - all their life's experience, mental associations), plus their body (maybe with a few repairs/improvements). Then simply re-materialize them in their prime.
**Time travel, coupled with mind-reading tech and cloning.**
After death, their frozen remains can be discarded (they were only there for the family's viewing anyhow, PR style).
A person/bot is sent back to the most convenient time before death to retrieve the memories. For dementia patients, this could be pre-diagnosis, for murder suspects, just before the act (to ascertain mental state) or just after to get an exact view how it went. Memory editing by the state/third parties could be an issue in this society, I'd hate to be hacked - again. Anyway, the cloning wouuld produce a new body, an imprint of the mind would be uploaded to the blank-slate.
**Nano, coupled with advanced AI.**
Molecular level issues with cell integrity could perhaps be sorted out by the bots, reversal of blood clotting, cell membrane rupture, proteins being shredded by ice crystals. These minor issues could be repaired on an atom-by-atom basis (see "[The World's Smallest Movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0)"). They could be repaired if the process is supervised by a splendidly intelligent AI, in communication with all the bots-in-the-bod, supervising the various stages of repair and reanimation.
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One of the posts above talked about using alcohol. I'd propose we Cryo-freeze folks by first giving them genetic therapy that grants them traits of koi/carp. Carp, according to this article have the ability to survive in icy water by turning lactic acid (what happens when you exercise) into alcohol. <https://www.foxnews.com/science/scientists-discover-how-some-fish-survive-in-icy-water>
\*> Per the BBC, goldfish and crucian carp developed the ability to
>
> survive months in icy lakes and ponds using the unique ability to
> convert lactic acid into alcohol.
>
>
> As water freezes and oxygen levels dwindle, lactic acids produced from
> eating carbohydrates are unable to escape a fish's body. These trapped
> lactic acids would kill the fish in minutes were it not for an
> evolutionary trait that allows them to convert the acids into alcohol,
> which is then released through their gills.\*
>
>
>
This is where the scifi twist happens. This genetic therapy also gives our characters GILLS! This allows our characters to be frozen at near cryogenic temperatures while retaining the ability to breathe under water.
Folks wishing to prolong their life our stored under water in a cold facility or climate (free).
The drawback here and the low cost method of defrost would be that these folks would remain near "merfolk" until they could afford the genetic treatment to become an air breathing human again. Just like Amazon Glacial cloud storage, you can put your data (or body) in for free but when you want to reverse the operation it's going to cost you.
A method of the plot could also be how the cryo company raised rates and now have a ransom group of merfolk from 100 years ago.
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**This question already has answers here**:
[How long would a Martian colony take to gain independence?](/questions/9281/how-long-would-a-martian-colony-take-to-gain-independence)
(3 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
Well, it would be another great leap for humans to finally start their first colony on another planet. But considering our history and how colonies tend to get independent why would an organisation of any kind ever risk and put money into creating this colony when it could totally get out of hand?
Let's assume:
* A colony on mars is created which is **stable enough for normal life** and human reproduction
* This colony is able to grow and produce **food and get enough water** (from polar ice caps probably)
* There are nearly intact resources on Mars (Mines, Land, ...)
* Other nations on Earth are not able to easily travel to Mars for an attack or conquering other parts of Mars
* People on Mars are scientists and they have been living on Mars for enough time to have kids born on Mars even
Therefore could we conclude that:
1. There is no specific reason for this colony not to cut ties with Earth and therefore it's a high risk to finance this colony
2. We will wait then until it's low cost to travel to Mars and that planet will experience multi nation governments and probably wars over the planet's resources
**Update**
As mentioned this [question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/9281/14526) is quite similar to mine, but I'm looking for reason to make this project for a company economically justifiable and **counter measures that this company will take in order to always keep Mars in control and submissive**.
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Remember that whatever the colony is producing needs to be really really valuable. If there were refined gold bars and diamonds lying around on the surface of mars it would not currently be economic to land a rocket, shovel them into a cargo bay and fly home.
To maintain control all the parent organization needs is something that the colony cannot supply that it needs to survive. Do they need computers to run their survival equipment? well unfortunately chip fabs are huge and expensive. It's not easy to make a few hundred decent computer chips for a colony but enough to supply repairs for years can weigh only a few pounds. Ditto pharmaceuticals.
A colony would have to be huge before it could ever hope to be self sufficient. Until then it's in the power of those who can ship it supplies.
Also, in the shoes of that corporation/owner I'd make sure that every computer chip that reaches mars has a **semi secret hardware backdoor** to allow me to take control of it remotely if I want to. The colonists try to rebel and suddenly half the lights turns off, a little while later once they understand the score they come back on.
A small amount of military hardware could also be used to maintain control since even a fairly trivial number of drones on the level of predator drones or even simpler things that can punch a few holes in the colony walls would be an existential threat. Actual human soldiers could be subverted or decide to take control and rebel themselves and need lots of food and water.
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There could be several reasons.
Maybe the Martians can produce their own food and water, but what about all the other parts it takes to run the colony? Which high-tech devices are the Martians willing to live without in the name of independence?
What about entertainment, or luxury goods? Are the common folk willing to do without all those products? What about the rich and powerful who have the means to influence public opinion, affect policy, etc.
On a more personal level, what about their families back home? How many of these people might be on Mars on a work contract, eagerly awaiting their return to Earth and their loved ones? Would they support a revolution? Unlikely.
Furthermore, as you've mentioned, there probably exist several factions on Mars, such as the American Colony, the Russian Colony, the UN Colony, etc. Do you think they could all agree to work together? Would they trust one another?
And finally, how valuable are the resoures and products of Mars to Earth? How far would the governments of Earth be willing to go to take back the colonies? Would the Martians really stand a chance against the combined military might of Earth? Maybe they wouldn't be able to counterattack right away, but what about a decade later? What could the Martians do about a giant Earth armada?
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There is a number of reasons for why a Mars colony would not declare independence easily:
**Economics**
* Food and water are just the beginning if you want to survive on Mars, you'll also need a lot of technological components (chips, drugs, ...) that are very hard to produce until you have a population of millions (or billions). There won't be enough people for a long time, and the technology needs to be be built up from nothing.
* Even if survival was assured, there are luxury goods that won't be reproduced any time soon. Enjoy living on fungus derivatives!
**Politics**
* Unless massively mistreated, there will certainly be a powerful Earth-friendly block and probably all the key personnel will be pro-Earth, at least initially. This will of course make up a big part of the conflict but will be another reason why independence won't be easy.
* Unless massively mistreated, why should Martians care? They can be practically independent anyway since it takes time for Earth to find out anything. They can make their own decisions and expect Earth to rubber-stamp them after the fact.
**Military**
* Although very far away from Earth, the colonies will be highly vulnerable to attack for a long time. Their buildings may be underground but not deep enough. If they truly piss off Earth it could cause them severe damage or wipe them out entirely.
* If a real war breaks out, there may not be any qualms about using the nastier weapons known to man. Got to use up those nukes somewhere!
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Why is it that every city and town on Earth today does not declare independance and become a separate nation? I live in the U.S., probably the most successful revolutionaries in history. And yet since the revolution we have built up 50 states that stick together. Why doesn't Hawaii or Alaska or Texas rebel and form an independent nations? There are lots of reasons.
The first and biggest reason: Declaring independance is not a free and easy thing. Assuming the central government objects and sends troops to keep control of the colony, property will be destroyed and people will die. If you lose, at a minimum the leaders will be executed or imprisoned. Depending on the brutality of the war there might be mass executions. The government might impose repressive measures to prevent a new revolution. Even if you win, a lot of people will likely die along the way. Going to war is not something that rational people do on a whim or for trivial reasons. You have to have serious grieviances.
Second: cultural ties. If the people in the colony all have relatives back in the home country, and they share similar political, religious, and philosophical beliefs, and they all get along more or less, what would be the motive to declare independence? Why would they even want to?
Third: as others have mentioned, economics. We could speculate about what technology is developed, but it could be centuries before a Mars colony would truly be economically self-sufficient. We tend to think of the "colonial period" in the New World as a brief time, but in fact it was 284 years from the arrival of Columbus to the Declaration of Independence. It was a longer time from the first colony to the first colony becoming independent than it is from the first colony becoming independent to today ... and Canada and South America were still colonies long after the U.S. was independent.
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## Cui Bono?
Why was Mars colonized in the first place, & by whom? The answer to this has significant repercussions on its trajectory.
The other answers so far seem to be working from the assumption that the colony was established by a Terran government, so I won't dig too deep there.
But what if it's a corporate colony? The parent company would want to establish an independent government immediately in order to put activities on Mars out of the reach of Terran taxes, laws, & regulations.
An even more extreme example would be that the colony is established not for the benefit of any entity on Earth, but by the colonists for their own benefit (via interplanetary Conestoga wagons). They're setting off with the express purpose of cutting ties with those they left behind, and would brook no interference from Earth.
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Judging from the situation of the United States, I'd safely state that holding Mars too tight (if possible at all, but that's rather tech-related, thus irrelevant here) would cause an independence war. Fair treatment is a key, but also depends a lot on local power - which is also depending on more factors, like tech level, weaponization, how organized and united they are, and so on. African kingdoms were easily defeated in the colonization ages.
I'd consider enormous distance as a factor as well; with communication and personal meetings rare enough, Martian (or any colony's own) culture would quickly take a much different turn, and history taught us that different cultures **might** be (but not neccesarily are) problematic, causing conflicts. Hell, just try to imagine global Martian corporations!
Specific reasons might also be created to stay together. Everything's true - and so are their opposites. Might be politics, economy, or other interests too. It might even be forced, or otherwise out of necessity, constraints and need. I'm saying it because even if water, oxygen and food are solved (which are, well, yes, vital), other products might be traded between Earth and Mars.
These are the spare thoughts I could add out of the water.
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## Cyber Attack
The martians have limited options for any sort of attack. If they can hack really well and can tamper with an important digital system then they could get earth to agree a favorable truce. (There is malware in all your power stations, send these supplies or they all turn off.) This only works if sending the supplies is preferable to fixing the problem. Those on earth probably wipe or replace the hacked computers. Only works until someone unplugs the radio dish on earth.
## Rockets
If they have a return rocket they could crash land it on earth. This is pretty stupid as it means they're stuck on mars. Better to return to earth. Hard to aim well, earth is protected by its atmosphere. Earth has time to hack it, shoot it off course with their own rockets or jam its signal.
## Enthusiasts
Probably the most effective would be to whip up a crowd of people on earth who are furious at the governments stance on the issue. May include family and friends who feel they have been abandoned on mars. Could happen without the martians help. Will not be stopped by turning off communication. Works best if you have not used other techniques.
## Earths Attack
The martians probably still rely on small, hard to manufacture devices from earth, like spacesuit parts, or computer chips. The martian colony is unlikely to be producing anything other than scientific data that earth can't make its self. If earth stops sending supplies then the martians can probably do nothing, waiting until something breaks and they die. All earth has to do is stop sending supplies.
Crash landing rockets and cyber attacks will work as well for earth, and they can muster more rockets, mars has less atmosphere and less opportunity for evacuation or defense.
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David Drake covers this sometimes in his novels. I want to say it was somewhere in "Hammer's Slammers" where it came up in some detail:
Basically the owning company just needs to control trade.
It's hard to cut off trade on good old planet earth because there are too many parties and travel is relatively easy and hard to control. We rebel against England, and France happily buys our stuff. Or the rebels buy and sell on a black market. It's also hard to cut off low tech trade because you can probably make most things yourself, locally, anyway. I think "trade" is one of those things that's easy to underestimate, though, especially as tech levels go up. A colony with no trade may be self-sufficient in the sense that they aren't going to immediately die but it's a very vulnerable (and dull) state to be in.
No trade means no help in a disaster. One bad year of crops and everyone dies. It means anything you can't produce locally just can't be had for love of money -- this could be high tech gear (you need computer chips but a "computer chip factory" is not something you can just locally produce with blacksmiths) or it could be things that simply are not available locally (e.g., maybe the colony has tons of iron but no form of coal and it's hard to grow enough trees to act as carbon/fuel).
So, at least in Drake novels, the way colonies are kept subservient is by simply not supplying them with the things they need to "tech up" or expand their product lines. Let them produce all the raw materials they want but never sell them or help them build the things they need to turn those raw materials into a finished product.
Keep control of the spaceport and ideally just don't allow anyone else to trade with the colony that doesn't go through your company. e.g., Amazon decides to make a Mars colony but Amazon controls the space port therefore nothing goes in or out without them knowing about it. If they don't want the colony to make computer chips (or laser drills or insert-high-tech-gizmo-here) then they're not going to be able to because they will never have the technology or parts for it.
There's also something of a sense of cooperation between the major companies that can afford colonies: we don't help your rebels if you don't help our rebels. So the rebels rise up and take the space port but they can't actually get anyone to trade with them. Small timers don't have space ships and the few organizations big enough to have space ships have shaken hands with each other. Eventually the rebels back down and let the owners back in because they liked it better when there was trade.
So, in summary, control trade and you control the colony. (At least in "near future tech" terms. If you reach a level of tech where people are flying around in personal star ships, ala Firefly/Star Wars, then it's more like "old earth" where travel is too easy, smuggling is rampant and it would be very hard to control a colony without direct military threats.)
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So, I would suggest that it doesn't matter. If you want a way to keep the project feasible, have it (the feasibility) depend on things that are not in it's self dependent on the "independence" of the colony. (That's a lot of depends.)
For example, a company may fund a mars colony, if mars dirt is super valuable. It doesn't matter if they declare independence so long as they keep sending their mars dirt. In fact as a company, you may want to plan for that independence.
You will be hard pressed to keep martians from declaring independence. There not like us. They will have different needs and concerns. There also so far away. So instead keep the project feasible but not relying on their status. I mean who else are they going to send mars dirt too, other martians?
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If it is a company setting up this colony, then it doesn't work like any modern company I can think of. First off, real world companies have **employees** not **citizens**. If a government sets up a colony and its citizens start having kids, then those kids are also citizens and their welfare (healthcare, education, etc) is the responsibility of the government.
If a company's employees start having kids, then apart from employment laws about maternity pay and the like, the kids are nothing to do with the company. And when they grow up, they don't have to work for your company.
So either:
1. Your company is going to have to be set up like an old style 'company town' where, as well as doing whatever business/industry it is in (e.g. mining) the company also does all the infrastructure like sewage, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, etc.
2. There are other companies involved in the venture. Company A runs the agriculture, Company B runs the mines, Company C provides the hospitals.
Either way, those colonists are **citizens** of somewhere else. Possibly citizens of several somewhere elses! They will still have Australian or Icelandic or Kenyan nationality.
If they are rebelling against the company, it is a labour dispute, not a secession. If the company starts shooting at folks or switching off the oxygen, the Australian or Icelandic or Kenyan government may take a dim view of their actions. "Hey, those are our citizens you are shooting at!"
The traditional way that 'evil' company towns keep their employees in line is to overcharge for everything. Tools, safety equipment, food, clothes - all of which can only be purchased in the company shop. Everyone is in debt and stays that way. The debts get passed on to the next generation. That gets dialled up to 11 on Mars, where even the air is company controlled.
This would only work if the Australian/Icelandic/Kenyan government is in collusion with the company or is turning a blind eye.
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David just bought a $1500 grand computer, he put the parts together himself. He was about to play some games on it and aliens just yoinked it to study. Without even looking at David or the biology of planet earth all they took was a computer and did nothing else. (they also took the monitor and all the other essentials like mouse and keyboard)
What the aliens know:
The gravity of earth and it contains a large amount of life.
Intelligent life on earth exist but knows almost nothing about it beyond that fact.
This is a device that a lot of Earthlings have some better some worst.
They do not have access to our internet, they just have what was installed on the computer itself.
My question essentially is how much could they find out about humans from consumer grade technology? Biology? Culture? or could they even tell its consumer grade or would they assume this is the most advance we have?
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# Our tech level, +/- 100 years, from a CPU alone
A relatively decent proxy for technological advancement is the smallest piece of matter you can simply and precisely manipulate.
It requires all kinds of understanding - you need a way of looking at that matter, you need to understand the physics around it. How small you can accurately measure is also a good proxy, and is required for accurately manipulating it.
So, aliens should be able to deduce lots of things from the CPU:
1. how small an object we can manipulate - a modern CPU has structure down to 5-7nm - from this, you could reason we had advanced past optics, and had some way of seeing individual atoms. In addition, to make a machine that works, we'd need an understanding of quantum mechanics, as effects become noticable at that scale
2. how good we are at materials science - cpus require rare metals and extremely pure silicon, both of which are tough for us to obtain. Victorian era people would have had no chance. Future people are likely to have hit the limit at which these techniques are useful, and switched to something else entirely.
Even if they have technology working from an entirely different place, manipulating atom sized things will always require certain tech, and the tech chain to make that possible.
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1. humans have tentacles or fingers that can interact with the peripherals.
2. there is at least one symbolic language on the planet
3. assuming they can launch music or video, what wavelengths of sound and light we perceive.
4. we are intelligent enough to create devices such as cpu's
5. we have the ability to manufacture plastics and metals
6. we have knowledge of electromagnetics (disk drive)
7. whatever else they can learn by using trial and error interacting with the device
8. they need a reliable internet connection
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They would be able to sequence the genome of humans, some species we eat, and some micro-organisms we are hosts to, from hair, skin flakes, and crumbs in the keyboard
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## Intro: Cyberdyne Systems Scenario
I believe that just as Cyberdyne Systems from the 'Terminator' series was able to reverse-engineer the future's advanced AI technology from a single Terminator CPU, potentially accelerating humanity's progression to a machine-dominated apocalypse, the aliens could similarly extrapolate a wealth of information about human civilization from a single consumer-grade computer.
I will assume as a space-faring civilizations they know how to use tools and understand the basic principles of electricity, allowing them to turn on the computer. I will also assume that they can slowly work out the language, as any space-faring civilization will by necessity be developed in the area of communication themselves.
Here are some things the aliens could infer about humanity from a computer:
1. **Ergonomics and Senses:** The design of the keyboard and mouse suggests the number of fingers /appendages we have, the approximate size of our hands, and possibly our posture when we use such devices. The monitor's size and resolution might hint at our visual acuity and how we perceive colors and wavelengths. This along with audio devices allow them to understand the range at which we normally hear, and our reliance on visual and audio cues to interact with the world.
2. **Cultural Insights:** Depending on the content stored on the computer, they could gain insights into our languages, art, music, and other forms of expression. Of course, depending on what David is interested in, they may get a different glimpse into what human culture is like.
3. **Technology:** The presence of silicon-based microchips,the types of metals used, and the intricacy of the circuitry gives them an idea of our advancements in microelectronics. By necessity we need an understanding of Quantum mechanics, lithography, materials science, thermodynamics, and economies of scale. They will also be able to deduce based on this our understanding of physics, chemistry, and materials science. If they can decipher a part of the language, they will also quickly understand that this one computer has the potential to connect to the internet, there are others like it.
4. **Environmental Impact:** The use of plastics and certain chemicals might suggest our reliance on fossil fuels and could hint at environmental challenges we face.
5. **Biology:** If there are any games, software, or documents related to human 'biology', they could gain insights into our anatomy, physiology, and possibly even our understanding of genetics and medicine.
6. **Pace of Advanement:** While computers seem advanced to us, it might be primitive to them. They may see that we are taking the first steps into technological advancement. Or, conversely, they might be surprised at how advanced it is for a species they perceive as less developed.They will not assume this is the pinnacle of our technology, but rather one piece of a larger technological landscape, due to its ability to connect to a network, the variety of materials necessary in its construction, and the evidence of economies of scale.
## Conclusion: Mostly Harmless
Just like in the terminator series, a single piece of technology can offer significant clues about our physical form, technological prowess, culture, and challenges. Just by analyzing the combination of materials necessary in its creation, as well as the cultural documents, and its ability to connect to some sort of network, the aliens can gauge the level of our cultural and technological advancement.
As for the alien's take on Earth after analyzing the device? Perhaps they'd conclude: "A curious species with an intriguing mix of art, technology, and plastic. Mostly harmless."
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They could infer Language, written language, a Knowledge of Maths and Physics, some inferences about our ability for fine-motor control.
The issue is, that without any applications installed (you indicated it's just the base OS installed) that really limits what they could glean.
However, if you allow for some applications to be installed and perhaps a little bit of Web Browsing history, the amount that could be learned increases exponentially.
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Every evil galactic empire has an emperor’s palace. From the Goa’uld to the Sith Empire to House Harkonnen, every emperor has one extremely lavish but heavily defended structure they call home.
My empire, known as the Dynasty, is no different, but I want my setting to be (somewhat) scientifically realistic and internally consistent, and that extends to royal palaces.
My original plan was to make the palace of the emperor—who is known as the Sovereign-Lord—the entirety of a paradise planet near the heart of the Dynasty’s core systems. While this definitely fulfills the “lavish” criteria and the plentiful available resources allow for large-scale defensive weaponry production, it faces the disadvantage of being a gravity well, and also cannot dodge any relativistic projectiles launched through the interstellar wormhole network by an aspiring rebellion. On the other hand, a space station can maneuver away from inbound threats, and can be totally surrounded by defense platforms without much worry for gravity and orbital mechanics, but won’t be as powerful a statement as an entire planet and thus be less effective in its role as a palace.
Which of the two options would have the best balance of opulence and defense? Is there a third option I haven’t considered? And are there other factors I haven’t thought of regarding imperial palaces?
[Answer]
Think about the purpose of a Royal Palace:
* It's NOT to impress the Emperor of their lackeys.
* It's to impress the Emperor's potential enemies when they drop by for a chat. *I'm so rich and powerful that I can squash you like a bug, pal. Reconsider your perfidity or else I'll turn this power and wealth against you.*
* It's a place to keep the Emperor's hostages. *Your family will be well cared for, and your children will be among the ruling class of the Empire...if you play ball*.
Real defense from an organized and powerful enemy force comes from deterrence: Fear of discovery by the Emperor's countless sinister agents and subsequent immediate retribution by the Emperor's tremendous, unbeatable battle fleet. Faced with an emerging threat, the Emperor seems likely to *leave* the palace in favor of the well-defended War Room on their personal battleship (the *Invincible*).
Local defenses are merely to keep the Emperor's day-to-day nefarious activities from being interrupted by the occasional intrepid, incorruptible Space Rebel seemingly bent upon a suicide run.
It should be comfortable for the hostages (not spartan or prison-like -- the children really WILL be the future scions of the Empire!), but the only parts that need to be truly *lavish* are the spaceport, grand processional avenue, facing gardens, and palace ceremonial spaces that outsiders (potential enemies) see on their visit so they can be suitably impressed.
[Answer]
# The D\*\*th Star:
I guess this would be a "station" argument, but that hardly seems to apply.
>
> That's not a moon, it's a space station.
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Don't make the emperor's palace a fixed place. Make it a huge warship so large that its mere presence terrifies the local population. You can devote a significant proportion of your empire's GDP to building a vessel so large as to be impractical as a useful weapon - after all, it's not REALLY part of the fleet.
Your despotic lord can travel in horrifying comfort aboard the largest death machine in the galaxy. The emperor's will to destroy unruly servants is at his immediate disposal, without time to reflect on common sense. No relativistic projectiles, as the ship isn't in the same place twice. The emperor doesn't need to look cowardly by not visiting various planets, since he brings all the comforts and protections of home with him as he travels.
[Answer]
**A well protected bunker inside a planet**
The emperor lives on a planet that has maintained life for 2-4 billion years. There is no life on the surface left now, because the star has evolved into a red giant, your planet is on the outskirts of it, in a Mercury-like orbit. In a few million years, it will be swallowed and destroyed, but until that point, your advanced civilization has managed the situation, building undergrounds. As a result, the palace is a very well protected place, there are few ships that can approach the planet. When they can, it is difficult to attack, because the Emperor's palace resides about 240km below the surface, with a few, well protected strongholds on the surface. There is no single entrance, your civilization is built around the palace.
[Answer]
**The far future.**
The palace is not contemporaneous with the rest of the story. The palace is in the far future. They have had millenia to make this planet and palace awesome. Also, being in the future, the Emperor knows all. He can anticipate your every move. If he is not acting to block your actions it is because he knows he can do so at a later date. The Emperor controls access to the future and return to the past. You cannot hurt him. There is nothing you can do except resign yourself to being ruled. And while you are at the palace sample some of these fine blue quandongs they have been breeding into amazing
succulent fruit over the millenia.
There are some temporologistical problems posed by having your Emperor reign from the far future. Should it work for your story, there may be some aspects of the Great Oz to this Palace in the Future scenario. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
[Answer]
A few comments.
## One
Why do you assume that a galactic emperor would be evil?
I say that the president or monarch of an independent sovereign planetary state, star system, state, or species state, would be evil, because the function of independent sovereign states to occasionally make war against other sovereign independent states. Fighting wars and making their own citizens - just as much as the citizens of other realms - experience horror and suffering, destruction and death, is the function of independent governments.
And in a society with rapid interstellar travel, independents would have the power to devastate enemy planets and kill all their inhabitants, which is trivially easy compared to having rapid interstellar space.
So no matter how evil a galactic emperor might be as a person, their regime would be saintly compared to any independent sovereign state ruling only part of the known galaxy.
I note that most countries in the world today have various administrative divisions with varying powers, and that the main function of such administrative divisions is to do things which are good for the people within them. So most administrative divisions manage to do things which are good for the people within them without being independent sovereign countries with the power to fight wars and kill people.
Being a resident of an administrative division within a larger administrative division within a larger administrative division within a larger administrative division within a larger administrative division and so on up to being part of a galactic empire is much safer than being a resident of a sovereign independent state surrounded by other sovereign states with the power to make war against them.
So don't go calling galactic emperors evil.
## Two
You write that a planet as the location of a Galactic emperor's palace would have this disadvantage:
>
> and also cannot dodge any relativistic projectiles launched through the interstellar wormhole network by an aspiring rebellion.
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Any planet available for a galactic emperor to build a palace on would either be part of a star system or else be a rogue planet in interstellar space.
A planet in a star system would move constantly, orbiting around a star or a pair of stars.
A rogue planet in interstellar space would move constantly, orbiting around the center of the galaxy.
Even a rogue planet in intergalactic space would move constantly, since it would have formed within a star system within a young star cluster within a galaxy, and must have been given sufficient speed by gravitational interactions to escape from its star system, its cluster, and its galaxy.
So if the mouths of wormholes are fixed in space, the palace planet, like every other planet, would be constantly moving relative to the mouths of the nearest wormholes.
So if a projectile is sent at relativistic speeds through the wormhole, its trajectory will have to be properly aimed and adjusted on the far side of the wormhole.
And considering that the two mouths of the wormhole should be light years apart, a projectile sent through the two mouths should have only a very narrow range of possible trajectories.
So it seems to me that it would be extremely rare for the palace planet, or any other planet, to be within such a thin and narrow cone of possible trajectories of relativistic projectiles emerging from a wormhole mouth. I would say that the odds against a projectile emerging from a wormhole mouth and striking a planet even once in galactic history would be astronomical.
And that is assuming that the wormhole network is natural. If it is artificial and the galactic empire created it, the wormhole mouths would be planned to be located where they didn't point toward inhabited planets.
What if the wormhole mouths are attached to star systems and move with the star systems?
That way the wormhole mouth could be located a lot closer to the palace planet, making travel times shorter, and increasing the probability that the palace planet could be struck by an unsteerable relativistic projectile emerging from the wormhole mouth.
But when you start with astronomically low odds that something would happen, and then increase them millions of times, the odds will still be astronomically low.
The obvious way to attach the mouth of a wormhole to a star system would be with gravity. The wormhole mouth might be generated by enormous machines which would have mass and gravity. The wormhole mouth itself might have mass even without generating machines.
So the wormhole mouth, having mass, and being (relatively) near a star, would orbit around that star, just like the palace planet in this case.
Assume there is a carnival carousel surrounded by a circular racetrack. Suppose a loaded gun is lying on the floor of the carousel, pointed outwards toward the race track. Suppose that the carousel is turning, and cars are racing in the racetrack, when the gun goes off and shots toward the racetrack. Wouldn't the odds against hitting the bullet from the gun hitting one of the racecars be very large?
Suppose that there is a line directly from the center of the Sun to the center of the Earth. If that line is extended outwards into space it will pass the orbits of the other planets in our solar system. But considering how small a planet is compared to the total circumference of its orbit, that line will have a very low probability of going through a planet at any one time.
And in fact that line will probably not intersect the orbit of any outer planet at all, let alone while that the line from Earth and the planet occupy the same spot in the orbit.
The orbits of all the planets are tilted slightly compared to the orbits of the other planets. So by the time a line from Earth in the plane of Earth's orbits passes tens of millions or hundred of millions of miles outward, it will pass "above" or "below" the plane of the other planet, by a distance much greater than the width of the planet.
So if a slight tilt is enough to make a line from the Earth miss the orbit of another planet, the creators of the wormhole network can give the wormhole mouths orbits which are tilted much more, to increase how much a line from the wormhole mouth will miss the orbits of the planets.
And of course the creators of the wormhole network can give the wormhole mouth an orbit outside of the orbit of the palace planet or any other inhabited planet. And if the wormhole mouth only opens in the direction facing outward from the star, any relativistic projectile emerging from the wormhole mouth will only be able to travel away from the inhabited planet, not toward.
Maybe a projectile can emerge in any direction from the wormhole mouth.
In that case any gigantic space habitat palace or palace on a planet would be defended like a major planet in E.E. Smith's *Lensman* series of space operas would be defended.
In the series, the two sides learned how to create artificial hyperspatial tubes leading to any destination, much like artificial wormholes, and so could suddenly create many hyperspatial tubes leading to an enemy world and send invasion fleets with millions of space battleships through them to attack.
They would also send major weapons thought the hyperspatial tubes, not mere fleets of millions of space battleships. They attached giant engines to planets and tried to crash them into target planets. They built planet-sized negaspheres, balls of negative matter that cancelled out normal matter, attached giant motors, and tried to smash them into target planets.
So any planet which was expecting to be attacked would have major defenses such as fleets of millions of space battleships, and giant orbital fortresses, and a bunch of planets and negaspheres with with giant engines ready to smash into attacking planets and negaspheres and knock them off course.
And by the last battles in the series really powerful offensive and defensive weapons were developed.
So I think that any really powerful galactic emperor would have really powerful defenses in place to defend the various star systems where their various palaces were in giant space habitats and/or on planets.
So they could attach space drive engines to asteroids and place a line of asteroids in front of the wormhole mouth in the the system. A spaceship on a normal slow approach would be traveling slowly enough to have time to swerve and avoid the first asteroid, but a relativistic projectile would smash into the first asteroid in line causing a gigantic explosion. Then the next asteroid would be moved forward to plug up the gap in front of the wormhole mouth.
Suppose that the wormhole mouth is a spherical shape and objects can exit it in any direction.
Then the thing to do would be to put many concentric spherical shells around the wormhole mouth, each shell consisting of equally spaced pebbles or grains of dust. If an object came out of the wormhole mouth at a relativistic speed, it would run into pebbles or even dust with enough force to explode.
No doubt there could be cylinders running though each concentric shell of pebbles or dust, the interiors of the cylinders clear of pebbles or dust so spaceships could pass through them. But each cylinder would have great doors at each end and and a spaceship would have to stop in front of a cylinder to be checked out before the doors would open and let it through, and any object which rammed a cylinder would be destroyed.
And of course there could be space battleships and gigantic battle stations, etc. posted around the wormhole mouth to destroy any hostile missiles or ships which may emerge from it.
And possibly there are many lifeboats/escape capsules throughout the palace; if an alarm is sounded people in the palace can rush into the escape capsules and zoom away from the palace and the planet or space habitat, and take refuge with the battle fleet.
So it seems to me that it would be possible for any system which contained a palace on a planet or in a gigantic space habitat to be well guarded against attacks.
And possibly the galactic emperor could have several different palaces in systems tens of light years apart, and travel between them in gigantic palatial spaceships guarded by vast fleets of space battleships.
## Three
While writing this, I had a thought.
There is a legend that King Louis XI of France, fearing assassination, slept in a different room each night.
I don't know how many different bedrooms he had to choose from at his favorite residence, Chateau de Plessis-lez-tours. 365, one for every day of the year? Probably not that many. About 30, one of every day in a month? Maybe. 7, one for each day of the week? He should have had at least that many. And no doubt he didn't sleep in the same order time after time, or hypothetical assassins could predict where he would seep each night.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Plessis-lez-Tours>
And legend claims that Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, or Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of China, built a ring of palaces around his capital city, connected by underground passages so nobody could see his coming or going, and slept in a different palace and room each night. As I remember, there were supposedly over 100 or even over 200 of those palaces, so not enough for every day in the year, but enough to go for months without repeating.
<https://zippyfacts.com/why-did-emperor-qin-shi-huang-of-china-sleep-in-a-different-palace-every-night/>
And considering how many times, almost infinitely, more powerful a galactic emperor ruling a highly technologically advanced society would be compared to Louis XI or even Qin Shi Huangdi, a galactic emperor could do something almost infinitely greater than that.
If you go to the PlanetPlanet blog, and the section called Ultimate Solar System, you will find blogs dedicated to designing fictional solar systems with as many habitable planets as is scientifically possible.
In "The Ultimate Engineered Solar System" there is a design for a solar system with literally hundreds of potentially habitable planets in its circumstellar habitable zone.
<https://planetplanet.net/2017/05/03/the-ultimate-engineered-solar-system/>
Though of course the author admits that even though such a solar system could exist and all the hundreds of habitable planets could have long term stable orbits, it would seem to be statistically impossible for such a solar system to form naturally, and so it would have to be engineered, created by a highly advanced civilization which built planets and/or moved them into the correct orbits.
So so possibly the civilization in your story found such a multiplanet system left behind by a past advanced civilization. Or possibly it is advanced enough to build one themselves.
And I don't know how many days there are in a year in the calendar used by your civilization, but I guess that a system with hundreds of habitable planets could have one planet for each day of the year in its calendar.
And possibly the emperor sleeps in a different bedroom in a different palace on a different planet in that system each night.
## Four
See the answers to [https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/186407/the-emperors-new-palace](/q/186407)
Especially my answer.
[Answer]
One of several dozen similar-looking [O'Neill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) or [Bernal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_sphere) habitats in a system containing a major fleet base and one very nice, very habitable planet.
* A sufficiently large station has lots of nice real estate, and it is an impressive technical achievement.
* The naval base for protection, and as the kernel of a counterattack against an ursurper.
* The world for fresh veggies, and surfing or skiing holidays, and also as a fallback against technological regression. There are mothballed industries on the surface, as well as explored-but-unexploited raw materials.
* The multiple similar habitats for a shell game. Is it in L5 today? Or the one at the trailing Trojan? Those which are not the palace contain loyal troops and scientists, of course.
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In the Lensman series, the villains have their Grand Base in a star cluster outside the Galaxy itself.
You could do that too, particularly if the wormhole network is generally very interconnected with every node having multiple connections EXCEPT your Palace World, which links to one, and only one, other star system, which is Impenetrable Fortress World.
Having separated the two functions, Palace World can now be as ostentatious as you like. Giant gems as moons? Why not? 8 pleasure planets in the system? OK. Next to an exotic star type? Fine.
As a nice touch, Palace World could be at the very centre of the galaxy, but displaced from the main galactic plane. It would have a staggering view of the whole galaxy and everyone could see it, but be outside the gravity well.
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Inside the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. It’s large enough that you won’t get spaghettified on your way in, and no one will want to come after you because just like you they can never leave again. Which is a bit of an inconvenience for you, to be sure, but you asked for the *safest* place, not the safest convenient place.
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# He has many redundant palaces
He doesn't have just one heavily defended opulent planet or base or palace, he has **many of them**
* the emperor has a network mesh of defenses, many fortresses, many ships, many planets, many factories, in a vast expanse across the galaxy. He can even copy his opulent home so it's exactly the same in all the different locations, so it feels more homely.
If there's an incoming barrage that threatens to wipe out an entire sector, he can just move to one of his other homes that has all the same defenses and opulence.
redundancy = less risk of a single point of failure
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[Question]
[
On plain Pilar forest biome of planet X, you have mostly 3 types of vertebrates:
* those who burrow under the ground
* those who run through the widely separated trees
* those who live above ground level, calling the colossal plants home
and hardly coming down.
In this scenario, one creature adapted to both climb efficiently and running on the plains.
It has 4 relatively long limbs with durable non retractable claws. The hind limbs are digitigrade and mostly similar to something like a zygodactyl emu, capable of sustaining the creature while it uses its arms to grab prey. It's forelimbs end in short palms with 4 digits (2 of them being opposing digits) and has 2 elbow joints, the first bending backwards and the second one forwards,somewhat like the following, very poorly drawn, example:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OSx7u.jpg)
Now, would this forelimb structure really aid a creature that climbs and runs? I know it doesn't happen here since no ancestor had such arms, but I'd like to know if this could truly be a good evolutionary trait.
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**An extra arm joint does not improve mobility.**
The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom (axes of rotation) - we have 3 in the shoulder, 1 in the elbow, and 3 more in the wrist. This allows us to put our hands at any reachable position in space in any orientation. This configuration actually already has one redundancy, as it only requires 6 degrees of freedom to achieve the same range of motion. Adding even more joints to the arm adds more weak points, increasing the overall fragility of the arm, *while adding absolutely nothing to the range of motion achievable*. It does add a bit of extra redundancy, allowing a wider range of motion even with a broken joint, but since you typically avoid using an arm with a broken joint anyway, this redundancy has very limited value.
There's very likely a good reason why no animal has evolved limbs that look like this - the singular, slight advantage of redundancy does not outweigh the disadvantage of increased complexity and fragility of the arm.
See: <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22255087>
[Answer]
The legs of most ungulates are actually multi-jointed in the way you describe. The knee — between the femur and tibia/fibula — makes one joint, and what we think of as the horse's lower leg is actually an extended tarsal bone with the ankle joint (at the calcaneus) always elevated. Ungulate 'feet' are actually single or doubled toes: solid or cloven hooves.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ue3lQ.jpg) *skeletal anatomy of a horse rear leg*
This design gives the ungulate leg extra power that translates into speed and maneuverability. But this comes at the expense of flexibility: ungulate legs only move in one direction, with minimal lateral freedom.
It's not impossible for a non-sprinting creature to develop limbs with two joints, but it requires some odd contexts. For example, flying creatures like birds and bats have extended their finger bones to act as structural bones, making the wrist effectively a second arm joint, and the aye aye has developed an elongated finger with special joint mobility in order to reach around 'corners' to get at grubs. I'm sure we can all think of situations where we just can't get our fingers to bend the right way to reach something we've dropped down a crevice, but I find it hard to imagine an environment so structurally complex that there would be an *evolutionary* advantage to develop an extra joint for reaching along twisting trajectories.
[Answer]
Spider legs have seven segments:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aVYIf.jpg)
Source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spiderlegdiagram.png>
The last segment has claws, which is how the spider clings to surfaces.
Tarantulas can be as large as rats and they are still able to climb on surfaces quite well. If your creatures are about that size, having more joints should be no problem when it comes to climbing or whatever.
If they are larger, though, see [L.Dutch's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/171689/21222).
Being vertebrates, your creature has one more point to break ligaments. It takes only one elbow going bad to make the whole limb go bad. In the long run, evolution may favor less elbows because of that. So for the extra elbow to last geological eras, it must provide some advantage - sexual selection, or increased range of movement for the limb that the creature needs somehow.
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If you happen to have a copy a Spore, you can see how such a creature would run. Proceed to the second stage, sketch your creature in the game and then run around the island ;)
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One can throw stones at great distances with such limb.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower>
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I think it would be an obstacle to a creature climbing.
The reason is simple: if you hold yourself on a object, your arm, forearm and object, or better your shoulder, your elbow and your wrist form a triangle which, as we are taught since primary school, cannot be deformed, assuring a firm hold.
Any geometrical figure with more than 3 sides instead can be deformed easily, therefore it won't be able to easily hold on the object.
If the object is a tree or a boulder, it means more ease of falling down and getting hurt. Not the best situation for being able to reproduce.
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An Ibex (ungulate) is a great climber up extremely steep rocky surfaces and a jaguar (digitigrade) is great at climbing trees, I think using all four limbs to climb may be necessary, leaping up the surface as both animals do but once in a safe area the forelimbs could act as arms again.
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[Question]
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Imagine if you will..a world where humans had large black pupils that covered most of their eye like the picture below
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R6ICz.jpg)
**The question:**
What would these humans see and could they see more/better/worse than us?
Would their vision be obstructed when looking around because it might block part of their pupil?
What are the social implications of these humans having black eyes?
[Answer]
## They'd go blind, very quickly
A pupil that big allows very large amounts of light to enter the eye. In extremely low light conditions, this is a great adaptation since it permits the maximum amount of light to reach the retina. However, in any other lighting conditions, this is a huge disadvantage because it prevents the eye from managing how much light it takes in. They will need to continually squint in bright light to keep themselves from being blinded. Imagine permanent image burn on the back of your eyes; this is their view at practically all times in conditions humans would consider normal.
Any kind of sudden bright light will cause them considerable difficulty.
**Obscured Pupil**
For the portions of the pupil behind behind an eyelid, the person won't even notice they can't see there, similar to how normal people don't notice that they can see their own noses. It's just how they see things and won't notice a difference.
**Social**
Socially, if everyone has black eyes like this, it's normal. Just like people with blonde hair in a nation of blonde hair don't notice anything different about each other. Interactions between the black-pupiled people and other peoples will be strained at first but probably work out, eventually.
**Alternative Structure**
Instead of having a monstrously large pupil, the sclera and iris could also be black with a normal sized pupil. Building an eye this way maintains a normal human's adaptability to different lighting conditions but also gives the desired "black eye" the OP is looking for.
This can be achieved by introducing significant amounts of melanin in the iris and sclera. Brown eyed humans already have this, just bump up the amount of melanin.
[Answer]
A huge opening with suitable lens to match would be a much larger aperture, providing for lower-light vision and [poorer depth of field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field#Effect_of_lens_aperture). However, with no way to *adjust* the aperture and no other changes, it would not handle differing light intensity.
The implication is that (a) there is no bright light and you *always* want the highest exposure possible; or (b) there is some *different* mechanism to deal with different light intensity.
*Some* ideas for that include:
* variable opacity: a [neutral-density filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral-density_filter) or sunglasses, that can be instantly tuned. This directly replaces the iris.
* the change in gain of the pixels can happen fast enough to make no other mechanism necessary, unlike our own cells which [take many minutes to adjust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)).
* the *range* of brightness handled is so wide that it requires no adjustment. A different underlying technology might make this more natural for the solution.
* some pixels are for bright light and some for low. Rather than spoiling the image, out-of-range pixels are ignored in the imaging process. (Our own eyes have separate rods and cones.)
* the eye works more like the “windsock” design of some spiders. The retina has different areas for bright or dark that are positioned over the imaging-forming zone, and can be tilted as well to attinuate the light via Lambert’s Law (and increase the resolution!)
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Adding the link for [ND filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral-density_filter#Varieties) I noticed that it mentions
>
> These are used on catadioptric telescopes mentioned above and in any system that is required to work at 100% of its aperture (usually because the system is required to work at its maximal angular resolution).
>
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So, there are *reasons* why an instrument would need to work at a large aperture. This implies that there might be real advantages for why an eye is built this way. Something to keep in mind for alien eyes!
Finally, I’d like to point out that the [compound eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod_eye) of flys etc. seem to do just fine without an aperture adjustment, which would need to be employed on each lens individually! They must use some other means to cope, right?
[Answer]
Others suggest that humans with such large pupils would go blind very quickly. While this would be the case for humans with the same eye construction as us otherwise, I propose an alternative:
# A chemically (or electrochemically) alterable vitreous humor.
The vitreous humor is the jellylike substance that fills most of the eye. For us, this substance remains relatively unchanged and largely inert through most of our lives. While I'm stepping a bit out of my depth in biology and chemistry, hopefully the following concept gives you an idea that you can research in greater depth to meet your needs.
If a chemical were added to the vitreous humor, perhaps a something like a polymer, it might be possible to adjust the opacity of the vitreous humor, and thus how much light actually reaches the retina. If the retina (or perhaps even an external organ, possibly including the skin near the eye) detects too much light, an electrochemical reaction occurs that charges the vitreous humor and causes the normally amorphous polymer to crystallize to some degree (ideally this would be an analog behavior, with the body being able to control the degree of crystallization based on light). When the polymer crystallizes, less light passes through it, and so less light reaches the retina.
There are a few consequences to this though:
1. Visual acuity in bright light may be reduced; the crystalline structure may scatter as well as reflect/absorb light, so the path from pupil to retina is no longer as straightforward and the perceived image may be blurry.
2. With large pupils, the reflection effect (such as what you see in cats' eyes in the dark, or in peoples' eyes with camera flashes and the like) will be greater -- their eye will less likely be inky black as shown in your picture, but more of a dark reddish color.
3. In bright light, the reflection and refraction of the crystalline polymer may additionally tint the eye to the color of the crystalline polymer. It's possible this could be black, to help maintain the black appearance of the pupil; a black polymer would also be good at absorbing excess light.
4. The crystallization reaction would likely not be instantaneous; if it had evolved tens of thousands of years ago to simply adjust to the slow light changes of moving into/out of shelter, something like turning on an electric light in a dark room could be even more painful to them than it is to us (they would probably also find strobe lights unpleasant).
## To more fully answer your questions...
1. They would likely see better than us in dark environments. With the large pupils, their eyes would be able to take in and process even the dimmest light. As outlined in consequence #1, they would probably have worse vision than us in bright light, unless the polymer's crystalline form simply absorbed the light vs. scattering it.
The caveat is that with such a large aperture (pupil) their depth of field would be smaller... their ciliary muscle (that adjusts the lens) would need to be able to react faster and be stronger; otherwise they would have trouble focusing between near/mid/far ranges.
2. Their vision wouldn't necessarily be obstructed; on the contrary, it would probably be slightly better, as they would likely have more sharp "central" vision, and less peripheral vision. Any physical obstruction by their eyelids/etc would be naturally filtered out as their brain processed it.
3. As others have said, the social implications will depend on whether these humans are the primary/majority of the species, or if they are a lesser percentage of the population. I'd imagine anything between 20-50% would result in getting picked on similar to redheads, while below 20% would have more serious social repercussions such as discrimination and marginalization.
If their eyes do indeed function poorer in bright light, it's possible that it could be seen as a disability or genetic defect. Depending on the general social structure of your world's population, this could result in better acceptance more along the lines of how we treat disabled people today, or even greater marginalization and possibly even attempts at sterilization and eradication.
[Answer]
### Slightly different take
What if instead of being black due to the pupil being open, say that the proteins in their lens instead of filtering out just UV Light - adapt a filter that filters out a lot of the visible light spectrum(possibly due to increased sun exposure or hostile desert like conditions), this may lead to [the ability to see in the red-to-infrared section](https://io9.gizmodo.com/under-the-right-conditions-humans-can-see-infrared-1665448040).
This increased opacity in the lenses may cause the giant dilated pupils as less light would get past the dark lens, and it would adjust to let in more of the other light spectrum. This may lead to an increased visual acuity in the bright sun - but they may be completely unable to see in the dark. Think of wearing extremely dark sunglasses. The colors they see may be completely monochrome, or if this was far down the line of adaptation, they may be able to see some of the infrared range.
### Social
Because of seeing in some infrared, there may be a stigmata in social circles, as they may have been outsiders that would live/wander the desert. Also in certain light conditions, they may see through regular clothing. They would probably be color blind to many colors we see, and sometimes see some dark colors as bright white, this could lead to circumstances as seeing many obscured stains - think dirt or pizza sauce on a black shirt, this could lead to a view that regular people are "dirty" as they would see many of the things we would not clean regular without seeing the dirt or stains. They may be able to see veins or features under the skin, this brings to mind lie detecting seeing blood flush in the face.
### Technology
A group of people with these abilities, may develop flashlights that cast ir light, that only they can see, and regular people would not.
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You would also need to adapt the retina in some way. Perhaps its possible to have a much higher dynamic range retina which can handle the increased amount of light let in by this giant pupil, while at the same time being more sensitive to details in shadows. See HDR photography for examples, like <https://owlbrainwave.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/hdr-example.jpg>
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They would need a less sensitive retina, which would imply less accurate vision. Alternately, they could do with a less tranparent cornea, vitreous body, or acqueous humour, which would also dampen their vision (unless there is some mechanism that changes the opacity of any of those to fit the amount of light).
The focus of their vision would be much less precise in both cases, too, so they would need to either be myopic, or have really good iris muscles, to adapt focus for different distances. They would probably be nocturnal people, trying to live at night and avoid sunlight. Other things unchanged, they might, like albinos and blind people, prefer to work as entertainers or musicians, professions that demand night shifts or dark work environments, or depend more on hearing than seeing.
There is going to be social prejudice against them unless they are the majority of people; if they are nocturnal, such prejudice will probably be even more intense.
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They could have several "eyelids" that filter out some of the light with one or more only allowing light of a certain polarization. That way at night they could fully open the eye to see all the remaining light while at increased light levels they could filter out some to reduce glare.
Depending on the kinds of filters available they could be better off under certain circumstances. For example light reflected by water often polarized and so the glare created by such reflections could be reduced with polarized filters. Honey bees use the ability to see polarized light for orientation.
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**1) DEPENDS.**
Real world biology works different.
*Pupil is actually the "hole" on the iris. It lets different ammount of outer light reflections reaching inner side of the eyes.* The inside of a human eye is covered with a layer called 'retina', this contains the specific bodypart, which turns outer light reflections into electric signals possible to be processed by the brain.
First dependency: Is the retina same or better/less developed?
Second dependency: Is the brain image processing is same or better/less developed?
Third dependency: What is the light reflections perceptable around?
I believe this latter one is the point you are interested in, as visibly "big-black-eyed" creatures adapt better to *low light* (even if smallest measuarble ammount. With no emitted light, an eye structure is useless) environments. Should you expose them to overwhelming type and ammount of light (please everyone, don't do that), it will temp/perm damage their eyes or even brain.
Multiple other dependencies still follows, but the question is covered.
**2) What do you mean at "looking around"?**
The basic mechanics you can discover also with just a hand of yours using as obstacle, positioned in front of you.
In short, if you turn "your lens" behind a covering material (even if partly), it will of course block you from getting a *complete* image.
Forth dependency: Distribution of light processing types on retina? If ever wondered, why our retina exactly goes wide or pointy, it is because the different location of percepting 'sticks'. In sharp light, the middle ones work better, in dim light, perimeter ones work better. You can try to read a digital clock panel by night with no room lights on. You will be able to get clear numbers only if not focusing on the panel, but just close to it.
So in dim light, if the pupil is wide, and location of dim light processing units located on perimeter area, image is obstructed in the ration of blocked line cone of sight related to completely unblocked. The brain mght still try to complete the vision with memory stored segments, however it will be not a real-time vision, but this will not necessarily be known to the person. Might require extensive knowledge on the topic.
**3) DEPENDS. On social culture.**
It absolutely depends on what the people associate individually or collectively with this specifics. They can be superhumans, falsely mistified gifteds, disadvantage holders...it comes mostly from history and folklore.
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All the other answers focus on light sensitivity, but I think there is another important issue:
They would see everything very blurry, because a large pupil requires a large lens behind it to focus the light, and such a lens might just not fit into the eye (for comparison: a normal human's lens is bigger than the pupil, even when the pupil is at its maximum size).
The larger lens also means that there will be less space behind the lens, which moves the focal point further back and thus requires an even stronger lens than humans have (so either it has to be even thicker relative to its diameter or made out of another material entirely).
And even if such a large lens fits into the eye, there would be hardly any space left for muscles that contract or expand it, preventing any adaption, i.e. they are permanently near sighted or far sighted.
I'm not going to answer questions 2 and 3, as others have done that well already.
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This is an actual condition (assuming its a black iris). The iris should not have too much of an affect on vision, and it is very common in the animalia kingdom.
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Edit: I am not looking for a specifically scientifically supportable answer. Rather, I am curious as to what characteristics of weapon metal lead to making them harder, and better at penetrating/destroying other weapons/armor.
Edit #2: The comments below this question may aid in shedding light on specifically what I am looking for, the necessary characteristics of an unnaturally strong metal. For even if not truly possible in our world, we can surmise what such a metal would hypothetically need to give up in order to gain higher toughness and strength.
(I have reviewed the questions regarding "Super Metal and Knights", but found them unsatisfactory for this specific query.)
First, I'd like to note that I understand that "Medieval-Tech" can cover a wide range of years and technological levels. For my purposes, I simply mean the general level that high-fantasy technology often exists at, e.g. Lord of the Rings, Eragon, etc.
In my world, there is a special sort of metal that is used for both weapons and armor, although it is extremely rare. This is metal is not capable of "slicing straight through my enemy's blade", because it isn't a lightsaber. However, it is of significantly higher strength, quality, durability, etc. It will hold its edge far longer than steel; it can cut a notch into a steel weapon if they are struck together in a sharp parry, while remaining itself largely unharmed; on a spearhead it is able to penetrate steel armor with much more ease than a steel or iron head would be able to. Likewise, when used in armor it is very hard to dent or scratch, and will turn away the toughest of spearheads/crossbow bolts/etc.
**What would be the characteristics of a metal that is far harder/stronger/more durable than steel?** At some level I assume this must be scientifically possible, as for example, steel can shred aluminum. I would like this super-metal to be to steel as steel is to aluminum. (I understand there's more to the science surrounding those two than my analogy, but the point regarding their relative toughness in a combat scenario remains.)
I have assumed that in order to have the characteristics I desire, it would have to be quite dense. Therefore I envision it being used as some sort of alloy, or even just to serve as the very tip of a stabbing spear or very edge of a sword, while the rest remains steel or iron. Note that I am not looking for real world elements that could be combined for this, but rather the basics of what a metal with this specifications would be like.
Most metals become more inflexible as they increase "hardness". Damascus or Wootz steel was rumored to be able to maintain an incredible edge while also being quite hard and extremely flexible, though through my research I understand some doubt has been cast on that in recent years.
**I would like my metal to be incredibly hard, to hold an edge for an extended period of time, even if parrying with the edge, and to be capable of puncturing or otherwise damaging steel weapons when used against them.**
*I am not concerned* about how difficult it may be to smelt/sharpen/work, as I'm comfortable with a degree of handwaving there. I'm simply curious as to whether a metal like this is theoretically possible, and if so, what would its characteristics be in regard to weight, flexibility, and so on.
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***Long answer warning:** If you wish to skip all the context, just see last section about Mangalloy steel.*
### The Problems with Tungsten
While tungsten is an incredibly hard metal often used in making tools designed to cut steel, it is not actually as tough as most grades of steel. It is also a much heavier metal than iron such that most weapons made of tungsten would be inherently too fragile and too heavy to be as good as steel. Its easiness to shatter would also make it a very bad armor material compared to steel. It's melting point is also so high that it would take a magic forge to even work with.
The only practical application of tungsten as a weapon making material would perhaps be in the formation of bimetallic blades made of tungsten carbide encased in a mild steel (like how the katana is made from a harder steel encased in a mild steel). This would in theory make a decent blade, but if you already allow for unlimited cost, magic smelting techniques, and metallurgical knowledge, then a better option for tungsten is to use a blue steel. Blue steel is a high end iron alloy made with small amounts of tungsten and chromium which is used in premium knife and sword making today for its combination of excellent edge retention, weight, and toughness.
### The Problems with Titanium
Pure titanium is a much softer and all around weaker metal than steel. Much like pure iron, it is too soft, but unlike iron, it can't be easily alloyed with carbon until it reaches its desired hardness... or rather, it takes so little carbon to harden titanium that it very quickly becomes too hard, brittle, and useless; so, you cant make it with traditional forging techniques at all. For titanium to be at all useful, you will need magic to refine it, and you will also need other anachronistic metals like Aluminum and Vanadium. If you allow for all of this, titanium alloy CAN make a very good armor. It's weaker than most steels of a given thickness, but for its weight it is generally stronger. So, if you want a light weight armor that can stop most attacks, titanium alloy is a good choice.
However, it is not a good blade making material. Even a basic carbon steel makes for better blades than titanium alloy because, titanium can't hold a narrow edge as well. In order to make an equally tough blade out of titanium, it would need to be thicker, and thus not cut as well.
That said, titanium is still not the BEST material to make body armor out of. There are types of steel that are even stronger for their weight than any titanium alloy, and their higher density means that you could make a thinner suit of lightweight armor than a titanium alloy would allow which would not just offer great protection, but the thinner plates/smaller rings will allow better flexibility in your articulating sections.
## Solution: Steel, but a better explanation than existing answers
The first important thing to understand is that steel is not one single alloy, but rather a general term meaning any iron based alloy... but all iron is an iron alloy, because it is practically impossible to make a truly pure iron. Some of the stuff we call iron actually has a lower iron content than the stuff we call steel and vise versa. Some of the stuff we call iron is even chemically identical to other stuff we call steel. In short, differentiating iron and steel in the modern context is pretty pointless.
The best way to understand what steel is is to look at the word's historical usage. The word steel is derived from the Old English word stēli which simply means "stay". In the medieval period, blacksmiths would often advertise their prices for "blaec" meaning "black" which we now call iron or "stēli blaec" meaning "stayed black" which later became "steeled iron" and then shortened to just steel. Simply put, steel or steeled iron just means that the blacksmith did something extra to it to make it "stay" or be stronger than other iron.
The second important thing to understand is that by the end of the Medieval Period, steel making was actually very good. Expert blacksmiths could make steels that were very comparable modern steel. No they weren't as well alloyed or refined as modern steel, but complex wroughting and tempering practices gave their steels the precisely desired qualities in the exact places where it mattered most in a way that you don't get from modern homogenized steels.
So, depending on what part of the medieval period you are talking about, the kind of "super metals" you are talking about already existed. A high quality, late medieval weapon/armor grade steel used by knights and kings was way more rare and expensive than the much cheaper steels used in peasant tools and levee weapons, and they could achieve all of the desired effects that you are asking for. To understand this, let's look at all the factors that determine how good your steel really is.
1. **Contamination**: Throughout ancient history, sulfur and phosphorous contamination were major issues in the iron industry. These contaminants would make iron alloys significantly more brittle without adding significant hardness; so, it was common for blades to shatter if they were made from a contaminated ore. During the early parts of the medieval period, many blacksmiths learned to cook their ore at a lower temperature before they would smelt it. This burned away most of the contamination and lead to a much more pure steel. So, if your setting represents the early medieval period, a smith could add to the price, quality, and rarity of his steel just by pre-cooking his ore. This step was often skipped when making budget steel or tools where shattering was not a major concern. It was also not commonly done in Middle-Eastern blacksmithing; so, depending on where you are, decontaminated steel could be rare. So, a cheap levee's blade might shatter, even in the late medieval period whereas a knight's blade would be far less likely to be contaminated.
2. **Carbon Content**: When smelting iron ore, the iron always absorbs a certain amount of carbon from the kiln. The more carbon it has, the harder and more brittle your steel. Then as you hammer your steel into shape, you press out some of the carbon making it softer. The ideal weapon/armor grade steel is a medium carbon alloy (about .3% to .5% percent depending on what you are making). The problem most early blacksmiths ran into was that they had to be careful not to add too much carbon to their steel or it would crumble when they would try to hammer it out, or they would over hammer it making it too soft. So getting a good, medium carbon steel was almost impossible. By the high medieval period, you start to see finery forges that could take higher carbon steels and reduce the carbon until it was ideal for forging. It took a LOT of extra charcoal, time, and equipment to make finery steel. In fact, finery steel was about 10 times as expensive as traditional bloomery steel in many places where you saw them both as options, but it made a big difference between being able to make the short swords and chain armor of the early medieval period and the longer swords and partial plate armor of the high medieval period.
3. **Tempering**: The way you cool your steel also impacts how good it is. If you cool steel too slowly it anneals meaning that it will bend if you flex it and then stay bent. If you cool it too quickly then it hardens meaning that it will be harder but break if you flex it. If you cool it at just the right speed for the amount of carbon in it, it tempers meaning that if you flex it, it will spring back into its original shape. A good temper can make any blade or armor several times as difficult to damage. In the early-to-high medieval period most blades were either made of a lower carbon steel that was quenched in water, medium carbon 1/2 tempered steel which is where you used a higher carbon steel and water quench just the edge letting the core slow cool, or higher carbon air cooled steel. In the late medieval period, smiths got a lot better at tempering medium carbon steels by using oil instead of water. This was what made it possible to fully replace chain armor with articulating plate armor because it meant that moderate impacts would not dent the armor and lock up your joints. It's also what made longswords and rapiers possible because you could make a long thin blade that could flex and spring back into shape without breaking. When you combine oil tempering, pre-cooking, and finery forging and all the mastery it takes to do those things right, you get a very expensive steel that was practically indestructible when used as armor or weapons in melee combat.
There were of course other trends that came and went like pattern welding, bi-metallic layering, and Damascus alloys which were different ways of alternating high and low carbon steels to make a ridged blade that is both hard and tough, but these methods tend to suffer from delamination under too many impacts and largely fell out of use by the mid-to-late medieval period when homogenized steels got good enough that the trade-off stopped being worth while.
There was also a huge difference in sharpening techniques. For example, Eastern swords were often made out of worse steels than Western swords, but their culture treated sharpening and polishing as its own specialized profession; so, their swords tended to be much sharper. This leads to the general perception that Eastern steel was better, even though they were actually centuries behind in metallurgy.
## The actual best metal: Mangalloy Steel
Okay, so what if you wanted to pull out all of the stops, allow magic and modern alloying, and just make the best possible metal. What do you do?
Well, the answer is still steel, but it is a very specific type of steel called Mangalloy Steel. The addition of Manganese to steel is the biggest difference between modern steel and most historical steels. The ancient Spartans technically made their own version of Manganese steel which contributed significantly to their military superiority, but they never shared the secrete of their steel, and its use died out with their civilization, not to be rediscovered until MUCH later. But Mangalloy Steel is very special, even among steels. Most modern steels contain 0.15 to 0.8% manganese which makes it both harder and tougher than carbon steels, but still keeping the steel soft and ductile enough to be grinded, shaped, and generally worked into its final needed form. More than 0.8% manganese ruins your steel... that is until you add enough that something neat happens.
Mangalloy Steel has about 12% Manganese. At this concentration, the steel stops becoming brittle, and instead becomes a work-hardening alloy meaning that the more you try to shape it, the harder and more difficult to shape it becomes as opposed to other steels that loose hardness as you work it. However, everything about it makes it almost impossible to make anything but very basic shapes out of, even using the best of modern technology. Once work hardened, it becomes about 5-10x as strong as most other steels making it even stronger for its weight that titanium, and able to be used to make extremally sharp and durable edges and amazingly durable armor... except that it can't be tooled to make particularly sharp edges or complex armor.
This is where magic comes in. If you could magically shape and sharpen Mangalloy steel, then you could make highly durable, razor sharp swords that exceed even our modern blade making abilities, and complex armor that is thinner and lighter than historical plate armor, while also being several times stronger.
So your rare super metal is actually Manganese, but it has to be mixed with iron to achieve the desired result.
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There is a famous story about [Saladin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin) meeting [King Richard I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England) "the Lionhearted" of England.
The two heroes compare the qualities of their swords. Saladin demonstrates how sharp is his Damascus steel sword by cutting a feather-light silk veil; King Richard demonstrates what a good broadsword can do by cutting a steel mace with a mighty blow, or, in other tellings, by cleaving a stone boulder.
This is how that particular episode is described by Sir Walter Scott in chapter XXVII of his novel [*The Talisman*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talisman_(Scott_novel)) (1825), which as it happens, it available online at [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1377):
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> [Saladin] led the way accordingly to a splendid pavilion, where was everything that royal luxury could devise. De Vaux, who was in attendance, then removed the chappe, or long riding-cloak, which Richard wore, and he stood before Saladin in the close dress which showed to advantage the strength and symmetry of his person, while it bore a strong contrast to the flowing robes which disguised the thin frame. of the Eastern monarch. It was Richard's two-handed sword that chiefly attracted the attention of the Saracen—a broad, straight blade, the seemingly unwieldy length of which extended well-nigh from the shoulder to the heel of the wearer.
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> “Had I not,” said Saladin, “seen this brand flaming in the front of battle, like that of Azrael, I had scarce believed that human arm could wield it. Might I request to see the Melech Ric strike one blow with it in peace, and in pure trial of strength?”
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> “Willingly, noble Saladin,” answered Richard; and looking around for something whereon to exercise his strength, he saw a steel mace held by one of the attendants, the handle being of the same metal, and about an inch and a half in diameter. This he placed on a block of wood.
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> The anxiety of De Vaux for his master's honour led him to whisper in English, “For the blessed Virgin's sake, beware what you attempt, my liege! Your full strength is not as yet returned—give no triumph to the infidel.”
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> “Peace, fool!” said Richard, standing firm on his ground, and casting a fierce glance around; “thinkest thou that I can fail in *his* presence?”
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> The glittering broadsword, wielded by both his hands, rose aloft to the King's left shoulder, circled round his head, descended with the sway of some terrific engine, and the bar of iron rolled on the ground in two pieces, as a woodsman would sever a sapling with a hedging-bill.
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> “By the head of the Prophet, a most wonderful blow!” said the Soldan, critically and accurately examining the iron bar which had been cut asunder; and the blade of the sword was so well tempered as to exhibit not the least token of having suffered by the feat it had performed. He then took the King's hand, and looking on the size and muscular strength which it exhibited, laughed as he placed it beside his own, so lank and thin, so inferior in brawn and sinew.
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> “Ay, look well,” said De Vaux in English, “it will be long ere your long jackanape's fingers do such a feat with your fine gilded reaping-hook there.”
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> “Silence, De Vaux,” said Richard; “by Our Lady, he understands or guesses thy meaning—be not so broad, I pray thee.”
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> The Soldan, indeed, presently said, “Something I would fain attempt—though wherefore should the weak show their inferiority in presence of the strong? Yet each land hath its own exercises, and this may be new to the Melech Ric.” So saying, he took from the floor a cushion of silk and down, and placed it upright on one end. “Can thy weapon, my brother, sever that cushion?” he said to King Richard.
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> “No, surely,” replied the King; “no sword on earth, were it the Excalibur of King Arthur, can cut that which opposes no steady resistance to the blow.”
> “Mark, then,” said Saladin; and tucking up the sleeve of his gown, showed his arm, thin indeed and spare, but which constant exercise had hardened into a mass consisting of nought but bone, brawn, and sinew. He unsheathed his scimitar, a curved and narrow blade, which glittered not like the swords of the Franks, but was, on the contrary, of a dull blue colour, marked with ten millions of meandering lines, which showed how anxiously the metal had been welded by the armourer. Wielding this weapon, apparently so inefficient when compared to that of Richard, the Soldan stood resting his weight upon his left foot, which was slightly advanced; he balanced himself a little, as if to steady his aim; then stepping at once forward, drew the scimitar across the cushion, applying the edge so dexterously, and with so little apparent effort, that the cushion seemed rather to fall asunder than to be divided by violence.
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> “It is a juggler's trick,” said De Vaux, darting forward and snatching up the portion of the cushion which had been cut off, as if to assure himself of the reality of the feat; “there is gramarye in this.”
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> The Soldan seemed to comprehend him, for he undid the sort of veil which he had hitherto worn, laid it double along the edge of his sabre, extended the weapon edgeways in the air, and drawing it suddenly through the veil, although it hung on the blade entirely loose, severed that also into two parts, which floated to different sides of the tent, equally displaying the extreme temper and sharpness of the weapon, and the exquisite dexterity of him who used it.
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The key take-away is that how believable is the presentation of an element of the story depends mainly on the art of the storyteller; a skilled storyteller will make even the most fantastic story element seem plausible and indeed perfectly natural in the context of the story.
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# Steel
How about something very simple and actually quite realistic (def. for early medieval period) - steel vs. iron? IIRC, they knew steel, but didn't actually know how to reliably make it, so steel weapons/armour were quite expensive and a common soldier would just use wrought iron.
You could use something of that sort, the "mundane" weapons are made out of crude iron (nor all that much better than bronze, actually, just easier to get), while whoever is able to wield the right sort of magic can tweak the trace element content and heat treatment to get a much superior blade/armour.
In comparison you get virtually the same density and resistance to heat&magic, however one will behave like a spring (hard yet flexible, possibly even stainless!) while the other one will feel like made of mud compared to it.
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Smiths of the medieval period had no idea **specifically** why one sword cut better than the last one they made. They knew the process and intuitively were able to do incredible works. They had no concept of atoms or molecules. They did know it was far better to quench a sword in oil than water. You could make copper harder just by hammering on it, that heating an ingot where it glowed a certain color when it was ready to be worked.
Others have pointed out that it is not a matter of a metals "strength" but how it balances hardness with ductility. In Game of thrones Valyrian Steel was a superior steel. No one was able to reproduce it. Best they could do was recast it (which was weird but beside the point).
Equally important to how its made is what it is made from. The smelting process and the source of the ore used. For instance, Japanese sword making has been inflated far a reasonable assessment of their actual characteristics. Tamahagane (the steel used to the making of Katana) is folded hundreds of times in a ritualistic manor, not because it is a superior technique. But because it is necessary since it is a poor quality ore and must be done to impart carbon into the steel to make it useful. Additionally I would look up, Wootz steel, or Seric steel,crucible steel or "true" Damascus Steel.
The point I think is, what you are looking for, were it possible, it would have been already done, and we would know. So, what it would look like has to be invented... fabricated, its up to you. My suggestion would be take a few hours and watch some of the earlier episodes of Forged in Fire. Look up blacksmithing on YouTube, and get a feel for what actually goes into forging a blade, armor or tool. How many different ways it has been done. Forge Welding, casting, cold hardening. Then inject your own substance, process, ritual to elevate the creation. Or, just leave it an enigma to the reader. Which can be more interesting than revealing how the magic trick is done.
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A medieval smith knows a sword is a composite structure. A Norman light whacks their broadsword against the other guy's broadsword until one of them becomes too tired or too numb to parry any more. The winner then uses the edge to cut the other guy. He could then go back to the smith and ask "Why does the edge get all notched? Can't you make it out of something harder?"
The smith probably does not have the formula for [Fracture Toughness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracture_toughness) but they may instinctively understand what is needed. The strength of metals comes from their ability to fail and still remain in one useable piece. If they used a [ceramic blade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_knife) then it would shatter. The could make a knife with a low-carbon steel body for toughness, with a high-carbon layer at the very edge for cutting. The high-carbon edge might lose chunks, but it would still have enough sharp edge to be unpleasant for the other guy.
"Not a good sword, milord? You carried it back here, so it must have been good enough in a fight. How was the other guy's sword then? Does he still have both arms? I can take out those notches, easy."
It would be nice if we could cut things by just severing a single layer of atomic bonds. Machine shops would use this everywhere if they could: it would take almost no energy. A medieval philosopher might imagine such a sword as an ideal. If they could come up with the sharpest, hardest material, then it would cut effortlessly though things. Unfortunately, there is no 'hardest metal' - or rather the hardest metals become more ceramic-like, and can break. Make it harder, and it becomes less brittle. Make it lighter and you have less weight to swing. The craft is balancing all these properties in a single device, rather than using material X.
You can have your 'subtle knife' that cuts anything in your world, and not explain it. But if you want to make something that feels like real stuff (a worthy aim IMHO) then you are going to need some other trick.
Electrify the blade, perhaps? Combination broadsword and taser?
PS:
The low-carbon, high-carbon steel combo is a very good solution for traditional blades. There are lots of new alloys and techniques these days, but they don't really add much. If you want to be fancy, add beryllium to a bronze sword for a [copper-beryllium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium_copper) hard edge. But I doubt if it would be anything special.
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Many of the answers provided here have good information about real materials that we currently know about and their properties, but as a fantasy material we're not limited by real world materials or things like the periodic table. On the other hand, we want to take advantage of some of the depth that exists in the real world to give more verisimilitude to our ideas.
So, some ideas about material properties and creating an ideal material.
# Density
The density and weight of a material on their own contribute to the use of a material. A dense material like tungsten, depleted uranium, or lead is often ideal for bludgeoning weapons like maces. Density also allows for more energy to be imparted on a projectile as it travels down the length of a barrel and reduces the effect of things like drag. A dense material might make for good armor, as the extra weight can allow more momentum at a given speed, though it will be harder to build up to that speed.
A low density material can be great for weapons that rely on finesse. Low density allows for rapid changes in direction and speed with less effort. This means that a club made of something with low density will not carry as much momentum and will be easier to deflect, but it also means something like a rapier would be extremely easy to move around and navigate to vital places that you might want to poke. Low density can be good for armor, as the purpose of armor is typically to spread out the force of an impact over a large area, which the low-density armor could do while tiring out the wearer minimally.
# Hardness
In the real world, hardness and brittleness generally have a positive correlation. In steel, hard steel has a dense, messy crystalline structure that ensures that crystals can't slide over one another easily. Soft steel has large crystals that are more easily able to find lines that allow them to slide.
The tradeoff is that in a hard steel, when the crystals are forced to slide, they're more likely to push against each other in such a way that gaps are created, which creates a fracture.
The solution historically here has been to make implements that use both types of steel. There are a handful of processes to do this, but your fantasy material could be a metal that is otherwise accessible but uses a special technique to weave together different properties of the same metal in different conditions.
# Structure
This is where being able to handwave the manufacturing process could have the biggest payoff. The crystalline structure and the binding properties of the molecules that make up that material are the main things that influence the properties of that material.
Diamonds, carbon nanotubes, carbon fiber, graphite. These materials have significantly different physical properties; however, they're all based on arranging carbon in different ways. Diamond is extremely hard, carbon nanotubes are extremely strong, graphite is not either of those things. They are all the same element as ash. Your super material could be a special treatment of something relatively mundane.
# Conclusion
A true one size fits all super material could be based on ash-forging or something like that. Using different treatment processes could result in high or low density, a diamond-hard edge, point, or case backed or interweaved with an extremely strong phase of the same material. The equipment could have a very thin, clear case filled with pitch black. Armor could use only carbon nanotube-like material to create something akin to modern Kevlar (but stronger) or a mixture of diamond-like and nanotube-like materials in configurations like plate, scale, lamellar, chain, etc. You could also take some of the downsides to these materials such as in the right conditions they can be flammable, or cause cancer.
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I mean... Titanium would be an option.
Especially if you handwaive the smelting problems away. You've mentioned LoTR, so we could even assume Magic is involved in the refining process from Ore to useable metal.
Either that or something involving Tungsten - like Tungsten Carbide for a blade edge or Tungsten tipped arrows (Low-tech equivalent of the modern Tank APFS-DS round)
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[HSS steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_steel). I have HSS steel bits that can open holes in construction grade steel as if it is made out of wood. They are sharp and they keep that sharpness under heavy stress a lot longer than regular tool steel. Even the thin ones do not snap easily. Their only weakness is temperature but it can survive up to 400C which is better than most steel variants. HSS steel contains tungsten, molybdenum, chromium and vanadium so I am not sure how feasible it is to manifacture at your time setting. But a variant of it was discovered 1800s so it is not new. It can be air cooled for hardening. There are also subvariants of HSS steel that are more (M1) or less flexible (M7 or M35), allowing compound weapons like katana or kilij.
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There are modern examples of exactly what you're looking for.
The fist example is simply steel but modern. With modern understanding of metallurgy and modern processes, you can get off the shelf steel with the specific characteristics you want to best suit your needs. The steel used in pots, in knives and in armour production is not the same steel.
Because of the advancements, the modern steel you would use to make weapons and armour for a Medieval battlefield will not only be better suited, it would also be of better quality with less defects. Which means that if an old steel sword hits a modern steel sword hard enough, 99 of 100 times the old sword would break. Add some shock absorbtion to the knights with modern steel, and their tactic can be just get in and bash the oponent as hard as possible until their armour or weapon gives in. This is what happened with the move from bronze to iron weapons. The slight advantage of iron caused eventualy for iron to be adopted over bronze. With a naked eye, you will probably not see many differences between the swords only under a microscope the diferences will emarge and when the bad quality steel breaks.
Then you have modern composite armour, which uses layers of steel and other materials to achieve comparable stopping power to steel with less weight (but at the cost of being thicker). As the outer most layer is steel, it also looks and feels the same as steel, only thicker and lighter. It isn't very practical for weapons, nor for personal armour. But with some magic and hand waving you could say that it's as thick as normal armour but lighter and still gives considerable armor and is used by recon or other troops that utilize the added mobility to get an advantage against a slower but better protected enemy.
Then you have modern metals and alloys used today exactly for the purpose that you specified. Specifically, [depleted uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium), which is used by militaries both for strong armour and for creation of armour piercing ammo, but has a considerable drawback of being radioactive, so you don't want to use it as the kit of a soldier, if you don't want them to get cancer. Or [tungsten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten) which is used in the creation of kinetic armour piercing rounds where DP can't be used because of its radioactivity.
For body armour you have modern materials which are used today, Kevlar and ceramics which offer better protection than still and are able to withstand modern firearms, they are able to stop a sword. I don't think that you can make a full set of armour from them, but you can make from them modern protective gear. Body armour, helmets and ballistic shields. With some magic and what not it isn't unreasonable to say that a full body ceramic armour is created.
As to the reasons of why only one group has access to the super steel could be that the knowledge was lost but only one facility that is able to create or extract it still exists and so only the function that controls that facility has access to the technology or material. Another option is that of the depleted uranium, the super steel is better but is also toxic to the user, and only the function that has immunity to the toxicity of the metal can use it, think of cockroaches using depleted uranium because those doses of radiation are safe for them, but humans can't use the same gear.
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I have a very large desert, approximately 15 000 km across from west to east (the north-south distance is around 4 000 km, although it's at a bit of an angle). The desert is bounded at one edge by a large mountain range running north to south which casts the rain shadow which gets the desert started. This desert is intended to be extremely inhospitable, with the bulk of it receiving no rainfall and having no sources of water available for human travellers.
About 9 000 km into the desert (from the side with the initial mountain range) is a secondary mountain range, also running north to south. The desert then continues another 4 000 km.
What I am wondering specifically is, is it technically plausible for the mountain range cutting through the desert to have accumulated snow caps? I would like for that mountain range to serve as a way through the desert (north-south), albeit a very difficult one, by virtue of having a small amount of moisture present rather than none at all.
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**Yes, but...**
You don't describe your desert. Let's assume it's the driest form of desert there is. You also don't describe what you're looking for in terms of a "snow cap," other than your desire for it to be a source of moisture for travelers.
Can it be plausible? Yes, to a degree... You won't be able to handle much population growth.
* A high mountain will always be cold, no matter the conditions that cause the desert. This works in your favor as what little moisture exists in your desert will have someplace to condense and be deposited.
* But you're not working with a whole heckuva lot of water. Therefore, by "snow cap" what you should expect is that shimmery, glistening, really thin layer of icy buildup. Wind will cause it to build up in small "rivulets" where travelers can steal a bit of water for themselves and their animals.
But if you're thinking snow caps like the alps... no. You won't and cannot have those unless you have a boatload of moisture in the upper atmosphere that, for some unknown reason, never falls on your desert. That would be unbelievable.
Frankly, I think your opportunity here is pretty cool. Those icy wind-driven buildups are like dew collecting in flowers. A rare and precious commodity that would cause people to keep secret where the deeper, richer flows are (not unlike mines).
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Below is from Four Peaks, Arizona
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/emhth.png)
Here is the Ashgabat desert in Turkistan
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RPDK8.png)
Below Mount Kodar, Trans-Baikal area, Siberian Mountains
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Zlsw.jpg)
For various reasons, warm regions can have cold mountain tops. Mauna Kea in Hawaii gets snow. Mount Kilimanjaro at a latitude 3 degrees from the Equator gets snow.
1. Higher in the atmosphere the temperature can be a lot lower. Actually as altitude rises, pressure drops, and in different altitude zones temperatures rise or fall.
2. As prevailing winds cross the landscape, they have to rise up the mountain. This causes drop in pressure and loss of humidity (which might drop as snow). That cools the air.
3. Also a mountain may have a different angle in relation to the sun than the flat of the desert. At Mount Kilimanjaro the sun would shine directly on level ground but be at an angle from above on the mountain. In Siberia, on level ground the sun is at an angle, but may be more or less on the sunward side and in the shadow of the mountain on the north.
4. Finally, the desert might not be hot. In Siberia, there might be tundra or there might be arctic desert.
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Whatever air is flowing through that desert will capture some humidity and will release it when it cools down.
This means that over the centuries the inner mountain range will get some deposition of snow/ice, due to this mechanism: desert air will cool down while climbing on the mountain range and deposit its humidity.
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Another example: The Peruvian and Chilean coast are exceedingly dry. Archeologists still talk about discoveries made due to the 1923 rain. The land is bleak with no green thing at all away from the rivers that flow from the Andes to the east.
This desert is dry due to the Humbolt Current. It's a cold water current flowing north along the coast. Air at saturated humidity mixes with warmer air over land, and quickly drops below saturation. That air has to cool before it can drop any water.
On the Altoplano (The highlands that include Lake Titicaca) at 12,000 feet there is enough rain to support sparse grass. As you get closer to the mountains it gets increasingly wet.
The issue is that you need to have *some* water in the air before the climb. You can do this by having a drier but not impossibly dry area in the first rainshadow. Afterall: The rain shadow of the cascades in Washington state still gets 9-12 inches of rain a year. This area of low rainfall allows some water back in the atmosphere. Now make your mid desert mountains even taller than the coastal range. They will wring whatever remaining moisture there is, and then the *really* nasty desert starts.
You can also do things like:
* Erratic rainfall due to jet streams tht bring in storms from north or south.
* The area is a former seabed, and there is a lot of ocean salt mixed into the soil, so that the only potable surface water is in 'tanks' on bare rock. (A tank in this sense is a hollow in a rock surface that collects rain water for a few days to weeks. Common in the Canyon lands of SE Utah and N. Arizona)
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# **Yes**
There's two things that are important here. First is that a desert doesn't need to be hot. A desert is a definition for a mostly barren land. Because of this the heat can easily skyrocket, which is why the hot deserts are so famous. That being said, heat is not a requirement. Your incredible large desert can be a frozen wasteland for thousands of kilometers. Technically the North and South pole are deserts. They receive little precipitation, yet consist mostly out of water.
Things generally get colder with lesser pressure. Thanks to gravity and less air pushing down on itself at altitude, you'll get less air pressure the higher you go. At altitude, like in the mountains, the lesser air pressure results in colder air. Make the mountains high enough and you'll get temperatures suitable for ice and snow.
Over the years of this colder climate the water that does reach the mountain can accumulate in snow and ice for example. Eventually it'll get there.
That means a random mountain range in the middle of the hottest desert in the world can have permanent snow covered peaks. It does need to fulfil some shape and size requirements, but can lead to basically anything you want.
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The mountains almost certainly *will* have at least a partial snow cap on them and there will be some runoff from them that gives a narrow "moisture corridor" along there flanks. The [Coriolis Force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force) is going to push storms around the [rain shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow) that forms the first part of the desert onto one face of the central mountain range from the north and the other when weather comes up from the south. The moisture in those storms, and in air flows that are simply a bit wet, is going to precipitate out in the mountains in the form of [orographic precipitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orography#Orographic_precipitation). Now a lot of that moisture will fall as snow and [sublime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)) back into the high altitude air over time but you are probably going to get glaciation and there *will be* some absorption into the underlying ground and some melting and runoff. This is going to form rivers and possibly a [spring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_(hydrology)) line at lower altitude. The desert sands are probably going to suck down the moisture that runs off the mountains into the lowlands pretty fast but there may be a navigable corridor through the lower edge of the mountains for much of the year.
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I was thinking about space as a measured and marked series of boundary lines to denote ownership and governance. The problem is that I'm having trouble seeing that as useful. If there's no particular immovable assets or resources there, why would you spend effort occupying it? Consider how we have vast oceans with 7.5 billion people on earth and over 200 sovereign nations. Even still the most aggressive occupation actions are localized to shorelines and fossil fuel resources.
Let's consider Star Trek's take: space is parceled and occupied, and it's a major offense to cross some boundaries. Now let's consider Dune's take: space is a vast waste with small picks of usefulness spread so thin, it's like a handful of rice spread out in the sea. I understand space travel in Dune is of the "space-time folding" type and is thus instantaneous, while Star Trek is linear FTL "warp". Despite this, I'm having trouble believing any spacing society would spend much effort protecting massive voids between the bits that actually matter. How can the Star Trek style "space occupation" be explained as necessary, desirable, or even possible?
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Its less about occupying a space and more about setting a boundary in all senses of the word.
"If you cross this boundary then your ships would get a tactical advantage in scouting out potential weaknesses and might be in a better position to attack some of my colonies. So if you cross it we will assume that action is happening and retaliate accordingly".
This is why countries might claim patches of sea such as straits or claim deserted regions, it forms a buffer so their forces have depth of territory to give up when pressured by superior forces and gives more time to formulate a plan or warn off potential enemies before they become a direct threat to trade or military/civilian areas.
You can see this in Star Trek. They don't just have a border but a neutral zone as well. It takes time to cross the neutral zone, time in which scanners can potentially detect them and prevents both sides from seeing clearly what the other team is doing along their border. And whenever someone is detected in the neutral zone then they have time to engage in diplomacy, "return or we assume hostile action".
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You might think of it as the outer-space equivalent of the Treaties of [Tordesillas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas) and [Zaragoza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Zaragoza).
The situation is most space opera is similar to the situation of Earth in 15th and early 16th centuries, at least from the point of view of the European nations: you generally know where the big stuff is, but there's still a lot that's unknown. Spain and Portugal divided up the planet between them by drawing borders and agreeing that everything on one side belonged to Spain, on the other to Portugal, with the aim they could then focus on exploring and developing everything on their given side without worrying about claim-jumping from the other.
So, to use the Star Trek example, the borders between the Federation and the Klingons is a 3D boundary where they've agreed that they have exclusive authority on their respective sides, and that they have claim to anything that happens to be found, discovered, or developed on said sides. In that setting they're still discovering new planets, new resources, ancient derelict starships, new intelligent species and so on, just as the Spanish and Portugese were still discovering new islands and territories to settle, new people and new resources to exploit, and so on.
How they *exert* that authority internally is an independent question, but both sides have agreed that if it's on the other side of that boundary, it's a Not My Problem situation, so if the Klingons want to conquer newly discovered planets, the Federation may complain on moral grounds if they find out, but they don't rush to that planet's rescue because it's officially Not Their Problem. If the Federation wants to isolate a pre-warp planet and let them develop naturally and eventually make contact and offer membership, the Klingons may find that funny, but whatever, it's Not Their Problem.
Again, this makes sense in the Star Trek context because in that setting there's still a lot of stuff that isn't explored even relatively nearby, and the method of travel allows you to go anywhere within it, so you never know what you might stumble on in interstellar space. Even if you're travelling FTL in that setting, you can still scan and monitor the "normal" space around you.
Dune, as you point out, is different because the method of travel is different. When you're dealing with jumps or hyperspace or wormholes some other kind of interstellar travel such that you're never likely to stumble across anything in normal space between travel points, then there's little interest or point in claiming it, so "borders" in it make little sense aside from being drawn on maps simply as a convenient visual way to separate systems.
From a military point of view, this differentiation makes strategic sense as well. In Star Trek, the technology is such that you *can* monitor space and detect starships (cloaking aside) in between solar systems. Thus, a clearly defined boundary is sort of necessary. Then Starfleet and the Klingons can merrily cruise on their own sides without worrying that their very presence could be considered an act of war because the other side could detect them.
On the other hand, consider a setting that uses jumpoints. Let's use [Pournelle's CoDominium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDominium), or the [Starfire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_(board_wargame)) settings as an example: ships pop from one system to another and aren't in between, so even leaving the instantaneous nature of the travel aside, there's no way to detect a ship travelling between system. For practical purposes, there's nothing between "here" and "there", so there's no point in trying to define or defend a border; you defend systems.
Less advanced tech version: if you have a city that allows easy travel across it, at any place and any time, then street gangs would need clearly defined boundaries between them to differentiate, and those boundaries would need to be patrolled and monitored, and possible defended. If, on the other hand, you had a city composed of numerous islands and the only ways between them were by tunnel or bridge or ferry, then gangs that controlled entire islands would only need to watch the points of entry, and defining boundaries between gangs, through the waterways between islands, would be pointless.
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There's "open space" and then there's *open space*.
In a planetary system, at least, there are valuable places in open space, starting with orbits (orbits that intersect my own are either threatening, valuable, or both) co-moving regions of space (like Lagrange points) or simply lines of sight (for solar power, perhaps, or communication). These places could be tens or hundreds of millions of kilomtres away from habitation, and have nothing there but a slightly higher concentration of dust and gas than the rest of the solar system, but their economic or militaries values could be *vast*.
None of those apply in interstellar space, which as the good book says, is *BIG*. At that point, where you search and patrol and protect will be heavily influenced by your transport, communications, sensing and weaponry technology and as such the question is a) super wide open and b) totally subject to the whims of the fictional universe's author.
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I will start by saying the Star Trek idea of parceling up space is unrealistic. The short answer is that there is not a very good reason for closing off empty space. In reality, "open space" probably would work more like "international waters," in that a certain distance from someone's home planet is considered territorial, but beyond that it's essentially the law of the high seas (or in this case, space?). Space is so vast this would likely even happen on a planetary level, rather than a star system level (i.e. space between Earth and Mars is international space).
However, that wasn't your question so I will work within its bounds.
The main reason you would close off space is to control lines of approach. This works especially well in the linear FTL world of Star Trek and Star Wars. You can't "cross my space" because it allows you to get close to something of value, like my home world. In this case, space acts more like a buffer. This way, it makes it much more difficult for someone to explain why they're in "your space," as they would have no reason to be there unless they were traveling towards your home world or a world you've claimed. However, even this doesn't quite fit, as countries aren't allowed to close off large portions of international waters "just because" it provides a straight line to their shores, and in some cases there are bodies of water recognized as "important" where territorial restrictions don't apply. Generally this is in cases where the body of water is the *only* access to an area (such as the straights of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, Straights of Hormuz, etc...).
Given this, it becomes difficult to justify parceling off space, so the next remaining possibility is one of resources.
Empty space isn't empty at all. Even interstellar space is likely to contain asteroid and planet-sized rogue bodies. You could, in this case, say "all the stuff in this volume of space is mine, whether I know about it or not." In this case, it becomes something akin to a country's Exclusive Economic Zone, which is much larger than territorial waters (200 miles vs 12 miles). But even in the case of an EEZ, international law permits any and all innocent passage through its waters, including that of military ships, so once again it becomes impossible to justify whole blocks of space being off-limits to ships.
With FTL travel though, it becomes possible for a ship to arrive at a destination before anyone has the opportunity to detect it. In Star Trek, this isn't the case because subspace sensors can detect FTL ships, but in reality it would be very hard to detect a ship at warp. With this, you can again make the buffer case, and say that no ships should be allowed to cross into my predefined box because they can get to my planets before I have a chance to respond. This is the one difference between seagoing navies and spacegoing FTL navies. If I send a flotilla of ships to your country through international waters, you have days, weeks even to act and prepare yourself. If I send an FTL ship to your planet, it could theoretically arrive there in minutes, making it more akin to an aircraft problem than a sea vessel problem.
In this case, rather than being like shorelines and international waters, your space territory becomes one of ***airspace,*** and airspaces must be relatively well-controlled. This allows you to make the case that any starship entering your space territory must be under the control of the local space traffic authorities, and a warship refusing to follow these protocols is one that is acting in a dangerous manner, which could be considered an act of war.
So to answer your question: The best way for this to work is to treat your space territory as an airspace, requiring that FTL ships be in constant contact with control authorities to ensure safe passage for all ships. After all, two ships colliding at FTL speeds would release an immense amount of energy that would likely create a black hole (Ek = 0.5mv2 after all, and velocities greater than the speed of light imply incredible amounts of energy involved). Any ships refusing to operate under local controls are thus a navigation hazard and should be treated as a hostile actor.
Your space-nation would likely need to organize these FTL airspaces into controllable lanes, ensuring proper spacing between ships in an FTL lane and safe distances between overlapping lanes traveling in different directions or at different speeds. In Earth airspace, there is a concept of uncontrolled airspaces, but in your FTL lanes, any FTL speed is likely to require control, so uncontrolled airspaces might be relegated to sublight speeds. Earth airspaces require 1000 feet of separation in altitude, and usually 30 miles of separation for aircraft at the same altitude. You'd probably want to increase your boundaries based on maximum FTL speeds allowed in a given lane, and have them set so that a human-equivalent-alien can react in time to avoid a collision at the speed given. Let's set this at no more than 30 seconds. Traveling Warp 2 in the Star Trek universe is 10x the speed of light, so at this speed your separation distance would have to be about 90 *MILLION* kilometers, or about half the distance between the Earth and the Sun. 0.5 AU sounds big, and it is, but in interstellar space you could have thousands of FTL lanes easily. You would probably want a central set of high-speed corridors with no-go zone buffers in between, then you can surround that with slower speed corridors, etc...
Given the dangers involved, there would likely be FTL no-go zones near planets to prevent accidents, and given that space gets less empty the closer you are to a star, it's likely the FTL/sublight boundary would be at the far edge of a solar system. You sometimes see this plot-hole come up in Star Trek, where actors will say things like "you want to go to warp *inside* a solar system?!" or otherwise imply that going to warp near large bodies is unsafe and undesirable.
Truly deep, interstellar space would likely be nothing but FTL lanes, as there's almost no reason someone would want to be going at sublight speeds there, but you would probably want "step down" zones the closer you got to stars, allowing ships to slow to lower warp levels and finally to sublight speeds as they get close to planets.
This is a little off in the woods from your original question, but all of this regulation takes up a lot of space, time, and money. It goes to reason then that each of the nations undertaking the maintenance and control of the FTL lanes in their space has a vested reason to claim sovereignty over that space, and that any ship operating outside of the rules established by the local sovereign is a threat to the local order, thus you have a reason for the boundary lines specifying ownership and governance.
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Besides all the other answers, there's the concept of *trade routes*. If your shipping vessels have to physically traverse space between destinations, you will want to have these trade routes.
Space isn't a complete waste of nothingness. There's plenty of things like black holes, various stars with dangerous radiation, hostile alien races, and more. Even in space, the quickest route between 2 locations is a straight line. Unfortunately, if you have a black hole directly between those two places, you'll want to go around it. You may also want to go around solar systems, since the space there can be a bit crowded and dirty with space debris when flying at "warp X". Yes, you can go "over" or "under" the objects as well, but sometimes a detour to a nicely exotic planet for shore leave works, too.
Maintaining these trade routes is key. There may be roving bands of pirates or scavengers which need to be defended against, but there also may be comets/meteors that need to be noted on maps. Keeping track of all this is part of "defending your territory".
If you can't move freely around, then it's not your territory and it's someone else's. They may set up tolls to cross the volume or simply commandeer the vessels, cargo, and personnel. They may just blow your ships up, without warning. These are all bad things when it comes to trade. You can't make money when your ships keep getting destroyed. You can feed or medicate your people if it's getting re-routed to another planet or system. You can't even go back to continue exploring an interesting spacial anomaly, planet, star, or whatever if someone else has decided it's "their's".
Setting up buoys in space, away from the trade route for an extra margin of safety, saying that this space belongs to you, having patrols, or even having a treaty with neighboring systems and it's just a line/plane/whatever on a star map are ways to make sure your ships are safe.
Trade routes are important for more than just your ships, too. Other civilizations might want to use them, potentially paying you money, favors, or items you need or want. Having a known and safe path means less cost and fewer problems for a shipping company and any governments involved.
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I think you have an underlying problem here: how do you define your borders?
On Earth, stating "the waters within 100 km from my coast are my economically exclusive zone" makes sense, because your coasts do not move with respect to the others (excluding tectonic movements).
In space stars and planet have different relative motion, so it will happen that borders will cross each other just because the reference points are moving with respect to each other.
That aside, space is empty, but has one valuable item: energy, in form of electromagnetic radiation (and dark matter if you can use it). If you put energy harvesting means in space, you don't want anybody else to cover them or to harvest the energy of your volume of space.
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A universe or galaxy with only one known polity, then I think your observations are very accurate. Under those conditions, occupying space would be useful for purposes of rendering aid to travelers between stars. Having a maintainable presence within some defined response time of a ship suffering a disabling casualty would be benefit society economically and socially by encouraging interstellar travel, communications and trade.
If there are pirates then it becomes even more important and the rescue vessels would armed.
If the galaxy has multiple polities and they are hostile, then I think you can add another reason for occupying space is provide a deterrent. To position forces that can interdict attacks or pose a threat to the opposing side that they can’t risk attacking. The Fulga Gap and the Golan Heights would be terrestrial equivalents of this idea.
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The other answers detail *why* you want to have well-defined borders, but are a bit short on *how* you actually control your space.
It all depends on the technology available. and you as the author can decide that.
First, if FTL is instantaneous, there is no point. Dune model applies.
If FTL takes time, but is *undetectable* until arrival, much the same applies. (Think submarines)
Interesting things happen when FTL takes time *and* there are ways of detecting it.
As we all know, Space is Big. You can adjust how Big space is by adjusting the *range* of your detectors. As the range starts passing tens of light years, space isn't so big anymore.
On the other hand, how far apart are useful star systems? If you have to travel hundreds of light years to get anywhere interesting, space starts looking big again.
The bigness of space depends on the relation between those two numbers.
The next question is how fast the detector sees things. If someone is moving FTL a light year away, when will the detector beep? Instantly, one year from now, or something in between?
Then there is the speed of communication. A detector has beeped. How fast can it alert the proper authorities? If you want a coordinated military response, communication had better be fast.
Where do you place the detectors? Obviously you want them near your colonies and on your ships. A colony detector can be bigger and more powerful than a ship detector. The ship detector is also likely to be disturbed by the ships own drive.
In many cases it will also make sense to spread out "detector buoys" which is a simple detector plus FTL communicator combination. They can't stop an attack, but they can scream before they die.
In short, it is all up to you.
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I want to use mana, used to fuel spells, as a [sort of currency](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/183482/magic-economy-using-mana-as-a-standardized-unit-of-currency). Basically you pay for items not with a fiat currency but with your mana, which someone may later use to cast a spell. I don't have a specific world in mind for this yet, I'm mostly trying to figure out if a system could be viable at all.
A person can store on their person the equivalent of roughly 100$ worth of mana before they become uncomfortable. There are coins in various denominations that act as mana batteries that you can charge with your ambient mana. The governments of the world regulate the manufacture of these coins to prevent counterfeit coins that hold more/less mana, just like they had to prevent counterfeit gold coins.
The key catch is that everyone produces mana all the time, just by existing. This has an interesting affect on scarcity if that much mana is constantly being added into the system. Presumably mana is being spent for casting spells at roughly the same rate as mana as is being generated, and thus added to your economy, by all the folks living in a country, though some inflation or deflation may be possible.
Could this system result in a stable currency? I'm giving a good amount of free reign to answers to adjust how this world's magic system works, such as how much mana a human generates relative to the current available mana in circulation, what kind of magic mana is used for and thus how it adjusts to supply and demand, and if there are other sources of mana besides what humans produce. Given that leeway is it possible to create a stable mana economy?
If it is are there any peculiarities to such an economy vs the fiat currency of today? What does it mean to be rich or poor if your poor are able to generate currency by their mere existence?
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### Characteristics of money / unit of exchange
Characteristics to consider:
Acceptable, divisible, durable, portable, scarce, and stable.
* Scarcity this might come into question since majority of the populace can produce mana. Then it matters how this rate compares to consumption rate. Based upon description there is demand to consume more mana that is produced each day. So mana is scarce.
If one could dial up the mana production per person and there was a point where it would supply all need and much of want. then it would start failing the scarcity test.
* Acceptable do people accept it as unit of exchange, since people generally want more mana then they can produce, it is acceptable
* Divisible can man be split up into smallest usable portion or grouped into large aggregates. ie able to trade 123.4 mana. Not explicit from description. presuming the 'mana coin' container can have various denominations or can somehow know contained amount.
* Durable, can a 'mana coin' be used in many transactions? Presuming the answer is yes, or at least the mana can be transferred to another coin.
* Portable can various units be readily transported. The 'mana coins' would fit this bill especially if there are coins that can scale to carrying million mana or above.
* Stable does it have same value over time. Mana fits this bill while more efficient spells over time might be created it would be reasonable to believe that a spell powered by one mana today will still be able to be powered by one mana hundred years later.
Another consideration that is why some commodities are not good money when considered in detail ie cows, grain or shells.
* Fungible is one unit of the commodity the same or as good as any other unit of that commodity.
### Conclusion
Yes mana would make a good money.
The primary concern is the scarcity of mana. So as long as the aggregate rate of production is below aggregate rate of consumption it is scarce and is usable as money/unit of exchange.
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**Consider mana as labor and you will see the system is fine.**
Suppose I want some of the fine decorated pants you make. I offer to pay you with my labor. I can only do so much before I get tired so I will pay you by doing work over a couple of days.
I make cookies, and fix your toilet. I brush the cat and clip its claws. Then I am spent, and so come back the next day. I make more cookies (you ate them all?) and fix the toilet again (too many cookies for you!). The cat shows up and gets more brushing.
On the third day I set out your collection of miniature anime girls in a fetching display, make some healthful granola brownies and brush the cat (who will miss me). You gratefully pay me with your embroidered pants which I promptly put on.
--
It is a barter system. We both use our labor to add value to things and we trade those things.
You could do that with mana. I put my mana to use adding value to the mana coin (does it have to be a coin? could it not be something more interesting, like a cookie?) and you later use the mana item to accomplish your own ends. Perhaps by eating it, temporarily charging your mana to more than 100 and then spending it all in a flurry of manariffic activity.
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## Money is printed but does not get destroyed. Mana is 'printed' with the intent of destroying it.
Imagine we would pay with electricity. All homes have generators (as you need electricity to buy food). Some homes don't use any. They just pay with it. Some homes have lights that use electricity. Some homes have even bigger lights. So big in fact that they need to work in order to get enough electricity to power them. Now maybe someone wants to do the biggest lightshow in history. They eat up all reserves of electricity and now electricity is scarce. You need to work more for less electricity.
The lightshow is over. Actually all lightshows are over because a famous influencer has said that candlelight is more beautiful than electric light (he gets a cent for every candle sold). Now there is more electricity than ever. For the same work you get a lot more electricity. Also it is worth less. You can of course still power things with it but the exchange rate of electricity to bread for example is now much worse.
## Your system would likely work, but have heavy inflation/deflation unless the magic use would remain constant.
By that I mean if the amount of mana spent daily remains the same, your Manacoins would slowly gain or loose value depending on if the amount spent is more or less than the amount generated. If it is equal then your currency would even keep its value.
But the appearance of a high mage that needs insane amounts of mana could impact the worth of your currency. Such a high mage that has been around for a while dying, would in turn also impact the worth. Honestly, that could make for an interesting story.
**tl;dr:** Supply and demand determine the value of your currency!
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# Only if stronger mages produce a lot more.
Gold and silver were not stable resources because you could randomly find gold mines and silver mines and massively swell the supply of mana. If you can just find a group of a thousand peasants and massively swell the mana supply with them then the value of mana is gonna surge up and down depending on how many people you can sway.
As such, the best mana producers need to be uncommon. Some people, perhaps from birth or from difficult training, can consistently produce more mana. They produce a substantial percentage of the total production, and are not easy to quickly generate. Mana would as such be a nice side income for the average person, but it wouldn't be worth just birthing huge numbers of humans for extra mana batteries.
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Yes.
The key condition is that demand for free mana is higher than aggregate supply of everyone's "just by existing" production plus other free sources.
It will have a price that makes demand meet supply.
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I could actually see this becoming a pretty interesting magic user-centric society. Perhaps more advanced magic users generate and can hold more mana, becoming the financial elite of this society in addition to their powerful magics. This would make it so that the common people who have no or very little magical ability make the least mana and are the poorest, while the elite are powerful magic-users. This would prevent everyone from making the same amount of money and giving you a nice clean social class system.
The only issue I see with this is paying a large number of people, such as an army or a large workforce like in a post-Industrial era corporation, but this could likely be subverted as a problem by simply having an extremely powerful magic-user at the helm, and/or ensuring systems of revenue are in place like taxes and profits. Additionally, since mana comes from people, this could imply that as a natural force it could be found in nature. Maybe mana extraction will be almost like the oil industry of your world, with the only difference essentially being that this is *etherial* gold, not liquid.
If you prefer everyone naturally producing the same quantities of mana, I could see this going two ways; 1, this leads to a classless sort of proto-communist society where everyone's needs are met and this currency is only used for the purchases of like luxuries or something of the sort, or 2, a brutal society in which great quantities of slaves are used as mana-cattle, feeding the insatiable appetites for wealth of a nightmarishly uncaring and ruthless ruling class. This could also take a slightly less grim but still brutal form, with this world's elite placing exorbitantly high taxes on its people to increase their own wealth and keep the poorest people poor and the richest people absolutely swimming in mana. Non-ruling elite could also maintain wealth by having workers, whom they take the lion's share of the profits of these workers' labour, in some twisted reflection of modern day capitalism.
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I think you need to refine the mechanics a little more before you can ask meaningful questions about it. And I have so many questions.
Let's assume the following:
* Rate: All sentients (and many Beasts) generate mana at varying rates depending on multiple factors.
* Capacity: Everyone has a limit (also varying between individuals) to their mana capacity and won't regenerate past that limit - no exploding if you don't 'spend' your mana.
* Transfer: Mana can be transferred between people at little or no loss.
* Storage: Mana can be stored in specially prepared objects, quality and size determining how much is lost, whether or not it leaks and maximum capacity.
* Restriction: while everyone can produce and transfer mana, not everyone can work with it well enough to perform magic.
* Purity: no fire mana here, just a neutral source of magical energy.
* Balance: you find some way to make this work as a system of economics.
The details of these points could get quite interesting. Regeneration rates might be affected by your health and how well fed you are for instance. Eating high-quality magical beasts might give you a boost to your regeneration, etc. Can you exercise your magic in some way to increase your capacity? Does mana have to be stored in constructed devices or can you produce crystalized or liquid mana that is stable and of uniform density?
What use does mana have to a person other than as a source of currency? It seems unlikely that we'd be constantly generating this magical power without some good reason for it. Surely it's useful for something in and of itself. Physical enhancement? Healing? What are the physical and mental effects of high or low mana saturation?
I know, I ask a lot of questions. But there's a reason for it. Well, let's call it a reason... it's certainly not because I'm trying to find a loophole, or expose a horrific consequence of the situation.
OK, fine, I'm a horrible person who can't help but look for ways to twist a system into dark and terrible things.
In this world where mana is currency and even the lowest beggar on the street generates it all the time, albeit in small quantities, all it takes is a tiny bit of greed and your whole world goes dark faster than dropping your last torch in an underground lake.
Let's start small, shall we? While small-time criminals will strip you of your mana in a back alley, the more enterprisingly nasty types will kidnap your entire family and farm them for mana. You're kept like cattle and drained constantly, so you'll never have enough mana to break free. Meanwhile your captors are living high on the wealth they're generating from your misery.
But hey, criminals, am I right?
Perhaps you're more concerned that the Evil Wizard (and there's always one) will raid your town, capture everyone and stick them in one of his generator towers, where your life force will be gradually burned to radically increase your mana generation, all to power his evil rituals. Or pay off his gambling debts. Or something. We don't really know his motivations here.
And don't even get me started on how this would affect warfare. Or pyramid schemes.
In an idyllic world where people like me didn't exist, this might work out OK. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bushel though. Or one well-meaning but short sighted person who thinks that his plan to create a better world is worth a little suffering by people he personally will never meet.
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## **Consider mana electricity**
I will expand the answer by [Willk](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31698/willk) and say that the mana can be considered paying by electricity. If - for example the mana can be used to fuel energetically intensive spell works (the shield defending the city, the alarm in the prison, the teleportation network, the industrial appliaction - smelters, waste disposal...anything done in our world by electricity can be powered by mana), then the demand will always be great IMO.
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I think this question is a bit hard to answer without more details on the limitation of magic usage.
The main difference between this 'Mana' currency and fiat currency, is that fiat currency is useless on it's own. It's value is derived entirely externally to itself. This changes a lot of the perceived value of the currency. Mainly that in moving Mana around, you aren't just moving currency around but also labor.
If there are 100 families and only enough food to feed 50, then you could be a billionaire and you still couldn't feed everyone. Some people will starve. But if you were the billionaire equivalent in Mana, then you could just 'magic up' some food and could literally fix the problem. Money doesn't solve problems, mana solves problems all on it's own.
Money has no value in being accumulated and stored away. It is meant to be circulated and invested in ways that will bring value to the community. Mana may have massive value in being accumulated and not used. If an enemy launches a magical attack at you, can they use accumulated mana to strengthen or increase the number of attacks? Do you need to use accumulated mana equivalent to the attack to deflect it?
What about using mana to generate more mana? On it's face, it sounds like investing. But investing is possibly profitable only if it generates value for the community, it's also possible to lose all of their money. It cannot be used to directly create more money. But can you use mana to create a mana making machine? Can you use it to create life, which will itself create mana? Or use it to create more 'time' which causes those under it's effects to create more mana? Or to duplicate mana battery coins?
The more magical and omnipotent the 'magic' is, the more divorced from reality as a currency it would be.
My guess is that you will encounter issues with having mana be the sole currency of a location due to mana's ability to have a value in and of itself. It might be better off to have a magic system with a defined scope and capabilities which is enabled by a mana currency and a correlated system of fiat or backed currency which is used to enable trade of non-magic related items.
Maybe people need food and nourishment to generate mana, but you cannot use mana to create food. It must be done with labor and time which is paid for with hard currency. Mana can be used to assist in the labor via plowing the fields and picking the food, but it does not create the food directly. Or magic will not create a structurally sound house, but a carpenter can use magic to assist with their work. They would want mana related to the mana expenditure and currency related to the usage of their time and skills.
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There is one big issue with this system - mana powers magic, which means that it is an incredibly flexible, useful, consumable resource. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what you want in a currency.
From a certain point of view, money is a token representing value provided or effort performed. Magic, presumably, can be used to perform useful work and produce resources. A mana-based currency system means that the easiest way for a person to gain wealth is to *do less work*. This is not a great situation for society to be in.
You can, of course, have people who pay other people in basic resources in order to use their mana to create larger magical effects. But since literally anyone can be "mana cattle" this would be pretty much the absolute lowest-paid job anyone could have.
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A seminal event in a story I'm working on requires a tragedy that will kill hundreds (or maybe even low thousands) of innocent bystanders. This occurs in a large American city (I haven't chosen one yet, and have no preferences as to which... if it is important to your answer, I can accept your pick as a constraint).
The supervillain is up to no good, but does not intend to kill anyone. He has no weapons of mass destruction nor any desire for that as a prime motivation. The superhero intervenes, and they fight. This fight can last awhile, if needed... the government has little ability to force either to stop (so we can figure they are invulnerable to some degree or another).
My first inclination is for a skyscraper to topple... but we all live in the post-9/11 world where we've learned a bit more about the extremes necessary to cause that. Perhaps we have learned a little more than we ever really wanted to know about it. I certainly have.
I don't think either of these superhumans will act as if he is burning jet fuel raining down from a high floor in a building for the better part of an hour. And it does not seem that a human-sized object of any density, being shoved/punched/launched through the side of a skyscraper could damage it in such a way as to cause it to fall. Are there any other superpower failure modes for large buildings that are plausible according to physics if impacts alone can't accomplish the trick?
Is this damage to the foundation of the building? Is it heat/energy applied to the steel frame of the building? Do the superhumans need to cause some change in some other building material? Are they slicing through it mechanically?
I have few details about the attempted crime because it's not essential to my story, only that the crime itself could feasibly succeed without much loss of life had things went according to plan. Heists, super-vandalism, doesn't matter so much to me (but it rules out super-powers like "the villain can kill people by thinking about it" since it'd be difficult for that to be used as I require).
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**Combatants are big.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lFN8m.png)
<https://maroonersrock.com/2020/07/ultraman-day-10-shows-and-movies-to-ease-into-the-franchise/>
Giant combatants always battle downtown! I used to work in Angel Grove, California so I know this well. And when you battle downtown buildings get knocked over because a good hard whack pushes kaiju and giant heroes backwards into buildings and then the whole thing falls down.
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**Throw him Through the Leaning Tower of Pisa**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yB9gF.jpg)
I have seen enough disaster movies to know that the aliens or asteroids always target beloved national landmarks. This is because (a) It is immediately obvious which city we're in and (b) They are old and easier to destroy.
You want to knock down a building full of people. But these new-fangled modern buildings, with their deep foundations and steel girder superstructures are hard to knock down just by throwing a superhero at it. You get a skyscraper with a hole and a big cloud of dust. If you are lucky the superhero hits something expensive on the way through. Like in Justice League:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTlsF.jpg)
So I suggest you throw your superhero at a more primitive building. The Leaning Tower is made of stone and has bad foundations. It might just fall over if you blast a hole through the base.
The tower then collapses on top of the adjacent Pisa Cathedral, smooshing everyone inside. The cathedral was full because it was a wedding. Now all those people are pancakes. The bride and groom. Their families. Friends. Well Wishers. The Choirboys. Even the pet dog!
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If we imagine that we have one of the combatants with a power similar to that of the X-Men character [Cyclops](https://x-men.fandom.com/wiki/Cyclops), who can shoot highly destructive beams of energy.
If such a character was to lose control of their destructive beam weapon while spinning rapidly in a plane tilted significantly away from parallel to the ground (45° from the horizontal or more), the damage done to a skyscraper might be such that the top portion would slide off the bottom portion despite any irregularities of the cut.
We even see such an event occur in one or more of the X-Men movies in at least two occasions, one in a school building, the other in a nuclear power plant's cooling tower.
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There could be Liquefactor (villain) and Reflector (hero)
Liquefactor has the power to send directional shockwaves that he can tune to the exact frequency that kills or destroys its target. Like an opera singer shattering a glass, or an earthquake [liquefying the ground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction) around the foundations of tall buildings.
Reflector can create a perfect shockwave reflector, that he can shape like a convergent, flat or divergent parabola. He can basically send back focalised shockwaves at Liquefactor, or deflect or disperse energy.
Both meet downtown in the daytime, and skyscraper sinking and falling is inevitable while they fight. By night Reflector generates a large 150m diameter parabolic mirror to act as a telescope and watch the stars with Liquefactor who also likes watching the stars through this amazing magical masterpiece of optics.
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If your story allows for the existence of anything as miraculous as superpowers, toppling a skyscraper doesn't have to be a strength move.
Your hero could cast a blob of self-replicating and destructive nanites toward the supervillain in an attempt to turn the evildoer into grey goo, only to hit the high-rise by mistake! Foundations turn to goo along with the steel beams!
Insert thousands of doomed office workers' screams here as the building falls over while the hero kneels, his own ragged roars of guilt choked off by his sobs. Or something like that.
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The Villian is a **"Last Avatar" Earth Bender**, he can **shape the earth** around him into projectiles, shields, earth elementals maybe. Maybe he's the advanced bender who can **bend metals**.
Against law enforcement, outside of cities he can use very little earth and metal to get the upper hand, but when forced to fight in an urban settings against a lot of super-firepower, desperate to hit his adversary below the belt, he'll use more and more of the **earth and metal under/in lower floors of buildings**. Being unused to doing so, he'll be surprised when buildings start crashing, but really for an Earth Bender this isn't much of a threat.
There goes the neighborhood!
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*I only saw after writing this that an [excellent comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/237665/what-sorts-of-powers-would-a-superhero-and-supervillain-need-to-inadvertently/237724#comment727277_237665) suggested the same kind of disaster. I've added some comments to address the OP's concerns about plausibility.*
>
> A seminal event in a story I'm working on requires a tragedy that will kill hundreds (or maybe even low thousands) of innocent bystanders. [...] My first inclination is for a skyscraper to topple...
>
>
>
*In case you're willing to consider other kinds of events:*
Supernatural weather conditions, power disruptions, or plant growth—or even just a super strong punch—could break a large, poorly maintained dam, like the one that holds back Atlanta's Reservoir No. 1, or the Willett Pond Dam near a suburb of Boston. You can refer to the dam's [emergency action plan](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6429723-Atlanta-Reservoir-2018-Emergency-Plan.html) for guidance on what might happen next. In the case of Reservoir No. 1, the [AP reports](https://apnews.com/article/ne-state-wire-us-news-ap-top-news-sc-state-wire-dams-f5f09a300d394900a1a88362238dbf77) that "If the dam were to catastrophically fail, the water could inundate more than 1,000 homes, dozens of businesses, a railroad and a portion of Interstate 75." In the case of Willett Pond, they report that "If the dam were to give way, it could send hundreds of millions of gallons of water into the heart of the city of nearly 30,000 people." This is really bad—and if the setting of your story has even more development in the path of the flood wave, the potential for injury will be even worse. City planners should try to prevent risky development like this, but they'll have little power to stop unscrupulous builders with city councilors in their pockets, or desperate people with nowhere safer to sleep.
Could the combatants plausibly cause this kind of failure? If the dam is already in danger of breaking, I'd imagine that a strong impact could set off a failure cascade. An especially dangerous situation, mentioned in the AP article, is when the water level behind the dam is too high, and problems with the dam's spillways make it impossible to let water out fast enough. This can lead to—and, unfortunately, has led to—spontaneous failure. The AP article also mentions other conditions—"leaks that can indicate a dam is failing internally; unrepaired erosion from past instances of overtopping; holes from burrowing animals; [and] tree growth that can destabilize earthen dams"—which I'd imagine could put a dam in danger of breaking even at nominally safe water levels.
The combatants' powers could contribute to a catastrophic dam failure in very subtle ways. For example, someone with power over weather might attract heavy rain around them while they fight. This wouldn't normally put anyone in danger, even during an hours-long fight near a reservoir; after all, the dam has spillways to handle flooding! If the spillways aren't working because of poor maintenance—or because the other combatant's electricity-disrupting powers have put the control systems out of commission—it might not be apparent until it's too late. As another example, a fight involving someone with power over plants could agitate nearby trees, causing them to shake and writhe. Tree growth, as the quote above says, can destabilize earthen dams—and some of the dams the AP read about were "so overgrown with vegetation that they couldn’t be fully inspected."
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Perhaps one of your super-combatants has some control over certain plants or fungi. It could be as simple as dropping seeds/spores around and spraying nutrient mixture where plants are desired. Perhaps the other combatant unwittingly has a power that accelerates or somehow enhances this plant growth. Perhaps the fight takes place during heavy rain.
Plant growth could cause a building to fail by exceeding the load bearing capacity of the building's material. I am not an engineer, but I imagine this could in rare occasions make the building fall to the side if the load is distributed unevenly, such as with vines growing on only one side of the building.
Alternatively, plant growth can cause building failure by displacing earth around the foundations or deflecting the foundations beyond allowable tolerances. Curiously, this failure need not happen at the exact same time as the fight; there could be weeks between the fight and the building failing.
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Well, one of the super guys throws the other guy right through a skyscraper. The trajectory is such that the thrown super guy cuts through one complete row of load bearing columns. Not good, if it is a narrow building - there aren't that many rows.
If the fight goes on, this may happen several times to the same building. Perhaps the evil guy prefer to fight near a vulnerable building - hoping to get away when/if the hero notices the danger. Which he doesn't do in time during this fight.
The building may have its own problem. Existing damage from other events (recent terrorism, fire, war, meteor strike, ...) or perhaps corrupt builders saved too much money on thinner steel and bad concrete. Maybe someone installed a way too big roof pool. The building is dangerously overloaded before the fight starts, and easy to bring down.
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Suppose there is a wandering starship that travels between the stars, bringing blackjack and hookers to every wormhole it crosses. This casino is like any other on a planet or station, except it experiences frequent gravity shifts and spends extended periods of time in zero gravity, due to its spacefaring nature and it’s captain’s reluctance to install centrifuges. This presents many problems, but the most notable one is playing cards. Due to the setting’s retro-future aesthetic, digital and holographic cards do not exist, and poker just isn’t the same on a bulky CRT display. With gravity shifting so much, how can the cards (or tables) be modified to allow them to stay put in a manner that preserves its iconic card shape (e.g. no protruding ridges), last a long time (no conventional adhesives), and be easily operable by those under the influence (no special “card slots” on the table)? Can they be lined with ferromagnetic dust for use on magnet-lined tables? Can the tables use active airflow to suck cards onto them? What other creative and elegant solutions would be of use here? Or am I overthinking it?
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# Magnetic board, metallic cards
Fortunately, you don't need to go further than 1963 to get your solution, when Norman Schuman filed patent [3,194,561](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/28/35/12/82a4ac1e1b5dc1/US3194561.pdf) at the US patent office.
By combining a magnetic table top with cards with a ferrous center filler between two paper/plastic faces, you get wind-resistant cards.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gxIEg.png)
Here is a real-world implementation:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oaO1k.png)
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When playing card games, the cards are in three situations:
1. Held in the hand
2. Being shuffled
3. Lying on a table (either individually or in stacks)
The first two mostly aren’t affected by freefall, but shuffling will be a problem if the cards stick to one another, magnetically or otherwise. Certain fancy shuffles need gravity, but skilful card-handlers can come up with freefall adaptations so that’s not a problem.
For holding individual cards flat, a vacuum table should work well with normal playing cards. To get a really strong vacuum hold-down, you would need to seal all around each card, but you don’t want them to be held too strongly anyway. If the cards are porous, it will even work for stacked cards, although I’m not sure an unsealed vac table would be strong enough to hold a whole deck of cards.
Realistically, I think you’d just have something like a bungie cord strapped across each edge of the table for players to tuck their cards under, and then some spring-loaded shoes in the middle for piles of cards, which would cover most games I can think of.
(If you google “CNC workholding” you will see a lot of solutions to similar problems, including details on how vacuum tables work)
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# "Smart" playing cards
We have an accepted answer for the *right* way to do this. But the nostalgic scenario means that the manufacturers will ask, *how would OUR society do this in the near future?*
The clear answer is the Smart Playing Card.
Take an ordinary paper card. Add 40 years of Moore's Law. A card is formally a communications device - it can display a number - so all the expected features of a cell phone are expected, even if it is hard to point to any specific *law* that makes them mandatory. The cards will contain at least 16 cameras, recording all angles; accelerometers; Space Positioning System receivers accurate to ten microns; multiple microphones; built-in fingerprint recognition on front and rear surfaces; terahertz beamforming antennae to upload their data to company servers in real time while imaging the surrounding room. The smart paper of the cards is audited by Digital Trust Us to ensure that it does not change and display a different symbol over the course of the game in a way that would be unfair, except as required by legitimate law enforcement processes or other considerations laid out in the Terms and Conditions.
To this, we need merely add some small actuators that can synchronize with the communications beams to move by interacting with their electromagnetic fields. A coherent terahertz beam (or any other radiation) will have a constantly changing electric and magnetic field, so by pushing off from it at the right times, the card experiences a controlled force. Playing cards are not heavy and it shouldn't take much to do this, and it's a good reason to explain why the terahertz scanner needs enough power to see through the privacy shielding on the conjugal bunks. (They are programmed to keep such information private on company servers, subject to the Terms and Conditions as updated in the most recent microsecond)
These playing cards are sleek, smart, they stay on a table where dealt regardless gravity, briefly turn blank if handled by an unauthorized user, report crimes and disagreements that may mar a gambling match automatically, and best of all, they are *FREE* because they are supported by carefully targeted advertising targeted to the specific user's DNA absorptions in the terahertz spectrum in a way that is completely anonymized from their name and official identity number. These helpful advertisements allow one-click access to gambling addiction treatment, bank loans, payday lending, organ and tissue research opportunities and more! But the cards display a traditional ornamental pattern once per millisecond so that any photography and video of this protected content permitted under the T&C will show a traditional-looking match without any of the ads, so that more relevant advertisements can be added in post. In-person audience members are strongly discouraged but not formally prohibited from using their Smart Glasses to screen out the ads in this fashion.
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**Card shoes and table clips**
Cards in the deck or discard are kept in shoes that are bolted to the table, so they'll stay put until you draw cards from it. Cards belonging to players are either held in their hand, or held to the table by a simple mechanical spring clip.
I'm not sure if the table clips violate the "no card slots" requirement, but I'll also point out that for certain casino games, drunk patrons would have no need to use them. In blackjack, for example, a player does not touch any cards at all, so placing cards in the clips would be entirely the responsibility of the professional dealer.
Even in games where players do handle their own cards, table clips would be very easy to operate, and casino rules about how and where cards must be played should already be strictly enforced. Every casino should already have a protocol for what happens when cards are accidentally or intentionally revealed at the wrong time, and failure to use the clips is just one more way that a card could be revealed illegally.
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Don't change the cards, change the ship.
It's not just the card tables that will have problems. Roulettes, dice tables etc.
Have the ship rotate on its own axis, problem solved. You can have a comfortable, constant 1G pull for all your guests and games.
This is so simple to do with even the cheapest lateral thrusters that there should be no excuse not to do it.
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The person in the story falls through a plot hole into the early 1800 years. Like, steam engines are still new and ineffective, but industrialization is nothing foreign anymore. Light bulb, car & bicycle are still 80 years in the future, electrical telegraph is 30 years to go.
History-wise, the "0th world war" (the seven year's war), is already history, same for the US independence war. French revolution is done, Napoleonic wars are soon to come and to be avoided as much as possible.
For some reason, the person gets a pre-warning, so they prepare. They travel to the best location where google says that there is the minimum amount of war, famine and disease, but the amount of freedom and available work force is sufficient to found an enterprise. Be it some African or american colony or some hinterlands of Portugal, Spain, Colombia... wherever nothing happens, people search for work and neither bureaucracy nor crime actively prevent it.
While they prepare, they also decide that it would be a great way to become rich if the humanity could shortcut the entire coal and oil burn down phase at the same time; so they decide to found an enterprise on electric applications.
He goes to the net and downloads a very good 2020-ish recipe for batteries, for making solar cells and a good dc motor. Prints everything on paper, adds a physics book to the pile and goes back.
Producing a solar powered motor for workshops is the most in-the-face obvious advantageous thing for small scale enterprises like smiths, mills and the like. However, despite the obvious advantage, I am not sure that I am on the right track here.
A semiconductor, any semiconductor, produces electricity as soon as light reaches it's surface. Silicium is cheap today and solar cells are the cheapest energy source worldwide because this material is used in many industries today - but there may be a problem if we have to kickstart the production out of the nothing. On the other hand, if you start it from ground up, it doesn't need to be perfect, it is sufficient if it works at all.
Same for the batteries. The biggest problem had been (and still is) the search for a good recipe. The production is as low tech as anybody can imagine - as long as you can get your hands on the material. Lithium is widely available; cheapest source is Chile of course because there you can find it in very clean form, directly at the surface. But if need arises and money is available, one could get it in nearly every place in the world. The recipe would be some variant that maybe can't store so much like the today's high-end batteries, but instead is very resistant/tolerant to in-current and out-current, overcharge and deep discharge, so that one doesn't need a sophisticated management system.
What would my person need additionally if I take the solar route? What would stop them from building their enterprise? Is that at all a realistic scenario, taking some knowledge and kickstart the solar age at 1800 or would I need a bucket full of other things I didn't think of?
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A bit of a frame challenge here.
*Solar electricity generation isn't going to be so easy to do without a whole lot of other tech which likely only comes along long after electricity is already a thing & by then it's too late & the vested interests in the power generation methods that already exist will block your entry into the market.*
*It's not enough that you know how to do it, you'll need a whole industrial infrastructure behind you before you can start developing it & by the time you've put all that in place you'll already have the 'wrong' sort of power generation systems established & already being copied by your competitors.*
So.
Wind not solar.
There's a lot of inertia in these things, if you can get in with small household generators & make them both ubiquitous & cheap enough b4 coal fired power stations really establish themselves you've got a chance at least that they & national grids never happen, something like [Halcium](https://www.halcium.com/)'s home [PowerPod](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3sSCwi4VJA) might do it.
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Imagine every household already has one of those & battery storage when coal fired power was first starting,
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It would mean fewer people would want to pay for their power to be piped in as they already have it than was the case in the real past, that reduced demand 'might' just be enough to make building the coal fired (& later oil fired) power stations & national power grids for electricity distribution an uneconomical prospect.
You're going to have to create the demand for them in the first place though, after all, if they don't have appliances to use the power why would anyone buy them?
So you're going to have to develop & market things like home lighting, home refrigeration, electric irons, washing machines & hoovers right alongside it.
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*As pointed out in comments home heating is also a big issue, so home heating is also among those appliances you should develop, maybe immersion heaters supported by home insulation & black pipe solar water heating, we probably need a real estate division for the multinational conglomerate we'll be building so we can get into house design & promote bio-home design philosophies earlier on.*
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That was stage one.
Now do hydro.
From there you expand into hydro electric & start building dams to supply locale industrial needs.
You've probably got a race on your hands against coal & you'll have to sink a lot of profits from the previous stage into it, but if you can get your methods fully established before coal power becomes too big you might be able to strangle it at birth & this will be the alternative (to coal) base for your industrial infrastructure that you need to get started on solar.
Again you will have to create your own market by developing things to use your power, various industrial machinery, anything that needs more power than a household wind turbine produces, you'll probably need to partner with locale industrialists looking to build new factories near your build sites, invent electric trams & sell trams & the power to run them to locale municipalities.
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You've brought in electric trams & you've now got the power for industrial production.
So you can now build on that tech & introduce them to cheap mass produced electric cars.
But you'd better make them hybrids that use alcohol as well because your batteries aren't good enough for long journeys yet & the fuel & power supply infrastructure to keep them running on electric (or anything else) just doesn't exist, so design them to charge overnight off those home turbines you sold everyone earlier & sell a line of cheap stills to go with them.
Get in before Ford & try to flood the market before he can get his petrol burners out there,
Who's going to 'buy' fuel when they already have their own home still providing 'free' fuel?
*With a little luck you'll kill prohibition dead as well, how do you enforce it in 1920 when everyone already has a still & needs it to run their car? they'd never even try.*
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You can now start on solar if you want to.
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*You're probably going to want to run interference on undesired developments as well.*
*You'll know where the fossil fuel deposits are, buy the land they're on so others can't dig them up, you'll know who invented fossil fuel technologies, hire them so you can redirect their efforts away from fossil fuels, & buy any fossil fuel tech patents so you can stop others using that tech.*
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*I think what I'm saying is solar probably won't suffice on it's own & even if it would there's a lot of things you should probably do first before you do solar, if stopping fossil fuels is your actual goal.*
*You'll have to build your technology infrastructure step by step, avoid introducing the technologies you don't want while you do & suppress their development by others.*
*But to be perfectly honest, I actually forgot what I was saying somewhere up there in all that lot :)*
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**Why?**
Solar is good in 2021 because it is sustainable and clean, and our world is dirty and fossil fuels are more scarce. But it is the equivalent of cutting your lawn by hand with a blade as opposed to a lawn mower. If you cant use a lawn mower because it is loud or you don't have gas that is fine. It beats using a scissors. If you have one and it runs, lawn mowers are fast and work great!
The energy density produced by burning stuff is awesome and for a long time (and still) stuff to burn is cheap. If you don't care about pollution and you have plenty of cheap stuff to burn that energy density will give you a huge edge over anyone using other kinds of energy, which is why it is so hard to wean civilization off of fossil fuels.
I am left wondering what your character is actually going to do with the solar power. Considering electricity generally, solar or otherwise, what applications in this period are best achieved with electricity at all?
That is going to be what makes your story tick. I am trying to think of an application for abundant electrical power in 1820 that will outcompete coal and steam. Your character will need that application too. Fertilizer production maybe?
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Photovoltaics are way too hard. Solar thermal, however, is doable. It's also comprehensible to the people of the era. They already understand thermodynamics enough to make a steam engine, and the idea of using the sun's heat instead of a fire is simple to get across.
What novel part you could bring from their perspective would be the use of a working fluid to concentrate the heat for use with the steam engine and store it for generation when the sun is lacking, along with a clockwork mechanism to make the mirrored parabolic trough or dish track the sun.
The economic argument you can make to them is simple: sunshine is free, coal is not. Once built, it costs nothing to run, just maintenance.
And all of this is before you introduce electricity! All those mechanical devices that ran off steam engines via mechanical shafts can do the same with your solar-thermal system. You're just making the steam from the sun. You can build factories in sunny places with neighbouring solar farms running machinery off the sun's heat.
Geothermal power would be similar, so long as you build in the right location. Wind and water are more for small-scale stuff prior to electricity (grinding flour being a common historical example).
Electricity opens up lots more options, but it's not strictly necessary.
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The major problem in the way of this would be the acquiring of materials and the precision of the manufacturing. My guess is that your character could start working on solar, but photovoltaic solar technology didn't really become usable until the space age. There is of course non-photovoltaic solar - stuff like doing it with mirrors. It would of course be inefficient however.
While solar would prove difficult, wind and hydro power are renewable energy sources that we've been using for thousands of years in some form or another. Find a way to build cheap windmills or dams (or get world governments on your side) and you can show that it is a "superior" form of power. Geothermal would also be an option.
The problem is, coal was cheaper than other forms of energy in those times, especially in Britain. If you're starting this enterprise from the very early 1800s, you can perhaps reduce reliance on coal, but there's also the problem of that there isn't a customer base for it.
Since you're starting at this point rather than the mid 1800s, you still have much of the world population, even in western countries, more agrarian, and they have no need for electric lighting, stoves, telephones, etc.
I know these are scattered thoughts, but I think that in some sense this is doable. A thing to keep in mind - make sure that your character has the capability to do these things. It is not enough to print out a design of a steam locomotive and take it to someone in say 1750. You'd need a whole BOOK of information on the process, and made so someone in that time could understand it. Even then you're bound to forget things like adding insulation on the locomotive's boiler.
What makes this difficult is the tandem progress of science and technology, all stacking upon each other in ways you wouldn't have expected. In some ways that can be frustrating, but in other ways it can be fun as it introduces unexpected results and conflict.
I'm sure that if you got to a certain point of success in exporting technology to the past many in power would take notice. Some would cry afoul. You might even think something that is an objective good would be praised, when a workforce might be put out of business with it, or they are suspicious of where you acquired this tech but don't have an acute understanding of how it works.
I'd recommend taking a look at the alternate history novel 1632 - basically an American town is transported to 1632 Germany in the middle of the 30 years war, and they begin rebuilding society. It leads to many interesting side effects.
Because this idea has been done going back to Mark Twain's *A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court* (your idea but going back to the middle ages) you might want to have something that stands out from the others. That however is only my personal suggestion and thought, not necessarily correct or important.
Wherever you decide to place your story will also have a big bearing on how this scenario plays out. In much of the world of the 1800s these industrial technologies were impossible to make. In areas of Asia they would cast out foreign ideas. Greater research in your setting of choice will help.
I hope that I was of some aid. I am however an armchair historian of the 1800s and of industrial technology, if you want more accurate information hone in on the specific setting, as I said, and on what technologies you want to insert into that time. Research the people's response to those technologies in that same place when they arose later, etc.
All of this may seem like side info, but when you're looking at the interaction of history and technology how people and machines interact will have huge bearings on whether your character is successful or not.
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There's a problem here: it has to be *energy positive* over a sufficient time period. The manufacturing process takes energy. The ratio of energy produced over lifetime to energy consumed in manufacture is "EROI", and [for modern cells is somewhere in the region of 10 but increasing](https://www.vikramsolar.com/eroi-of-solar-energy/).
If your homebrew system is not energy-positive enough then it cannot bootstrap its way up.
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Silicon wafers are used in basically one industry, the semiconductor industry, and are cheap because of the incredibly high production volume and also the gradual refinement of techniques. There are two things which determine the cost of wafers:
* how efficiently you manage the <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method> (energy intensive, requires careful process control at 1500C)
* how efficiently you saw the boule into wafers. They need to be as thin as possible, with as little material removed ("kerf") as possible. This is done with diamond wire saws.
While the description makes it sound straightforward, the industrial process control isn't, and it would require significant experience to improve the process to the point where you aren't consuming more energy to make the cells than you could get out of a 20-year life.
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I think this is a misconception; the manufacturing process is actually a pretty important part of the "recipe" for modern cells. For the time traveller though the Edison-era NiFe (nickel-iron) battery may be suitable.
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Does biomass count? Because if it does, and photosynthezing crops count as renewable, sustainable solar-powered energy, then this becomes far far easier (with the added bonus of allowing your MC to save a bunch of whales from extinction in the process, by driving the whale oil industry out of business quicker)- simply get your MC to start producing biodiesel (and/or biogasoline, or biobutanol), and bring along/identify a bunch of suitable cultivars. IMHO, the advancement of algaculture would probably be your/his best way to accomplish this, with a bunch of other benefits and byproducts (for instance, still allowing for a carbon-negative plastics industry); and it would also provide a low-tech, easily disseminable route to this desired outcome.
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'traditional' solar isn't *that* great for bootstrapping since it needs silicon and energy storage. In short, you're thinking like you have had a hundred years of tech and *you don't*
If I was going to bootstrap a solar based energy system - or more precisely a *renewable* energy system I'd look at a few technologies.
Rather than going 'straight' into battery powered storage, I'd look at a few fairly 'simple' ways to store power - reusing energy from water pumped up into storage tanks and the good old flywheel. There's even been [buses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus) powered by flywheels.
As for fundamental energy sources - water and windmills are technology used during this period, and while hardly portable, are relatively simple to bootstrap with existing tech. You can retrofit existing designs with generators and not need to reinvent the wheel.
The neat thing is, other than the actual generator - very little of this tech is 'new' other than how its applied.
If I was trying to do something fancier I'd try to invent a [solar powered](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_Stirling_engine) sterling engine - its a technology of 'that' era, and you wouldn't have issues getting 'decent' glass or polished metal in that era I suspect.
Its also worth considering a few applications of power once you've bootstrapped it
If you wanted a piece of 20th century technology that needed electricity, and was profitable - I'd go with [aluminium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium). Its a metal that was probably (more) than worth its weight in gold in the era, would help jumpstart your economy, especially if you didn't need to work out the process from scratch. I'd also want to figure out welding, which would also give you a massive advantage over other economies with tech like riveting.
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Idk, more like a comment
* What's needed for a solar powered past?
Answering this one - it needs easy low tech solution for that solar thing solution.
What can be an easy one, for great self sufficiency and such.
## Forests growing/cultivation.
Growing forests for shipbuilding purposes was a thing, as I heard, so growing forests was not a novel concept.
Trees are natural solar panel and battery in one package - and what one needs is just plant it. Maybe some basic works to maintain forest as well.
The idea of forests preservations wasn't there back in the days, and it had some bad outcomes - de-forestation.
Not a precise number, but 1 km2 of forest produces about 200 tons of fuel per year, dry wood. Which is equivalent to about 1 GWh of termal energy, or with 20% it is 200MWh of electricity. Or 1 km2 sustainably can feed a 24 kW power plant 24.7.365.
Not a lot, but easily achievable with 1800 technologies, and can be replicated by anyone with minimal efforts.
You wanna some higtech stuff then you can introduce plants cloning and selection in forest nurseries. It not necessarly required, as there are other similar approaches, more important is menatlity of processes, making a forest to be a factory, do those things on industrial scales in a systematic and scientific way.
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It is not a fully answer to your question. I am pointing you to some research I made my self 10 years ago. Problem was how to make electricity from solar power without make use of extremely expensive and fragile solar panels.Stirling engines.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plataforma_Solar_de_Almer%C3%ADa>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Dish_designs>
It was created close to your time schedule.
Like a curiosity: the wikipedia page on Stirling engines doubled in size since I last visited it.
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Do you mean a real/bad plot hole?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_hole>
I would like to include a bit more of information. With Stirling engines you can product electricity from sun light at night :).
I explain. Part of the light that hit the sun light reflector turns into heat. You can collect this heat using water pipes and store this hot water into a big thermos bottle. You can use separated light reflectors to specifically heating the water too. When at night you can use the stirling engines to generate electricity. Photo voltaic panels can not do that.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage>
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I'd not expect to fully bypass fuels — chemical energy is extremely dense, unbeatable as a way to take energy with you. Instead, fill niches where fuels won't compete with the *convenience* of power falling from the sky. These conveniences are more significant when power & oil grids don't exist yet!
Technologically, don't start from solar panels -> electricity -> battery storage, that relies on too much modern tech. Bootstrap from niches that are easier: the sun heats things ü•µ
* Solar cookers! Low-tech, easy to improvise, and attractive even now to a significant number of people, especially compared to foraging for wood to burn.
* Home water heaters. (Relevant after plumbing.) E.g. here in Israel they're standard on all homes and we get zero-effort hot water for much of the year. In the pre-electricity past when having a hot bath normally required burning something for half a hour, "install this system once and you can have a zero-effort bath on many days" is I think very tempting.
* Mirrors (or fresnel lenses) concentrating sun on boiler -> steam -> turbines. The end product doesn't have to be electricity!
+ Industrial off-grid uses? As you yourself say, small workshops that are closed at night might be best targets...
What about cloudy/winter days?
Well, burn something as fallback. I think the steam-engine parts are most of the price anyway, adding both mirrors and a firebox sounds not hard.
[bonus: you get a story that's both steampunk and solarpunk ;-]
+ Electrical power plants. At least for big cities that are too dense for direct solar uses by residents.
Obvious problem: how do you light up the city at night?
I don't know whether molten-salt heat storage was at all practical then.
Other low-tech ways to store energy overnight are gravitational — pull up weights, pump water to a high reservoir.
(Try to find problems with built-in storage — e.g. run city water pumps only during the day, fill passive water tower...)
Finally, burn something as fallback.
Another hard problem is tracking the sun... Linear parabolic trough designs are probably easier than central-tower?
* Food refrigeration was a life-transforming technology that was largely impractical before the electrical grid. And it doesn't require that much energy. Could you drive an indoor refrigirator from an outdoor solar engine long before electricity?
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> In 1878, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, Augustin Mouchot displayed Mouchot's engine and won a gold medal in Class 54 for his works, most notably the production of ice using concentrated solar heat. —– <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_refrigerator>
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The funny trick is you don't need energy battery for the night — make enough ice (or a better phase-change material) during the day and stuff can stay usefully cooled until morning.
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## **Stirling engines are just around the corner (invented in 1816)**
They will help **a lot**. If your character does historical research on their design, development and history he can dramatically improve their efficiency and patent those improvements. Linking them to solar thermal energy panels would make their use a lot more widespread.
That said you still have a problem. For all the benefits of 'green energy' particularity solar energy climate is a big issue. Southern Europe could benefit greatly, northern Europe which was where all the industrial development is centered far less! So improving windmill design for greater mechanical efficiency is also an option but also not the total solution. (Indeed perhaps nothing is.)
Lastly you could go with **bio fuels** (alcohol and methanol etc) but here again that requires the diversion of agricultural production from food production to fuel crops at a time when rising population levels in Europe probably wouldn't make their large scale use sustainable. So probably only suitable for smaller rural communities with the land to spare. One big plus however is though is that there was an enormous amount of animal waste produced by cities and towns of the time. That together with human sewage and crop waste is a readily available source of **methane**. So look at modern bio-reactor designs and the technologies linked to them for collecting & safely storing methane as well as engine designs best suited to running off it. And it is also a bad greenhouse gas so heavy industry on a national scale running off it is going to have leakages.
The basic problem remains though. There's a reason coal was used as the foundation of the industrial revolution. It's energy dense, was readily available right where it was needed and cheap to extract. That's going to be a hard combo to beat. So while you can reduce its dominance you may not be able to eliminate it entirely.
Best your character can probably do is introduce engineering improvements that 'make his name' and establish some of the technologies listed above so that they come into use while also publishing 'research' that points to potential of solar power, electrolysis (hydrogen) and other technologies so that their development is fast forwarded in time to meet oil head on.
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I have an... economic notice.
Why bother constructing all the high-tech stuff in the 1800s world when your character can simply *import* all that from our 2020s world? Sure, local construction would be better, but *a lot* of the technological toolchains is missing.
To take the less obvious: modern Li-ion cells need a microcontroller to be charged in a proper and safe manner. Even if they would manage to produce the actual cells, they might need to import the controllers from the modern world.
... but this is a very different kind of story, I fear.
Well, as we make it different, let's just cull the amount of dead dinosaurs down there. There are much more scarce resources on oil and gas in this world. Maybe, less coal, too. (But how does the steel production work in that would up to the "current" 1800s then?) So, they have no other choice, but to go green.
And, by the way, do they have Uranium? What about dams and hydroelectric plants?
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In a civilization with modern to near-future technology, are there ways so that a siege against fortresses, and eventually against cities itself, would still be required to properly conquer said city, or even be the most effective method? Are there ways to reduce the effectiveness of tactics in this setting that do not involve soldiers actively conducting siege warfare similar to the medieval era?
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Siege is still an element of modern warfare. If a faction wants to get in a city and another one doesn't want to let them in, a siege is the natural consequence.
We have had some famous examples in the recent years, just to cite a couple:
* [The battle of Stalingrad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad)
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* [Siege of Leningrad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad)
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* [Siege of Sarajevo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo)
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As additional info on what is so difficult with siege, look at the [siege of Montecassino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino): as long as the abbey was a no fight zone, German troops were stationed outside, and were a relatively easy target. Once the abbey was bombed and became a ruin, it became a wonderful hiding place for the German troops, who could hide and attack with much more ease.
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In principle, a siege is a strategy with the express goal of defeating your opponent through slowly attritting their forces.
With modern warfare’s application of combined arms — the tactical use of land, air, and naval units simultaneously to achieve a tactical goal — the pace of conflict is so fast that battles are either decisive and fast or forces keep their distant from each other.
But, Sieges are still relevant today in conflicts involving cities with civilian populations where the attacking force wants to take the city more or less intact without killing or at least minimizing the civilian population.
If the defending forces value the civilian population, they might abandon the city knowing the attacking units aren’t going to harm the civilians left behind. So no siege since the defenders would leave before they were encircled. The Russian invasion of Georgia can be interpreted as an example of this situation
If the defending forces don’t value the civilian population, then they can use them as human shields or as hostages. This causes the attacking forces to move slowly, house by house and street by street. The recent news showed this kind of warfare in the The Siege of Aleppo, and other battles in the Syrian.
I guess the same arguments apply to fortresses. But, unless a fortified area was needed to be kept intact, I would think attackers would destroy it with air power. And, conversely, if there was something in the fortress or the location of the fortress was in a key location to support future attacks on their opponents, then the attacker might try to take the fortress intact despite the expectation of high casualties on both sides.
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Presuming the attacking force has modern warfare of even today, a siege requires that there be some reason the attackers don't want to just obliterate the defenders. Or that they are having a hard time doing that.
If the attackers simply want to wipe out the defenders they can do this in short order. They can drop a huge variety of chemical explosives from [fuel air weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon) to [bunker busters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_buster). Any ordinary building with ordinary walls, doors, windows, etc., will go to the fuel air weapon. Any hard target with walls less than 6 meters thick will fall to a bunker buster. Even if the defenders are not killed outright, they will be buried under many meters of rubble.
If it's some extreme situation there is even the possibility of going nuclear. It would probably only happen if the attackers were somehow a coalition of nearly every nation in the world, and the defenders somehow drastically offensive to nearly everybody in the world. Offhand I can't think of a candidate. But it could happen. As a science fiction angle, maybe it's invading aliens and they have vile habits.
There must be some reason the attackers want to be relatively selective.
Perhaps there is a civilian population that is relatively uninvolved, and the attackers don't want to appear to be monsters for killing them wholesale. For example, the intended targets might be some small group of individuals that would be perceived as legitimate targets. Maybe terrorists launching missiles from a suburb. Or a defeated leadership after a war could have retreated to some stronghold in the middle of an otherwise pacified civilian population. There is desire to get the targets but not wipe out large numbers of non-combatant civilians.
Perhaps there is some value in the defense site such as historical monuments or buildings, famous works of art. Maybe it's a museum with many thousand works of art. Maybe it's a famed base of a religion, such as a major church or shrine.
Maybe the defenders have some other resource the attackers don't want to simply wipe out. The only son of the president of the attackers, for example.
Maybe the defenders have some suicide option. They have a bunch of bombs placed at key locations around the world, and if they get smashed to little bits the hidden bombs get set off.
Or, to go all science-fiction on you (since you added that tag) the defendants might have some counter measure.
Maybe they've got extra hardened bunkers. Perhaps they've got the local equivalent of a really good metal smith, and their bunkers simply shrug off the bombs. Or maybe they have some super tunneling ability, and they can hide 100 meters under the ground and pop up 2 km from the bombed location, take some shots, and hide again.
Maybe they've got some really good anti-aircraft gear. Maybe two or three decades of research on the [Iron Dome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome) has resulted in something that makes it very hard to hit a protected target with planes or missiles. Though in the quite near future that could probably be pretty much brushed aside. [Project Thor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) would see orbital kinetic weapons hitting the target at mach 10. It's quite a challenge to know what would stop that. It's unlikely that even a laser based defense could stop that, at least with next-couple-decades tech.
As to methods of siege, modern tech has provided lots of options. Depending on the nature of the target. Of course there will be some kind of surrounding to prevent additional resources getting in. There will be attacks on command and control such as electronics, radio equipment, etc. There will be attacks on any vehicles. There will be attempts at infiltration, to get intel, to open defenses, to perform sabotage, and to attempt to convince the defenders to give up.
We have also seen quite a few innovations recently. Playing loud music 24 hours a day to keep the defenders from sleeping. Chemical irritants that nudge right up to but don't cross limitations on chemical warfare. For example, dropping canisters of rotten egg gas. Bright search lights and laser beams shinning into the defender areas, both to obscure what the attackers are doing and just to be irritating. Radio noise to keep them from communicating. Enough electronic noise can even stop commercial grade computers from operating.
And depending on the nature of the defenders there may well be lots of other leverage. Do the defenders have relatives outside the defense location? Do they care about some religious site? Do they have financial holdings they are hoping to use after they get away from the siege? All of these could be threatened to good psychological advantage.
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By using the loose definition: **siege** - *cutting off an enemy's supplies and lines of communication*.
Then a siege makes military sense at all times, periods and epochs.
Once your enemy is not fully self-sufficient, you gain from cutting him off.
A siege will look different at various times. A siege will also vary in scale, depending on the period.
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Your question seems to me to be en reality two questions:
1- why anyone would want to capture a city
2- why just not nuke it, assault it and going forward.
* First, cities are often nodes in central communication networks, with railroads and major roads running through cities. These means of communication are very important for an army to maintain logistical supply. You simply cannot run thousands of trucks off road every days.They will simply make the road impassable. ([The fortress of Brest is a good example of a fortress that controls communication line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Brest_Fortress))
* Secondly, they are an area of population concentration. An uncontrolled city can be a danger for an army. But it can also be a relief for an army resting there. In the long run, most of the value produced by a country comes from cities (except for natural heavy resource extraction). To capture a city is to capture a population and economic assets.
* Some cities also have political importance and strategic assets such as political buildings, power generators, factories, airports.
* If a city is not of strategic, political or tactical value to an army, an army may lay siege to it to avoid being attacked from it. This includes the existence of alternative lines of communication. This was used by the Americans in the Pacific for example, they did not capture-recapture all the islands. Only the ones they needed to reach Japan and secure their line of communication or the ones with a political interest like the Philippines. The other islands controlled by the Japanese were isolated and/or bypassed.
Now, why besieging a city when you can storm it. They are several factors to considers:
1- Can you really storm the fortresses/cities? You can take inspiration from WWI or WWII fortresses that endured incredible punishment and held for months, such as Osewiec Fortress and Verdun. A mistake here could be very costly, the Germans think they can storm Stalingrad.
2- If you can storm the fortress, what will it cost you in terms of manpower and materials? Won't you lose valuable resources of the city?
3- How much time do you have? For the fortress of Brest, its capture was imperative because the German army planned to use its communication lines. For Leningrad, they decided they had time and did not want to risk a potentially costly assault.
4- The special nature of a city makes it a very difficult combat zone, with limited visibility, civilians (hostile, friendly or worse, unknown). Cities are places where you can set ambushes and traps, where a group of men can delay an unarmored column for hours using the cover of buildings.
If the defender is determined, and have enough force left to give a fight you can expect it to be very tough and costly combat.
They are two way of besieging a city:
Both imply to isolate the city from logistic. (no more freshmen, no more food, no more water, no electricity)
Then you have the times you can wait to starve to death, that can take some time you have an example of the success of such operation with the siege of [Siege of La ROchelle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_La_Rochelle); To work you need to cut off food and men supply totally.
The second option you don't have time, or you want to take it back ASAP but you cannot afford to storm it. This is what happened at Mosul, first, the city was circumvented, and then using support (artillery, air, drones, armoured vehicles) the troops made slow progress to gain small tactical gain. But even so, well-determined foes were able to slow their progress and inflicted significant causalities.
You also seem to be asking what can make a siege long IMO is the large supply or the ability to bring in supplies despite bypassing the city. And determination Soldiers under siege live a miserable life, to endure it and fight they must be very determined.
I hope my answer covers your question. I did not cover much the political aspect of it.
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Judging from recent history sieging is a problem. Yugoslavian war had almost 4 years long siege of Sarajevo.
Siege for Aleppo in Syria took time between 2011 and 2016 and although government stated that they control whole city there are still some fights on the outskirts.
Main problem with sieging is that you might want something from that particular place. It might have industry, control over port, banks or information, technology or the place is good for hiding and need to be control for defence purposes (like Tora Bora).
With modern and near-future technology you could limit the amount of soldiers. Self-driving drones, artillery that could be operated with limited staff. But you would still need some foot on the ground as the everchanging landscape of sieged city/fortress would require human-like abilities to recognize, adapt and react.
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Technically, the fight with the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups have included several sieges, if the whole wars aren't sieges in themselves.
When Osama bin Ladin was hiding in caves, Allied forces were in siege mode. They tried to prevent supplies from entering the underground tunnels, prevented reinforcements from entering & exiting, and didn't simply just destroy the tunnels with large ordinance. Part of that is because of how fortified the opposing forces were (since they were using mountains as strong points), but also because they wanted to minimize civilian or other non-combatant casualties.
In all reality, those forces had access to missiles that could have been fired into the cave openings and detonated far into the cave, causing a shock wave that would have killed everything in those caves. Allied forces did use some of these missiles, but not as often as they could have.
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1365479/Intelligent-missile-used-against-bin-Laden-caves.html>
American and Allied forces have essentially occupied Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade. We are working with those governments to ferret out terrorist groups, even going door to door to try to get rid of them. We have set up blockades at entry points in various cities, as well as fought against opposing forces in walled palaces, waiting for them to run out of food, water, and ammunition so we can either dramatically enter with little opposition remaining or they eventually surrender.
While this has had large and small scale battles throughout the War on Terror, it's still had the effect of cutting off supplies and reinforcements to terrorist groups. At the same time, over the past several years, we've also been rebuilding what we've blown up or tore down.
We've also replaced what the terrorist groups destroyed. Before Saddam Hussein took power, Iraq was at about equivalent to 1950-60's American culture, with cars, movies, clothes, education, and more. After he got into power, he sucked the region dry to accumulate his wealth, so not all of the damage was done by warfare, but I'm getting off the subject here.
So yes, sieges still have a tactical use in warfare. They allow a more gradual overtaking of a city than just flattening it.
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Sieges exist in modern times because while there is no fortress wall that the attackers can't get past defending infantry shooting from ambush in a city is extremely deadly to the attackers. Taking a city by force of arms is a bloodbath that will cause big troubles back home for the invader.
That leaves either flattening it from the air (bombs or artillery) which will also cause considerable upset, or a siege.
For near-future flattening it from the air might not even be a viable approach.
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Sieges make sense when:
* The location is a MacGuffin, so bypassing it is useless or impossible, or
* Some person(s) in the location need to be captured alive, or
* Some thing(s) in the location need to be captured intact
and
* It is possible to both hide deep enough to survive artillery or bombardment, but get back from shelters to fighting positions fast enough to resist assaults that occur immediately after bombardment ceases, and
* It is much easier to resist a frontal assault than successfully attempt a frontal assault, and
* There are critical supplies (such as water, food, fuel, ammunition, or mana) that can run out, and
* It is possible to stockpile the critical supplies, and
* Counters (such as bazookas or rocket propelled grenades) exist that can be used in tight quarters against sturdy offensive weapons (such as tanks), and
* It is possible to defend against poison- and germ-warfare attacks, and
* It is possible to defend against oxygen-deprivation attacks, and
* "Nuking the site from orbit" is "off the table".
These criteria set up conditions where infantry are required to successfully advance through the target area to root out sheltered fighters, but where frontal assault is impractical. A siege can force the defenders to use up critical supplies, so that the final assault is against a much-weakened defense.
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So, this takes place in a post apocalyptic world, within the borders of a government called the USC. 30 miles north of The Junction (modern-day Bakersfield) is the JSCF, or Junction State Correctional Facility.
About 2500 prisoners are held within the JSCF. The JSCF is used as a punitive labor prison, where convicts are used to do public works projects, such as building roads and railways.
The USC wants to use the smallest amount of guards they can, to cut costs. So, my question is how could a labor prison be run in a way that minimizes the amount of guards needed to run it?
The current technological level is near that of 1890s America, and the USC has considerable infrastructure
Basic layout of JSCF (please tell me if it isn’t realistic)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/p3LMj.jpg)
I just wanted to remind everyone, USC aren’t monsters. No abusing prisoners human rights
<https://www.worldanvil.com/w/after-doomsday-dattawan>
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### Turn prisoners into managers
Many societies across time have used this tactic (Romans for one, Nazis and Stalinists for more modern/malicious examples). Find the prisoners who are willing to enforce rules on other prisoners in exchange for more rights/luxuries/privileges. This creates a type of managerial oversight among the prisoners themselves. It's better to manage than to labor.
### Extreme rewards and punishments
Any small violation of rules is enforced *brutally*. Beatings, tortures, etc. Snitches are rewarded handsomely with accommodations and protection from guards. This keeps prisoners looking for relief an easy way out of their rough situation: betray someone acting out. This type of regulation also keeps prisoners from trying to group together or make a consolidated effort at rebellion.
### Group rewards and punishments
If a road or building is constructed well, everyone is rewarded with a day off. If *one* person makes a run for it, *everyone* in the group has to work through the night. This reinforces the idea of group obedience.
### Keep prisoners occupied
Wake up, work, sleep. Repeat. Give them neither time nor energy to think about anything except their labor. Just enough food to get the work done, and only at the end of the day when they finish the labor. No lunch breaks. Keeping prisoners hungry and desperate for "one more meal" will deplete resolve and eliminate any practical hope of escape.
Although this also breeds intense resentment, there should be a clear path to eliminate or minimize their suffering. Snitching on others, pursuing management over other guards, and performing good labor are simple, safe, straight-forward paths to make their situation better. If there is no (reasonable) hope of escape, but clear paths "up" by turning on other prisoners, then prisoners will pursue those options. Make extreme examples of those who don't.
All these together allow for a few, well-organized, intensely brutal and malicious guards to control a large number of prisoners.
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Inmates are the guards. This is the **Trusty system.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusty_system_(prison)>
>
> The trusty system had designated inmates used by staff to control and
> administer physical punishment to other inmates according to a strict,
> prison-determined, inmate hierarchy of power...
>
>
> The bulk of guarding and disciplining of the inmates was performed by
> inmate trusties. They also performed most of the administrative work,
> supervised by a few employees... Essentially, the trusties ran the
> prison system. Highest in the prison inmate hierarchy were the inmates
> armed with rifles, called the "trusty shooters." Their job was to act
> as prison guards and control other inmates on a day-to-day basis in
> the residential camps or out on the field work crews. Next came the
> unarmed trusties who performed janitorial, clerical, and other menial
> tasks for the prison's staff. Simple tasks, such as distributing
> medication, were carried out by other categories of inmates such as
> "hallboys.' Inmate trusties enforced discipline within the prison
> inmate living quarters (16 different residential camps) and in the
> work camps and farms.
>
>
>
Prisons using this system did it for exactly your reasons: limit required paid employees. Trustys were chosen as people who would recognize when they had a good thing going and not screw it up. Oversight was not a priority. American prisons in the South had to quit doing this this way in the 1970s but this system is still used in other countries.
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Other matters, such as the importance of keeping the prisoners busy, have already been mentioned, but we've overlooked a historical consideration from 100years before your requirement.
# The [Panopticon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon)
Designed by the late great [Jeremy Bentham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham) of being stuffed and sitting in the halls of UCL fame. The principle of the Panopticon is that a single guard can see into every cell in the prison from his vantage point. The idea was simple, to maximise the effectiveness of a single guard in a prison situation. Now of course we'd do that with CCTV, but that's surprisingly ineffective. Design your buildings such that there are no dark hidden corners and everything is visible from a small number of central locations.
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**One Guard**
All you need is a warden to make the decisions and an automated system. Prisoners have obedience collars. Door are remotely operated. Cameras are everywhere and everything is recorded.
If a prisoner plays up the collar can do everything from an electric shock to blowing their head off.
Should a collar be removed, other prisoners can be employed to capture/execute the escapee through the threat of their own collar.
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You already have a funnel. To me your biggest flaw is that your guard station is within the prison itself. If you positioned 2 guards (one necessary and the other as backup) at the funnel behind a door, then in theory you wouldn't need more. But your drawing doesn't make mention of what the clinic is, or really any of the rectangular identifiers.
Your governing process would be more important than the number of guards. You could have 40 guards and run the place badly and it would fail.
If rearranging the prison is possible - you did not say the prison couldn't be expanded or redesigned - you could move the clinic and guard station behind the funnel door, in a transient hallway, leading to an exit funnel that has no way to cross a hellishly deep and wide moat except a draw bridge from the other side.
If the clinics and guard stations had doors to both the main area and the hall, they act like a butterfly catch that prevents them from going through by way of one door not being allowed to be opened until the other is closed. Not beyond 1800 american technology.
Your kitchen is cut off except the service windows in the mess hall within the main room. Kitchen staff cannot interact with guards based on how you designed the food slot system. Use your imagination there, but I was thinking like a McDonald's burger queue. Slide it down a 20 foot pipe and your cooks never see the prisoners. No point of escape there.
All dorms are open so visual check is possible from the guard station across the way. Guards never need to interact with the main room. not even to break up a riot. Your governing system keeps them in check by threatening to lose food privileges or whatever else you want to leverage to keep them relatively sane.
So you have one guard in the guard station at all times. Another guard to accompany a doctor or whoever may need them without the station guard being away from post.
The draw bridge is only lowered by the convoy system that is used both for switching shifts or bringing in new prisoners, which go through the incoming butterfly trap so no prisoners can escape while new ones come in.
If your process was strict, and made sure of a couple things - at least one guard in the guard station at all times, only one door is ever allowed to be open at a time, never enter the main room, etc - you could conceivably run the prison with only 2 guards per shift. 3 shifts minimum. That would not include whatever convoy you have in place for shift management, which would presumably be in control of the elaborate draw bridge handling. But that's really just in the details.
Then you have to consider things like emergency cases where the guards need to flee, evacuation, communications, etc. But that's for another question.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qwZxn.jpg)
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If you can build deep within a mountain somewhere with only one way in or out, then guarding the facility would be easy. This would imply you have zero regard to what the prisoners do inside. If 2500 go to sleep and only 1000 wake up, then so be it.
In this scenario, the prisoners would be responsible for their own care. food and resources are delivered remotely, maybe via rope through a vertical shaft. The prisoners would have to distribute to goods amongst themselves. Now the goods are delivered proportional to the labor the prison provided. So if a prison gang wanted more goods, they would need to organize working situations for the others to maximize their profits. What does the guard care, if the gangs kill everyone else, or they starve to death, they get more "prisoners" to replace them until they start producing to requested labor.
The work they do in the community would be were the large number of guards come in. Maybe, to whom ever the prisoners are working for take responsibility of the security of the prisoners, it would reduce the labor cost of the prison itself. For example, corporation A rents the labor of 25 convicts. They provide their own guards. They receive 25 convicts, pay for 8 hours or labor and returns 25 convicts, or corpses.
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[
The Hegemony has a global (technically interplanetary currency) known simply as the Hegemony Credit. Unlike some currencies the credit does not have smaller denominations only credits. In theory the lowest possible price is a single credit.
However the Hegemony still promotes and allows the usage of local currencies. For example: the peso or the yen.
Would having both a single state currency while also retaining regional currencies have any benefits. If so what kind of benefits?
Notes:
Within the Hegemony regional currencies cannot be used outside of their designated region.
The Credit is the only currency able to be used to be things like: taxes or fees. As well as paying for goods across regions. Everyone must also be paid in credits or equivalent value in a regional currency.
Space colonies could also have their own currencies.
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## Easy Integration
The only way you are going to get anything done as an intergalactic bureaucracy is to make things as streamlined and efficient as possible. Otherwise your Hegemony is going to collapse under the weight of its own red tape. Therefore, it is actively in the Hegemony's best interest to leave the low-level running of a member state hands-off, and only regulate the integration points with the rest of the empire.
Think of your member state as a black box. You don't care what happens inside of the box, you just care that the interface with it does what you expect. In the case of your Hegemony you want to make sure that taxes are collected and goods are bought and sold using the standard credits currency. As long as that is true, what goes on inside the box doesn't matter to you (mostly).
What this looks like for each member state is that the local economy works almost exactly as it always has. No strict need to remove the old currencies or do anything else to shake things up. The local government will still collect taxes from it's citizens, and some of those taxes will go towards the Hegemony. All they need to do is exchange that share from **Local Currency Dollars (LCD)** to **Hegemony Credits (HC)**, using some standardized rate that the Hegemony manages. The same thing happens with inter-state imports/exports. Some good or service costs X HC, and people will know what that translates to in their LCD.
## Practical Example
If I want to import a good that costs 10 HC, and the exchange currently says that 1 HC = 10 LCD, then obviously I need 100 LCD to make that purchase. If I get paid in LCD then I would first need to exchange my currencies to HC (which may have extra costs associated).
This is really no different than the kind of currency exchanges that we have here on Planet Earth, except that we have a handful of major currencies (USD, Euro, Yen, etc.) instead of a single universal currency that everything can be mapped to.
A similar process would happen for the local government paying taxes to the Hegemony. If the government owes 1 million HC, then it would need to collect the equivalent of 10 million LCD (or whatever order of magnitude makes sense for a planet-wide tax).
## Lego Empire
The nice thing about this set up is that it makes it incredibly easy to add new member states to the Hegemony. All you need to do is figure out what the exchange rate is between HC and LCD. After that everything is pretty boilerplate. Imports get paid for in HC, exports get bought using HC, Hegemony taxes are paid in HC, and everything else is left as-is. There is a little more work for the government to perform managing things, but the average person wouldn't have too much in the way of adjustments.
This also makes it really simple to travel between member states because you always have a standard currency to fall back to. I can turn my hard earned LCDs in HCs and then use those anywhere in the intergalactic empire.
The Hegemony also gets a very strong leverage tool in being the sole decider of every exchange rate. If you need to apply pressure to a member state then even just the threat of devaluing their LCD could be enough to keep them in line. If your LCD is suddenly worth less then your *entire planet* is now poorer and has less spending power compared to other member states.
Favorable exchange rates could also be used as an incentive for new members. Join up early and get locked into a low rate that gives your entire economy a boost. Take too long to decide or try to play hardball and instead you could be given a higher rate that devalues your LCD and causes a planet-wide depression. Don't join at all and you won't have access to trade goods at all. A black market would still exist for any group that didn't join, but it would be inherently more dangerous and expensive and less reliable than the legal route. And the more pieces you add to your empire, the more incentive the next guy has to join up as well.
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Benefit: the Hegemony can use this to get its vassal states to bend the knee and keep it bent.
Argentina won't pass the law to allow the Hegemony to draft citizens from it? No problem! The hegemony will spend six days buying every other peso available in the market, causing its value to soar. That may sound cool to Argentina at first but quick variations in value are bad for economy. Then, on the seventh day, the Hegemony floods the market by selling all the pesos it bought and then some more for a ridiculous low value. Watch the country crash.
Even better, that wouldn't be the first time the Hegemony would use that tactic. If it has a history of doing so, then by the time the Hegemony announced their plan to buy pesos, every single person with more than a couple bills in the wallet and a sense of self preservation would know to move to another country more aligned with the Hegemony ASAP.
You can't use this tactic if everybody is on the same currency.
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Speed.
Charles Stross has an extreme example of this in Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood, with "fast" and "slow" money.
If you don't want money to be bound to physical tokens, you need to avoid the same money to be spent twice at the same time, so you always need confirmation from the bank or other institution that maintains the account, and this cannot be done sensibly over only a few lightseconds distance, so local economies need to be decoupled from interstellar trade.
Over vast distances, there is also a need to keep the value of the transferred money stable during transit, which is another reason to separate the local economies.
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Currencies can serve as a **form of investment**, since the inflation rate of the individual currencies can be controlled independently. For example, should the local currency be doing badly, people might invest in the global currency before buying back the local currency. That is, unless the local currency's value is tied to the global currency.
They can also allow the **local authorities to have a level of independence** with their economic policies without having 'tourists' needing to exchange.
The currencies may also have a **historical or cultural value** which may be a result of conservatives or the goodwill of the ruling nation.
A more practical use would be for **finer currency**, since a unit of global currency may be worth hundreds of a local currency. This would allow locals to trade in sub-credit numbers, potentially allowing to *make a profit* from selling sub-credit goods for a full credit on the global market.
I would recommend doing some more detailed research on currency exchange should you find the time, some interesting facts may give you additional inspiration.
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Such a system would be very much akin to how most online stores and F2P games work. What it gives you is a single value to assign to certain key goods. Think military hardware, munitions, critical electronic components, fusion reactors etc.
These are key things the Hegemony wants to remain in control over. They'd ban or heavily tax local production to bring it in line with their Credits. There might be a thriving black market of knock off goods. Think what key components does the Hegemony need to keep their people in check? Monopoly on FTL drives?
The local currency allows you to run an alternate economy. You want to do this if the region has a much lower GDP. You want to bring things in line with the local wealth. Think of food, medical supplies, etc. This could be seen at frontier planets that lack a sophisticated industry. They can't economically compete with the core worlds.
So dual currencies allow for a gap in wealth without outpricing basic goods for the poor.
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You know how to easy win people over? Pay them.
The conversion toward "credit" may always be in favour of local currency. People love when they get THEIR faces on notes and eagles or other aviaries on coins. and the conversion is always in their favour. It's so good to have such stupid hegemony that allows to scam it. Like taking pens from your corporate jobs.
But it's the hegemony that dictate the conversion rate. Your planet, colony, continent get rough? Good luck buying stuff from outside when you are pushed into super-extra-mega-hyperinflation.
Also you want to leave your planet? You change your money to credit and you leave the trace. Like a bitcoin but in reverse. The owner is not known but the money is always traceable and can be simple tied to any operation they do. Like buy ticket.
While using local currency don't clutter the system and leave local authorities to deal with such things on their own.
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It would help fund bureaucracies. If different local areas don't take funds from each other then travelers need to convert their currency. The organization that runs the Credits can then charge even a very small fee for the currency conversion. Over several transactions, that makes a decent amount of money.
Also, the holder of the credit is able to use its meta knowledge (it knows the instant value of a local currency changes) to its advantage. If a local currency goes down in value, simply by delaying that value change for those buying the local coin it can scrape off a bit of extra percentage for itself.
They can also "double deal." Double Dealing is when you tell your broker to buy a stock and the broker makes two transactions for that purchase. If the stock is volatile (going up and down a lot), the two transactions will likely come through at different prices. The broker then gives the client the worse deal and keeps the better deal. Lets say that a stock is trending upward and you enter a transaction to Buy at \$x and to sell at \$y. You are not guaranteed to the prices you want, the brokerage places the order when the stock reaches that price. So, if the stock is moving quickly, it may be higher than \$x when you buy. The brokerage then buys two lots at \$x and passes the one with the higher price to the client. At selling, it does the same thing and passes the one with the lower price to the client. The broker then makes a bit of profit on both ends.
The currency broker can subtly keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Through favorable transactions. The rich people (who, presumably, are allies of the brokers) get their transactions pushed through first whenever their transactions come through at the same time as a smaller player. One presumes that the brokers get other favors in return for this service.
Then there are the dirty tricks that others have mentioned here.
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I'm writing about a human character in a medieval fantasy novel, named Gaheris, who fights exclusively with a short spear. This spear is 180cm (71 inches) long and Gaheris is 190cm (75 inches) tall.
Since Gaheris travels all over the country, walks forests, goes into marshes... it would be easier for him if he could use his two hands at all times. But then, how can he carry his spear ? Probably in his back but how would it be attached ? With the spearhead up or down ? Does something like a spear-sheath exist ? And how would he "draw" his spear ?
If you think carrying a spear in the back is not possible, how would Gaheris climb up a mountain in your opinion ?
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# Completely non historical answer :
It seems that the most convenient way to transport a spear is [on the back/on your shoulder](http://basiclarp.blogspot.se/2013/01/how-to-make-larp-spear-shoulder.html). With a string tied to the upper and the lower part of the spear, you just pass your shoulder between the string and the spear and you are good to go. You just have to lean a bit to go through doors. For walking in the forest I think holding the spear with at least one hand is better to avoid to stuck it in a tree.
Or you can make a [convenient cover](https://vetosports.com/images/products/avj-b06.png), with two straps to use it like a backpack. But it is really less convenient if you have to use it quickly to defend yourself...
But depending on the technology used you may make it [telescopic](http://www.bladehq.com/item--TOPS-Trailwalker-Tool-TTT-Spear--28476), it would be much more convenient to transport. If the weapon is the main one of your character it could be unique and customized, and a telescopic spear could be really cool.
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As a [HEMA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_martial_arts) practitioner:
Use it like a walking staff. Walking staves are useful, both for traveling and fighting! This one just has a pointy end. It's about the right size for a walking staff, too. (Although a little short for a quarterstaff or two-handed spear.) If the pointy end is a concern, it can be covered it in some leather, making an effective "scabbard." This runs into the problem of rendering that pointy end unavailable for immediate combat. This, of course, may negate some of the advantage in carrying such a short spear.
This scheme runs into a problem if the opposite end has a spike. This is more common with halberds, but it could happen with a spear, as using the blunt end is suggested in multiple manuals, such as [Fiore de'i Liberi's "Flower of Battle"](http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fiore_de%27i_Liberi), and were sometimes not so blunt. In the case of one end being very pointy with smaller but still pointy other end, the spear ought to be carried over a shoulder, placed on a cart, or placed on a horse. Let's not destroy that pointy end!
People have occasionally covered the blunt end of staves and spears with metal, which prevents the wood from splintering at that end. This increases the durability of the blunt end in battle and everyday use. Really, though, the spear shaft is fairly easy to come by; it's the head that's the valuable part. If the spear must be abandoned, save the head.
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Medieval people didn't carry spears in general on a day to day basis, but if they were to use a spear on an "every day" basis they'd carry it on their horse. If for some reason they didn't have a horse they'd carry the spear in their hand and possibly use it like a staff.
The link in EngelOfChipolata's answer of a backstrap would never have been used and is a completely fictional thing that LARP and fantasy creative types came up with that is void of reality.
It may be that this character is carrying a special spear type weapon used for 1 on 1 fights which is designed differently than you average weapon. If that is what you have in mind then he might use, as suggested above a collapsible iron spear, designed much like today's collapsible weapons, but with different grips and overall worse iron. This would drop your weapon length to at least half size or smaller depending on the craftsmanship.
Just to be clear, you'd never carry this weapon on your back, but if you did you'd carry it point up, same with on your hip. The reason is while they have the tech to make something like this it was still not very reliable due to lack of science and lack of standardization. The most likely way to carry this weapon would probably be a horizontal back sheath or an upper leg sheath that is specially fitted to the blade head (point down), so that it's open, but holds it from falling down if something happens.
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None of these may be what you want, but you did say fantasy, so I figured we should cover all the bases. It might help your story if the spear isn't always getting in his way, and sometimes a magical solution is better for the tale than a a real-world solution.
Bag of holding. Telekinesis. Give it to henchman to carry. Holstered in his own collar bone (see Woundhealer by Fred Saberhagen). Let it sprout wings. Make it telescoping (a la Babylon 5 ranger staff).
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With a simple locking mechanism, this simple design should suffice:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hc289.jpg)
[Answer]
## Give the Spear a Sauroter
PipperChip has the right idea about using it as a walking stick, but kind of dismisses the metal spike on some spears as a problem, when it is actually the solution. The metal spike is called a sauroter. It was invented around 400BCE at the height of the Hoplite revolution after Greek armies transitioned to mainly infantry forces. These armies often had to walk for very long distances with their spears in hand; so, the sauroter was designed to facilitate this.
While the Sauroter is often described as an "extra spear tip" this does not appear to be its primary function at all. Greeks already carried backup weapons (a xiphos or kopis) for if thier spears broke so an extra spear tip would be a silly amount of redundancy, and harder to bring to bare. Furthermore, the spike on the butt of the spear was very different than the spear head. While the spearhead was typically a light weight, thin blade of steel, the spike at the butt of the spear was much thicker, heavier, and made of bronze or brass. It was also blunted as you can plainly see in better preserved examples of them suggesting it was not meant to be used as a stabbing weapon at all.
This choice of metal and design suggests that it was instead made to be able to plant into the ground over and over again without rusting, getting stuck, or braking actually facilitating its ability to turn your spear into a better walking stick than... well a walking stick.
They also functioned as a counterweight to bring spears center of gravity farther back extending the effective range of the spear, but that has nothing to do with them being spike shaped.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SYDfj.png)
[Answer]
Either over your shoulder in the approved fashion, or as a walking staff if the weight and balance allows. Climbing a mountain is easier with a mountain than without one --and pre-modern types stuck to the paths anyway and did not go 'mountaineering' in the modern of technical sense.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uTO3c.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
How could a large ectotherm (say, the size and shape of a horse) have a truly unidirectional system of respiration? Not a looping system as found in birds and other archosaurs, but a system where air flows continuously in a straight line through the lungs and out of a completely separate outlet, allowing a constant inflow that isn't interrupted by the need for deoxygenated air to go out the same way it came in.
One way might be to use a chambered heart-like organ, pumping air instead of blood. Alternatively, you could use peristalsis to draw the air in. However, I doubt these mechanisms would be fast or efficient enough to sustain a large organism.
[Answer]
Maybe not too creative. But indisputably effective.
**The gill.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N8S6Z.png)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_gill>
Water moves one way through the respiratory system in fish. In the mouth and out the gills. Gills work good. 500 million years old and going strong.
If you want air gills you could have them be external, salamander style. Air blows by them. You could do like fish and take air into some antechamber (like the mouth) then close the mouth and expel air through the gill. You could have some valved piston arrangement (I am imagining a piston like tongue) which fills an air chamber on the back stroke then expels air past the gills on the forward stroke.
Gills. Gills good.
---
[A broad-scale comparison of aerobic activity levels in vertebrates: endotherms versus ectotherms](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5326522/)
>
> The body mass scaling of maximum oxygen consumption rates (i.e. VO2
> max) in ectotherms was statistically indistinguishable from that of
> endotherms... based on
> the 95% CI of the scaling exponents from PGLS regression analyses
> ... Moreover, within both
> endotherms and ectotherms, the body mass scaling of VO2 max was
> statistically indistinguishable from that of resting rates based on
> the 95% CI
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dSsvL.png)
[Answer]
As AlexP mentioned in a comment fish already do this. That is good for water breathers but not so good for air breathers.
The main reasons the lungs are shaped as they are surface area and moisture retention.
What you seem to be looking for is a modified tube.
You need the surface area to transfer enough gas fast enough to be useful. So, any solution would have numerous pockets or breaking up into multiple thin tubes and then recombining. Either way, the higher surface area will create more "friction" resistance to air flow. Therefore, unless the creatures never go below a certain speed (like a get engine), they would need muscles along the tube that would contract in a wave to push air through.
The real killer here though is moisture retention. The moisture on the surface of the lungs helps the gasses to transfer through the lung lining. Our nose actually adds moisture when we inhale and recaptures a bunch of our moisture on exhale. So, the tube has to have a structure to moisten the air at the beginning and to try to recapture the moisture at the end.
I think that this is a plausible evolutionary adaption if you start with a water born creature that has a tubular breathing apparatus instead of gills. It is just that gills are more efficient for water breathing since the water doesn't have to travel as far through the body (water has more "friction" resistance than air). However, once you posit that gills didn't develop, the switch to air breathing should be smoother. It just has to add a bit of complexity to what is already there instead of creating a completely new structure.
[Answer]
# The Mighty Sphincter
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b8T0R.png)
There are two tubes. One tube sucks good air in through the mouth. The other tube pushes bad air out through the bumhole. Each tube has a sphincter where it joins the lungs. The Diaphragm is same as a human. It is a band of muscle around the lungs that makes the balloons expand and contract. When it expands, the bottom sphincter is closed and the top is open, so air is sucked into the lungs. When the diaphragm contracts the bottom sphincter is open and the top is closed, so bad air is pushed out through the bumhole.
With proper training, these people can learn to breath in and out through their bumhole. This is not optimal but makes them very good at card games and staring contests. It also lets them release the gas at inopportune moments for a practical joke.
[Answer]
A straight line path isn't much needed for air. It's more important for a denser liquid offering greater resistance. Hence the more or less straight-line design of fish gills.
Birds pass air through their lungs in a single direction, using various bladders in their bodies to create the flow. It's a simple change to have the exhaust vented down an exhaust-only pipe.
We can speculate on why evolution did not take that path. My guess is that it's because of the common body plan that birds share with mammals, reptiles, amphibians ... no way to get there from here by small incremental changes, all viable? However, it's also possible that the common intake/exhaust conserves energy and water by heat-exchange between intake and exhaust. (I expect somebody will have already written a scientific paper on this; if not, it would be interesting research! ) Birds have phenomenally good thermal insulation (feathers) and evolution will certainly be strongly selecting for energy conservation in a half-ounce bird living in North America (black-capped Chicadee, 0.32 to 0.49 oz according to Wikipedia).
[Answer]
Imagine a structure like a heater / radiator with one input, one output, and many "parallel" tubes between them. Inside the tubes, there are countless [**cilia**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilia) which push the whatever (air, water, alien substance) from one end to the other. The walls of the tubes and the cillia contain cells which can perform the substance exchanges (oxygen or whatever exists on that planet). The tubes are "optimum thin" - they allow at the same time big air flow and big surface for exchanges, while till having a relatively low volume. It can grow proportionally with the size of the animal. There are sphincters which protect the organism from dangerous substances. If there is natural substance flow (e.g., air), then the cillia do not need to provide any movement, just substance exchanges.
[Answer]
With valves, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_valves>
For example, with a [Tesla valve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_valve). It doesn't require moving parts apart in your case from a diaphragm in the middle (not shown) to make the air move. Many Tesla valves can be used in parallel like in the following image from [this link](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2668591):
[](https://cdn.thingiverse.com/renders/69/65/e9/80/b3/e15566d9c3f4d63ad60210809f2234ff_display_large.JPG)
An alternative to not having additoinal moving parts is to use vibration to affect its properties as described [here](https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2021/05/17/tesla-valve-flow-rates/5251621255310/).
Energy seems to be unnecessarily lost due to turbulences though, so see the list of valves linked above for more efficient valves.
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[Question]
[
Most of the guts and stomach are removed. The torso is cut short below the ribs.
Instead of legs there are vehicular links which the cyborg can put on and take off like a prosthesis. There are climbing versions, running versions and even choices for swimming. The arms haven't been removed, technology doesn't yet allow for perfect robotic limb precision when it comes to control, but legs are fine since walking is already automatic for most humans. By weight alone over 67% of the human is gone.
Instead of a jaw or nose there is a tungsten plate bolted to the skull, with a filtering system. The internal structure and all functions of the nose are removed and closed with bio-cement. Instead the olfactory sense is now handled by a chromatograph and breathing is done by sucking in and releasing air from holes at the side of the plate as can be observed in this image [>>](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YPT5Z.jpg)
Teeth, mouth bones and the tongue have been removed; communication is not a problem as the character is an antisocial who doesn't believe humans are ever worth the effort.
Most leg links have a compartment where sugar and vitamin water or liquid protein can be pumped slowly into the small piece of remaining gut; alternatively in emergency cases the cyborg can dissolve nutrient pills into water and inject it directly through a feeding tube with a syringe.
The air filters can be changed and cleaned as there is a sub-mandibular opening.
When I used to work in the field, it was normal to chug down 5 or 6 one-liter bottles of water in an 8 hour period and never feel the need to get to the bathroom. Sweating was getting rid of all the extra liquids. Since the cyborg doesn't consume solid food, does that mean that it can just evaporate away all the extra weight and never need the toilet?
[Answer]
The cyborg still has to break the nutrients down into forms that can be absorbed into the body. This will require not just a stomach, but some portion of intestines. These, then, will produce waste of some kind. Probably not much, relative to a typical 2,000 calorie diet of solid foods. But some.
Further, at least some liquid will need to be processed out via the kidneys and into the bladder. This will contain not just water, but the unused nutrients from the food, dead cells, and etc. This probably won't be that much different from a non-cyborg human in quantity.
The reason you didn't need to use the restroom while working in the field is that you were basically dehydrated the entire time. Not an exactly perfect environment for your cyborg.
In practice, then, your cyborg is going to need the equivalent of a colostomy bag and some sort of catheter system to handle what doesn't get digested. RoboCop could eat baby food. Which means he probably produced stuff that smelled quite similar to dirty baby diapers.
I suppose you might could drop the colostomy system if you use an IV system instead to provide nutrients. But you will still have kidneys that produce urine.
---
[edit] You asked in comments:
>
> what if the liquid food is already in a form that doesn't need to be
> processed by the stomach?
>
>
>
The digestive system [in summary](https://www.webmd.com/heartburn-gerd/your-digestive-system):
1. **Mouth**. Breaks food down into boluses that are swallowed into the stomach. You've removed this step entirely in your original post (OP).
2. **Esophagus**. You are retaining this in your OP, but it's just a muscular tube that delivers food to stomach. *(This also delivers air. Given how much of the face and neck you're destroying, you may need to also split this into two separate delivery tracts, just to prevent choking!)*
3. **Stomach**. This adds acid and enzymes to break down foods. Your OP posits that food entering the stomach is already at the paste-like consistency of food typically leaving the stomach. Not sure if the acids are required by your goo; probably not. Also not sure about the enzymes' necessity.
4. **Small Intestine**. With additional enzymes from the *pancreas* and bile from the *liver*, this is where most nutrients are absorbed out of the food. Can't afford to lose this if you're using any kind of feeding tube.
5. **Large Intestine**. Here, water is absorbed from the stool, which by the end is mostly food debris and *bacteria*. The bacteria synthesize various vitamins, process waster products, and protect against harmful bacteria. Again, these functions (and the bacteria behind them) are all critical if you're using a feeding tube.
6. **Pancreas**. The pancreas is a busy little organ. It makes insulin and other hormones vital to life, but for digestion, it creates enzymes that break down protein, fat, and carbohydrates. These enzymes are going to be necessary, even in pre-processed food goo like you're suggesting.
7. **Liver**. There are many important jobs the liver does (filtering blood for one), but for digestion, it secretes bile.
8. **Gallbladder**. This stores bile. Bile is critical for breaking down fats.
So basically, if your feeding tube system delivers a constant, but controlled, measure of food into the intestines, the stomach can probably be bypassed.
But regardless, if food enters the digestive tract, some kind of fecal matter will emerge at the end of the process. This is unavoidable. You could build a system that collects it, dehydrates it, and mixes the water back into the food matter for reuse. This would lower the water requirements of your system. The waste would then be stored until servicing, where it would be turned over to whatever purpose (disposal, use as fertilizer, etc.).
You could probably remove the entire GI tract (but not the pancreas and liver), and use an IV-based feeding system. No food goo and no fecal matter. But even then, the kidneys will still have to remove stuff from the blood stream and that will have to exit the body as urine.
Again, you could build a [urine-filtration rig](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Stillsuit) to extract water from urine, and recycle that into the IV (or food goo concentrate). But regardless, the ~~spice~~, er urine, must flow.
[Answer]
Here is my answer to this question:
[Is it theoretically possible for the human body to not defecate?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/139184/is-it-theoretically-possible-for-the-human-body-to-not-defecate/139190#139190)
>
> **The tricky problem is bile.**
>
>
> If a person is fed and watered completely by vein (this is done
> routinely; total parenteral nutrition) the guts can atrophy but they
> still make mucus and bacteria still live in them. Even a person on TPN
> must poop occasionally.
>
>
> A person might have all of the intestines removed and have the stomach
> be a dead end - sometimes that can happen with an obstetric
> catastrophe or certain tumors. The remaining problem as regards
> excretion is then the liver. The liver makes bile as part of its job
> and it is not going to stop. That bile has to go somewhere or it
> builds up in the liver; you get jaundiced and then eventually die. If
> you do not have intestines and are living in TPN there must be some
> route established for the bile to drain. One way is to have a drain
> placed.
>
>
>
Bile is the dumping ground for the liver. If you have a liver it needs to get rid of wastes somewhere. It could get rid of them thru a drain tube as is sometimes placed in people with blocked biliary trees. If you do not like toilets, your character could dump it in the sink.
[Answer]
## Urine and Bilirubin
Your cyborg still needs to get rid of nitrogenous wastes (urine), which are a byproduct of basically all biological functions produced by every tissue. Ammonia is inescapable byproduct of protein metabolism, mammals convert ammonia into urea which requires far *far* less water to get rid of. That's where a large portion of our water goes, to dilute and flush out urine. You also have other blood born waste excreted by the kidneys that needs to be flushed as well. No matter what, if you cyborg has organic parts they need to pee. Even dialysis does not change this it just makes it mechanical instead of biological.
If it has any form of digestive tract it will still have fecal matter being produced. **Even without a digestive tract it will still have minute amounts of fecal matter** this will be primarily made of [Bilirubin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilirubin) waste from the liver. this however is produced in such small amounts it could just be stored, dried and discarded as a pellet once a week or so, or alternatively dump it into your urine collection/disposal system, there is more than enough liquid to dilute it.
[Answer]
Yes your Cyborg will need a toilet.
Your cyborg gets nutrients ready for absorbtion, everything will eventually be absorbed. However your body gets rid of a large amount of waste through both peeing and pooping. For example old and damaged blood cells are filtered out of the bloodstream and put into your poop. This is what creates the brown color of poop. Without the option to visit the toilet you need some alternative to get rid of that.
Similarly many other waste products are disposed off through your piss and poop. You can't really sweat these out as that would make you a stinking, septic cyborg prone to infection and skin problems even if you wash daily. Even assuming you have some awesome anti-viral capabilities there will be a limit to what it can do, and such infections will love to get inbetween the cybernetic implants and body, disturbing the connections between them. In fact even with a great anti-viral/bacterial system it is the waste products and dead cells/bacteria that causes a lot of toxicity to build up in the body unless you get rid of it. This what the pus in wounds actually is: waste from your body and the infection which the body needs to get rid off. How are you going to get rid of that? Same method that caused the infection in the first place?
Maybe you can change what "toilet" means for a Cyborg. Some of the cybernetics seem to be able to hold food for the body, so you could simply change the plumbing and make waste products go there. It would basically be an alternative to a stoma, "easily" taken off and thrown away when it is full.
[Answer]
You produce urine from your kidney. Unless you are ok with the cyborg having regular extended time on a dialysis machine, they'll need to keep that to purify their blood and get rid of the many waste products in blood.
You also produce a fair amount of waste from protein breakdown which is normally pooped away. This is stored in the spleen as Biliverdin. This will need to be disposed of in some way as well.
You can have them work like you mostly dehydrated, but they'll be notably less efficient. It would make more sense for them to have some way of surviving if they drink a decent amount of water.
You can produce notably less poo, perhaps needing to poop once every few weeks, but you can't produce much less pee without radical changes.
[Answer]
Unless you're processing and dumping 100% of solid wastes, you'll need to get rid of it somehow. It might not be in the same form as organic waste though.
If you can efficiently remove and excrete clean water, you might be able to compress your solid wastes, minerals and other non evaporatables, and compress them into low volume cubes, you can dump them when convenient. You'd still have a significant mass savings (most things we consume are significantly water), and cubic poop isn't that usual, unless you're a wombat.
[Answer]
## Yes.
The chemical reactions used by cells to produce energy produce waste products. As such, while you can sharply decrease the *amount* of waste via intravenous feeding, tearing out the digestive tract, and replacing the filtering organs with a small dialysis machine, your cyborg is still going to need to expel waste in some way.
Now, as you suggested, theoretically your cyborg could expel liquid waste via the skin; there are some real-world examples of creatures that do this. However, you're going to run into three snags almost immediately:
1. It's unsanitary. I suppose that your cyborg, being a sociopath, won't care much about the stink, but he's still going to need to take *lots* of showers if he doesn't want to get infections / chemical burns.
2. He's going to go through a lot of water diluting the waste products before expelling them.
3. Most importantly, while the body naturally expels *some* waste via the skin, it simply isn't designed to expel *all* of it that way. Such modifications would require a fundamental change in how the body works. This goes way beyond replacing biological parts with mechanical ones.
[Answer]
yes, he will still need to go to the toilet.
why you didn't need to pee as much as a feeble flesh-bag was because you needed to replace the water you lost by sweating, but your normal metabolism was still working normally, so your kidney were still processing the normal amount. sweat is to regulate temperature, not to purge waste.
you cyborg will still need to evacuate some waste. it's possible to reduce this to the absolute minimum if you make sure that his nutrient past is as efficient as possible, so you might need to go to the toilet less often. also, shorter gut mean less time for absorption therefor more waste.
also, you seem to over look just how much the brain consume in term of energy. it's at least 20% of your energy, so your cyborg might very well need a good portion of his gut remaining. other organs like liver and even the gut themself have high energy requirement. cutting limbs is far from enough to reduce the energy consumption to a minimum.
[Answer]
Someone hinted at the answer earlier when they mentioned dialysis.
There is absolutely no need to produce faeces since you could just drip basic amino acids, glucose, vitamins, fatty acides, glycerides and minerals directly into the blood stream. The alimentary canal is only required for the absorbtion of water and the digestion of proteins to amino acids, fats into fatty acids and glycerides and complex sugars such as starch into glucose.
Respiration and normal cellular death etc produces waste protein and other products that gets metabloised to urea so dialysis would remove these from the bloodstream in the same way as a kidney does.
One thing that might mess it up (as an earlier poster said) is the disposal of bile. That's largely made up of bilirubin and other products from dead red blood cells and I don't know how you'd remove them by dialysis as the liver creates and dumps bile into the intestine via the gall bladder.
[Answer]
## Not at all.
I knew Junior was up to something out in the barn, but it's hard to predict what notion that boy might get in his head. Eventually I just followed him in there and had it out. When he saw me he started, and almost dropped the egg.
*"What possessed you to take that?"*, I had to ask.
*"I want to see if we can grow our own baby cyborg..."*
I had to explain to him that *no*, cyborgs don't lay *that* kind of egg. How they need to wait on their master at all times, without a moment's distraction. How they pile their decorative stands high with the sterile orbs produced with their intestinal shell glands as their means of relieving themselves. I tried to keep it simple, until I noticed a faraway look as I said "*uricothelic*". Well, no matter. I took that egg very, very carefully out to the far drainage ditch, the one on the main road. I swear the smell lingers on to this day.
] |
[Question]
[
The sentient species is about one and a half feet tall, and resembles a feathery raptor. The predatory creature is around two and a half feet tall at the shoulder. It resembles a thick furred dog with the addition of a hump on its back like a camel. It lives in chilly northern deserts in small packs containing one male, females, and young.
Would the sentient species be able to domesticate an animal so much larger than it?
[Answer]
It is definitely plausible.
Most importantly, the domestication should be the result of a symbiosis between the species. A mutually beneficial relationship that naturally develops.
In my mind I would say a few prerequisites should be established to help facilitate this symbiosis, primary of which is that the two species should live in close proximity, allowing for a historical familiarity of sorts.
An example of a plausible scenario would be:
Species A (raptor) and Species B (canine) have a common prey, and this prey is abundantly available in their common environments. Given enough time, multiple encounters between the species would likely occur simply by happenstance; hunting the same prey on the same grounds at the same time. Given even more time, these happenstance encounters would eventually yield an opportunity for them to observe that working together during a hunt yields better results (likely the first few times they would observe this by accident). And with yet even more time, this learned behaviour is reinforced through multiple situational / happenstance encounters. Add in little details like if the common prey were large and/or dangerous to hunt, would even better reinforce this cooperation. Naturally, the sentient species' ability to craft and think (assuming they are significantly more intelligent or advanced) and the canine species strength and transportive qualities, yields great cooperative opportunity. What may start as a cooperative arrangement with tentative commitment from both sides, again given enough time, will eventually become a much stronger symbiosis as long as the positive results are maintained over a significant enough number of generations.
[Answer]
**Wolves and ravens.**
<http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2011/12/wolves-and-ravens-curious-relationship.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sdQ7C.jpg)
<http://canislupus101.blogspot.com/p/wolves-ravens.html>
>
> Very few mammals have symbiotic relationships with other animals. One
> of the few exceptions is the raven and the wolf. Ravens are sometimes
> known as "wolf-birds" because they form social attachments with
> wolves. Where there are wolves, there are often ravens that follow
> wolves to grab leftovers from the hunt, and to tease the wolves. They
> play with the wolves by diving at them and then speeding away or
> pecking their tails to try to get the wolves to chase them.
>
>
> The wolf and the raven have a complex relationship that is many
> thousands of years old. Although the wolf had been missing from
> Yellowstone since the 1940's, the raven had not forgotten the wolf and
> what their relationship meant for both of them. With the
> reintroduction of the wolf into Yellowstone National Park, the old
> ways are once again practiced by both.
>
>
>
Ravens are already smart. They lead the wolves where they want them. They have fun messing with the wolves and the wolves put up with it. They are both pack animals with hierarchies and similar dietary needs, and their strengths complement each other.
Take it one more step and you have the world you proposed - intelligent avians and their slightly less intelligent but more formidable wingdogs.
[Answer]
I can think of one way, the animal would have to be a pack hunter with a fairly rigid pack structure and with a strong imprinting instinct so raising it from birth basically convinces it you are its parent and thus higher up in the pack. There are some issues with those behaviors evolving together but it is at least believable.
[Answer]
An Answer to this might depend on what you mean by domestication. This entails the breeding of the domesticated animal to increase it’s usefulness. Otherwise it would be taming.
This video might give you a descent introduction to what was historically necessary to domesticate an animal. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo>
Based on this, your idea has some problems that you should work around:
1. If your two species have the same requirements in food, the domesticated species needs to be very useful, to justify sharing that resource with it.
2. Dangerous animals are generally bad for domestication, but if your domesticating species is even more dangerous, or technologically advanced it might work. @John already mentioned imprinting and pack structures, which might also be a possibility to get around capturing the animal.
Some of this you might hand-wave since your working on fiction. On the other hand solutions to these problems might make your setting more interesting. The video I linked makes a couple more points that you could include. In this answer I focused things that might be problems.
Taming would of course be easier, and if the taming species forms a complex enough society it might even be likely.
[Answer]
In addition to the beneficial relationship proposed by Ryan McCoy, perhaps best as part of that scenario, domestication could be achieved by capturing very young animals, raising them and breeding those that display the most signs of tameness. The early generations would still be very wild and suitable only for the most prepared trainers - think lions & tigers with Siegfried and Roy - but as deliberate breeding continues, younger generations will become more manageable
<https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x>
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
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We, the Hrimfaxi, an extensive interstellar empire, are invading the Earth!
However, these pesky humans have proved themselves to be extremely good at pouring out dakka and making things go kaboom. Despite the technological advantages the we had during the first days of the invasion, they seemed to be adapting and dragging the ground war on and on.
So why shouldn't I, the commander of the invasion just claim Earth a lost cause and declare Exterminatus? After all, Earth is just one small planet in the entire galaxy.
**Invading Forces:**
My space forces consists of a rather small flotilla of space ships armed with weapons on the equivalent of Earth's strategic nuclear weapons, enough to make Reagan and Gorbachev blush. I have a small shipyard in the solar system so I can procure more as I needed.
My soldiers, on the other hand, are cloned, mindless drones, controlled by me through a psychic chain of command. Commanders like me have free will, while sub-commanders further down the chain have decreasing levels of free will. They are organized fairly conventionally: infantry, armor, artillery, air force, etc. I have cloning tanks at my disposal to replenish losses.
**Operational Objectives**
Standard expansion of Hrimfaxi sphere of influence and adding humans to the collective psychic network of Hrimfaxi systems. Secondary objectives include cataloging the genetic properties of life on earth, with is largely complete through abductions. The reasons are so buried underneath bureaucracy, ancient history, and indoctrination that most Hrimfaxi don't even know why they are invading other worlds other than they must or their superiors will have them executed. In fact, it is highly debatable if the higher spheres of the bureaucracy psychic network can be even fathomed under the mindset of an individual being.
[Answer]
Sir, here is your Prime Commander with an extensive report on our position.
**We are not reciving support**
The empire has, once again, refused to send more soldier to help us, saying that for those puny humans our flotilla should be more than enough and, as commander @Zhehao pointed out, FTL is too expensive anyway. We are on our own.
**High power weaponry**
I'm sad to have to remind you that we cannot nuke the whole planet, since we need it as is, but without the rioters of course. To be honest, even if we could nuke it, having to deal with all of the radiation fallout is not advisable.
**Soldier weaponry**
Our intel on the enemy is warring. they seem to be smarter than how we originally thought, they even started to reverse engineer our way superior weaponry from the fallen soldier and use it against us. Of course, it is not as wide spread and refined as our's, but it's slowing things down.
**Genetech**
Our people on the R&D department are totally incompetent. They cannot even mutate our clone army to breath the air mixture of the planet efficiently. After the first "round" of abduction we thought to have unlocked the secret about their metabolism, but sadly our soldiers seem to be able to stay on earth for only a bunch of hours before their lungs collapse.
For now, this is everything, but I'll personally update you if any new feedback from our specialists should come trough.
**--UPDATE--**
**High Personal Skill**
Sir, I'm here with an update. One of our research team, lead by @Martijn, recently found out that their brain is well suited for problem solving and independent thinking. This may explain how they have figured out where and who to take down in our battalion so quickly. As a result of the "hive mind", striking down higher grade soldiers heavily compromises the efficiency and the coordination of the simpler soldiers.
[Answer]
**My current idea**
A combination of expensive FTL travel and alien bureaucracy.
I am thrown into the solar system with the bare basic tools to establish a base of operations and a few samples of embryos to get my clone army started, and even sending this much stuff at faster-than-light speeds across interstellar distances is enough to bankrupt several planets. Reinforcing my forces is impossible, as the nearest Hrimfaxi world is a few hundred light-years away.
I am also being constantly monitored by the empire, who set my objective to bring Earth into the fold of our empire, and any serious deviation from the plan will result in my execution through an implant. However, while the bloated bureaucracy is extremely keen on eliminating traitors, it is close to impossible to find someone to rescind my order of adding Earth to the empire or change it to "nuke the hell out of these damned humans and strip mine the system instead."
So in effect, I am sent of a one-way trip with a mission of conquest that I have to either complete or die trying.
Free free to point holes out of this idea.
[Answer]
## Excerpt from Skynews.au News Article:
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> New, **delicious** species of desert dwelling dodo-bird discovered in Australia.
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## Hrimfaxi Official Operational Report on Sol-III, Stardate 12345.6667
### Mission Accomplished!
The **entire world** is ours:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hqu7G.png)
Our campaign to rip out the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of Sol-III has been an unmitigated success. Only a few minor outlying islands (Eurasia, Africa and America) remain.
I hereby declare mission accomplished and pass responsibility for the minor mop-up operations remaining to the *lightly armed* Imperial Pacification Forces at the State Department. Our heavy infantry forces will begin redeploying to out-of-system locations tomorrow.
Another glorious victory for our generals and for the spread of Hiveocracy to the peoples who yearn for such enlightened systems of governance!
May the Goddess bless the troops and the Hrimfaxi empire!
[Answer]
Well, I don't know if this counts as a proper answer, but to give you **an idea:**
What would happen if I, the great siege commander, would happen to succeed in taking the earth? Would I get another unsensible assignment? Maybe even an assignment that could lead to my death even without an implant activation?
Is my position in the current assignment in any way *comfortable*? Since there is already so much beaurocracy, why not gain something from it? Dragging this siege on and on, would I gain from it? If I don't have an exact timeframe in which I have to be successful, could I not secure some luxury from a microscopic fraction of the resources transferred to me to aid in my task? Could I not have a nice life while others die for me, far away on the surface, while I am here in my comfy space vessel? Or maybe, could I use the clone bays to secure my own personal army, using some of my assigned resources, just enough that I don't make myself conspicuous?
Maybe I enjoy doing this, and it makes me feel great, so I don't like rushing things?
**Context:** Beaurocracy has multiple origins. Firstly, it is a structure to limit and control power. But usually, individuals within the chain of command tend to use the system for their own benefit, either by using parts of resources to gain luxury, just being lazy, or by securing their own power, diverting resources assigned by upper echelons.
[Answer]
I think you've already got a pretty solid idea there:
**Collective Psychic Network:** The Hrimfaxi leadership doesn't care one whit about the balls of dirt on which their subjects live...they care about the squishy computers in their skulls. Gray Gold, it's called.
If the psychic control strips free will from the lowest level thralls, then what is all that delicious gray matter doing? Just sitting there, regulating heart rates and breathing? How wasteful!
Instead, the entire Hrimfaxi is, itself, just a single organism: the Collective Psychic Network. It uses the brains of its thralls as parallel processing units. The "lower" a thrall is, the more of its mind is used for this processing, resulting in a psychic pyramid scheme. This is why higher-level commanders appear to have free will: the only psychic processing running are those which make them follow the inscrutable orders of their superiors.
**How did this start?** Originally, the Hrimfaxi evolved as roaming mini-Collectives. The size of the collective was limited, because the entire cluster formed a single hive mind which controlled their every action (like a human who had to focus intently on what each of his hands was doing at any time).
However, mutations occurred which caused a certain cluster to contain "individuals". With a handful of individuals to control parts of the cluster (like an ambidextrous human whose hands could operate semi-autonomously), Collectives could contain many more individuals. Such mega-Collectives were much more successful, and easily enveloped the mini-Collectives.
Eventually the mega-Collectives coalesced into a single species-wide Collective-- not a hive-mind, however. The Planetary Collective consists of an Upper population of individuals, and descending orders of thralls.
At some point, the Planetary Collective encounters an intelligent alien species, and discovers that it can forcefully turn them into thralls. Once it does this, it suddenly gains an entirely new perspective on reality (like a human suddenly gaining the ability to see into the infrared spectrum). Seemingly insurmountable scientific and logistical problems may suddenly seem trivial.
This is also why the Collective Psychic Network doesn't rely *solely* on clones as thralls: they only add raw processing power...no creativity or knowledge.
**Brass tacks:** No one in the Collective knows that they are part of a collective. Everyone, down to the lowest grunt, thinks that they have free will. Likewise, everyone thinks that they're psychically controlling those beneath them. At the top, the Leaders believe that they're controlling everything, but they're still guided by an ephemeral psychic force. It surrounds them, penetrates them. It binds their galactic empire together.
[Answer]
The asker says in a comment that "there is so many layers of bureaucracy and indoctrination that the aliens themselves don't even know why they are invading Earth or any other planet, other than if they don't they will be executed for insubordination."
This seems to me all that's needed for an answer. The commander continues the invasion because to do otherwise would entail filing the appropriate paperwork - and that would be a *far* more difficult and dangerous task than simply continuing to send more troops indefinitely.
I actually quite like that as a basis for a story. It does what it needs to do, and has a darkly comic message about the futility of war.
[Answer]
The Hrimfaxi, an Empire building race are not just trying to take the land, they are trying to build an empire and assimilate the Earth into their own culture - They are trying to *save* the humans from their own crazy anarchic freedom-loving ways, not wipe them out! To bring them into the superior, structured, warm, welcoming peaceful bosom of the empire.
Unfortunately, there is a segment of the human population who fight back and are ruining it for the rest of them. Once those misguided barbarians who poison the human race are destroyed, the remaining humans will see the superiority of the Hrimfaxi and rejoice in a modern civilisation, free of negative thought!
Every rose has its thorn, as they say.
Also if your own soldiers are mindless drones, then you'll probably have less qualms about losing them to the human fight-back and more determined to properly conquer the humans.
[Answer]
## The bureaucracy cannot deal with a stalemate
It is impossible to "declare Exterminatus" due to a bureaucratic hitch: One of the attachments required for the Exterminatus request form is the Finalized Cost Accounting Statement, model 432g "Lost wars". As the war is not lost, this statement is unavailable.
There are also no directives or request forms that could be used for intentionally losing a war, so your options are to freeze any reinforcements and slowly let the invasion force die off or to request additional support from outside the solar system, at which point you might as well prepare the forms for your own evaluation and recycling.
Of course, none of this matters if your computers are compatible with human Apple laptops.
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[Question]
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In my world, using magic uses energy from an energy pool. Stronger spells use more energy, while weaker, simpler ones use less. If a person empties their pool, they can't cast more spells until they regain some of their energy. One could say every person capable of using magic is a walking magical battery.
Among spellcasters, there are two kinds:
* **Naturals**: These regain energy slowly, without any extra notable effort. A natural can refill their entire pool in about 10 minutes of sustained combat.
* **Meditators**: These can regain energy faster than naturals, but only during moments of meditation or focussing. They do not gain any energy when not focussing. A meditator can refill their entire pool in about 2 to 4 minutes of focussing during combat.
Now, I want to limit the above kinds of regeneration to being available only during active combat. What reasons could be given for this regeneration to work this way?
With this limit, I would like to prevent the situation in which wizards defuse all problems peacefully and avoid combat, by making energy more precious outside of combat.
Sidenotes:
* Magic is quite present, but not available to everyone (about half of the world population has potential for spellcasting)
* Outside of the above regeneration-during-combat, energy can also be regained using potions (which are considered cheap and common) and sleep in my universe. Potions recharge more according to quality, the best and most expensive supplying slightly over half an entire pool. One night's rest (8 hours) refills about half of an entire pool.
* A spellcaster's pool has a limit to itself, trying to gain more than this limit harmlessly releases the excess. The limit cannot be trained to become bigger (though some rare pieces of equipment or technology could slightly improve the limit).
* For reference, firing one large spell (levelling a small house in one blast) will on average blow out a wizard's entire energy reserve and a small spell (shoving a grown adult back a few meters) can be cast about ten times before the average reserve is empty.
* By combat, I assume any fight with any serious threat to either party involved. Mock fights and sparring matches will yield very little, if any energy.
[Answer]
**The body undergoes a very specific kind of stress when engaging in combat** so it shouldn't be hard to link together these special conditions with magic accretion.
The human body has two nervous systems, the symphathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). Combat shuts down the PNS in favor of the SNS.
Charging the magic battery is potentially dangerous so the PNS works to cap the total magic stored and the recharge rate, effectively limiting total magic energy available. The SNS wants to gather as much magic as possible, as quickly as possible. In non-combat situations, the two systems balance each other out and the wizard is okay. However, in combat, the SNS shuts down the PNS so the magic recharge cap disappears. Magic flows into the wizard and the battle begins.
The PNS does support some degree of magical recharge, just at a lower rate than what a combat-stressed induced shutdown of the PNS can achieve.
Wizards have two constant problems in combat they need to worry about:
* The longer SNS maintains control at the expense of the PNS, the greater the body's deficit in digestion, muscle reconstruction, rehydration and other normal maintenance activities. If the wizard keeps up this state for too long they will simply collapse or die of exhaustion.
* The longer the magic battery is allowed to charge, the greater the chance of overcharging the battery. For real life batteries, if overcharged [they will explode](https://youtu.be/SMy2_qNO2Y0?t=110). Wizards shouldn't be any different. Magic is energy and if the wizard concentrates more energy than they can safely store, they may explode.
**Meditation wizards are limited by their mental abilities**
Meditation wizards use mental focus and control to shut down the PNS to increase magic uptake into their bodies. This can be improved over time just as a yogi may slowly increase [control over such things as heartbeat](http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/24/6/1319.full.pdf).
**Natural wizards are limited by their magical physiology**
Natural wizards use the adrenaline and stress of combat to shutdown the PNS for magic uptake. This is limited by the body's ability to respond to combat situations. While the magic uptake by inexperienced/untrained may be high, the natural limits may be much lower than those of a meditating wizard (the OP says that they are, so they are. I think it could be argued either way.)
**Long term consequences**
Are you sure you want to do it this way? Only gaining magic while fighting or sleeping provides a very powerful incentive for the wizards to fight *all the time* or sleep most of the time. Since about 1% of the population are psychopaths, you're going to have to guard against a small but increasingly powerful group of wizards who do not care about the lives of those around them and do not hesitate to kill for their own gain. Further, if wizard combat is always to the death, then rather quickly the field of magic users will shrink to those with very low level, undeveloped abilities (those who choose life) and a very small group of hyper-wizards, who are basically gods.
Also, you'll need to deal with non-psychopath wizards who get addicted to the combat high and fight even more than they would otherwise.
**Unaddressed Questions**
What happens when the battle is over? Where does the extra magic energy go? Does it stay in the wizard so they can use it later or slowly drain off over a period of hours or days?
[Answer]
**Simply alter the way your magic is provided.**
Your magic is provided by helpful spirits, who happen to be drawn to combat, as they find it extremely exciting to watch (and possibly even participate if a spellcaster allows them to.)
Reliving such combat in your dreams is also enough to draw in the spirits, as they are perfectly capable of enjoying your dreams as much as the real thing.
And while the magical version of PETA still objects heavily, drinking condensed magical spirits is still a common way of quickly regaining energy.
[Answer]
My suggestion is similar to some of the others, but with a subtle twist.
The wizard doesn't generate energy out of nowhere, instead he actually feeds on the life energy of other people. In combat he drains the life energy of the people he's fighting so can recharge.
You can slowly refill the pool from your own life energy without doing long term damage (you just have to eat a lot). Draining it from other people though is both painful and harmful to them - so it would be a major sacrifice for anyone to do it willingly.
As a result it normally only happens in a hostile situation where all the mages feed on the lifeforce of everyone they are facing. Depending on what you need for the plot purposes you can have mages either able to draw from each other, be able to block each other, or have some mages able to do it. They are drawing life force directly though - not the magic pool which is separate.
Consequences of being drained would be pain and premature aging. The aging would gradually reverse itself but repeated draining risks making it permanent.
Ironically this actually favours smaller numbers in a fight - although being outnumbered is still a disadvantage in itself.
So lets say an incredibly strong archmage gets jumped by 5 bandits including a weak wizard of their own.
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> He'd not visited this area in many decades but the Archmage Vesurious was enjoying the experience of walking incognito. Dressed as a humble traveler he was drawing little attention and that was his aim. The sun was bright and warm ahead, and the trail clear as it cut through the forest.
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> It started with a strange tingle, then a spark of pain. The knee injured so many years ago started to ache once more. The Archmage recognized the sensation instantly, although no-one had been fool enough to try and drain him for nearly a decade.
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> The trees around the trail suddenly parted and a five people armed with bows, and spears stepped out to surround him. Another figure dressed in robes and holding a staff stepped forwards importantly. "I am Relif of Daran", said the robed figure, "give us your valuables and I'll let you live."
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> The Archmage could feel the life energy of all six of them, it burnt like a flame in the back of his mind. He reached out to the flames and inhaled, pulling hard. Energy flooded into him and he used it to throw up a shield against both energy and physical weapons.
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> The bandits cry out with pain, one staggers and another's hair turns white instantly. "Wizard" one cries swinging a futile sword against The Archmage's shield. Not even bothering to strike out at the bandits Vesurious conjured a swarm of flaming arrows and sent them flying into the only real threat there: The bandit wizard and the hastily erected shield that surrounded him.
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> Vesurious walked past the bandits ignoring their futile attacks bouncing off his shields. He breathed in again, feeling the warmth of their life filling him. One of them screamed and collapsed, while another's face was instantly lined and grey. Twenty years had been sucked from his body in the span of one breath.
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> Gazing coldly at the mage before him Vesurious said "I do not know you, and I do not care to know you. Banditry is not a suitable career for a wizard though.". Breathing in power once more he reached out a hand, burning through the feeble shields and immolating the fool within.
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> Sighing at the interruption of his stroll he turned and walked away, leaving a pile of ash on the floor where the weaker wizard had stood. The bandits lay collapsed on the floor, one's heart had given out while the the four survivors all looked closer to eighty than their real twenty-something. Two had lost consciousness, one was retching and the final one was clutching at his milky-white blind eyes.
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Of course most wizards would not be able to drain people anything like that strongly or that quickly, even a group of wizards working together would not work that rapidly. It would take minutes or hours of combat to bring on these effects, but this example shows exactly why it's something that generally you would only do to enemies...or prisoners!
[Answer]
Magic is best thought of as ripples in reality, which skilled manipulators can form into full blown waves by carefully adding an extra ripple or three of their own. When the pool is calm, it's difficult to gain any magic to be used later, but when it's being whipped into a frenzy by practitioners working at odds to each other? It is then that true power can be achieved.
The resting state of sleep allows for a gentle, calm way to gather energy from the pool, by allowing your subconscious to anticipate and capture the next ripple (the meditators also use this technique), and there are many potions that temporarily pit your own magical energies against themselves, allowing you to gain a temporary boost at the expense of your own physical and mental wellbeing (if overused).
This also provides an excellent background for blood sacrifice providing additional power, for certain sites having additional power and for stone circles etc being used to 'channel' the power and make it easier to skim magical energies from the world. It also provides a foundation for why covens are powerful (two witches push against each other, the third gains power) and lays the groundwork for how groups of magicians working together and in harmony can achieve much, much bigger effects than they can alone.
Plus: Magic Surfboards.
[Answer]
The techniques you mentioned for gathering magic energy could both function by collecting energy from hostile intentions/will directed at the magic user. Therefore, it wouldn't be available except when someone was sending intensely hostile energy your way, which would generally only happen during combat. If by "during active combat" you mean only at moments when a serious attack is happening, then perhaps it also requires the bodily expression and/or the mental state present when actual injury may be about to occur. Of course, some people might experiment to see if they could get this in other circumstances, such as by chaining someone up and getting them to be be hostile but not a threat, or by arranging for friends/allies to attack them, but either intentionally miss or not attack or be armed with pillow weapons or something. If you don't want that, then you could also make it that there are other conditions (perhaps which even arch-wizards haven't figured out yet) such as the hostiles might need to believe they have an actual good opportunity to injure the magic user.
As a twist, it might also be about something other than the humans per se. For instance, some scientists in the late 20th Century found that plant matter responded to human thoughts and emotions and the suffering or even threat of injury to other plants or humans they were attuned to. Maybe the collection of magic energy is channeling the stress signals sent out by the combatant's symbiotic bacteria in/on their bodies. Or, maybe it's actually the sympathetic energy of spirits riding along with people. If it's from spirits, that would go along with the way dreaming can regenerate magic energy, particularly if (as some modern dream researchers think) there are dream spirits.
If you want an explanation at the traditional metaphorical level of religion, it could be said that Xuxuxu the god of war's gaze falls on those in combat (perhaps the gaze of other gods too), and the casters bask in the light of his gaze and can gather some for themselves, and gain some of his attention, or something along those lines.
[Answer]
It depends a bit on what you want to do. There are 3 distinct possibilities I can imagine:
1. The magic user has to be actively involved in the combat.
2. The magic user has to be present where combat is happening, but not necessarily actively fighting.
3. The magic user has to be at a scene where combat has occurred, but not necessarily when it happened.
There are a number of things that could be used, depending on which of the 3 above you want to use. Let's look at them one at a time.
Magic user has to be in active combat: You could use things like adrenaline, heart rate, etc, which might be increased slightly in normal conditions, but are far more likely to be present in combat. You could use something like impact, blood loss, or other items that are indicators of such stress. Maybe moving the arms in certain manners triggers it. With the exception of something magical, I can't come up with a system that couldn't be spoofed, but maybe the ability to spoof it could be a plot point. If adrenaline is the key factor, for instance, maybe magic users become adrenaline junkies to build up their power.
If they only have to be present in combat, there's a number of things. Maybe they feed off of suffering, or blood somehow transfers power to them. Maybe pain of others is the key factor. Again, these things could be spoofed outside of combat, but combat they are far more likely to be present. You could use spirits of some sort, or some magical essence that leaves the bodies of those who died in combat.
As to the third, the options are very similar to the second, however, they stick around for longer. You could do some interesting things, like call the spirits of dead soldiers, perhaps only the losing ones, or the young, or old.
Bottom line is, you could do a lot of interesting things, try to think of exactly what the magic user must be doing as you can, and then research the types of things that are happening to him, or those around him, when this is happening.
[Answer]
My answer is more appropriate for regular fighters with weapons and magic than long-range mages, I don't know if it fits your world.
Your mages may have a special link with their weapons. Wearing a weapon could be like wearing a magic item, and you have to have an active contact with it to recharge the magic pool. It's a little bit restrictive, as some of your characters may fight without weapons (but they could have fighting gloves), and for long-range fighters... Magic bows are a possibility but it does not bring the same sensation as a sword or an axe.
Back to the swords.
The way your magic regenerate could depend from the kind of mage and/or the kind of weapons.
* The first kind brings a few magic as long as the weapons are in the caster's hands.
* The second kind brings more magic but less often: when the fighter's weapons meet, when hurting the ennemy, while being hurt, only when striking or attacking and not while fighting in defense mode... lots of possibilities here. If you really want to keep the fact that magic regenerate while focussing, it's not a problem, the spellcaster have to focus on his weapon.
[Answer]
## Blood:
The energy pool your talking about could be the casters own blood.
To regain that energy, sleeping and general restfulness could increase the amount of blood in the body, so that the caster can cast more effectively. But this is boring.
## Combat:
While the casters own blood is most potent for his or her spells, the blood of others works too. They need physical access to it, its your call whether they need to drink it, stand in it, whatever. The caster can use lethal quantities of other peoples blood to cast too. The more you kill, the more you cast.
## Casters:
Their blood is better than muggle blood. A combat caster would specifically target enemy casters, with the intent of capturing and harvesting their blood, which you go with your Universe, is probably also an integral part of the energy-recharge potions you mentioned.
## Naturals vs Meditators:
This could either be hand-waved, or if its a hard requirement, then meditators have a mind-over-body way of having their body produce more blood than normal, similar the the Buddhist monks who can raise their body temperature and change their heart rates at will. It is not inconceivable that this skill or ability would appear in a world where blood was the determining factor in who lived and who died.
# Politic:
The Crimson King and Vampire clans and all sorts of nasty political entities would form around the need to acquire large volumes of blood to win wars. Others would band together to protect innocent people and rally the masses to their cause. For this reason, I don't really see 50% and being sustainable.
## 50%, but for how long?
This blood-caster trait would get pretty noticed. Maybe it would go like Dragon Age, where using other peoples blood becomes heresy and gets you killed. More likely, the muggles would rise up and hunt casters, vilifying them and calling them things like "Vampire". Or perhaps we would be something like the goofy last season of True Blood, where everyone would try and get a caster in the family, making the trait so Universal that everyone has it. Either way, I can't really see 50% holding for long. A couple hundred years, tops. That gives all the evil casters time to win large wars or all the muggles time to hunt casters to extinction.
[Answer]
Mages call mana the lifeblood of magic. It is the fuel that powers spells. When a mage focuses his mind he can shape this mana into whatever magic he wills, but were he to run out of his reserve of mana his spell will falter and die just as a human would if drained of their own lifeblood.
There is a good reason that Magical Scholars refer to mana as the 'lifeblood' of magic, because mana is very closely attached to one's life blood. Mana flows through our own blood. Some mages argue that without mana to fuel it human life would be impossible to sustain. Recently Magical scholars have suggested an alternative claim, that mana is not the fuel of the mind, but rather that the human mind is the fuel, or perhaps the furnace, which generates mana itself! Whatever the cause or affect it's well known that the human body has always been tightly linked to mana, and the main source of it.
A mage is able to slowly refill his reserve of mana for casting spells by siphoning off the excess mana generated from his own body, the the process is slow, taking more then 8 hours of time to refill, but ensuring they usually awake full of magical power.
More relevantly though mana that mana within one's body can be spilled just as easily as the blood. When one is cut they bleed both blood and mana. Even the smallest of wounds allows some of the mana which infuses one's body to leak out. It's been well documented that upon death a huge surge of mana is also released.
This nature of mana has served humanity in the past. Mages wounded by some unfortunate danger have often tapped into the mana released by their own energy to cast spells to defend themselves. In fact many natural disasters have been mitigated by mages taping into the magical energies released by those wounded in the disaster to fuel the very spells used to save those still in danger.
Still, one can't deny some unsavory tactics have resulted from the nature of mana. The infamous blood mages willing to hurt, or even kill, to fuel greater works are a horrible thought, though strict laws and harsh penalties have ensured few go down this dark path in the civilized world. But one can not ignore the escalating nature of war magics and the death toll that has resulted. Battle mages draw on the mana released by the death's during war to fuel their lethal spells, which in turn leads to more deaths and more ambient mana for both sides to draw upon. Indeed the most fearsome magics are always worked during warfare, when mana is most plentiful. For this reason magic has always been, right or wrongly, closely tied in most men's minds with war and combat. Some sadly think of magic as only useful when used to harm another, though I and my fellow Magical Scholars would hasten to stress there are many benign and beneficial uses for magic outside of combat.
After all let us not forget about the great Merlin, who's made the ultimate sacrifice by drawing on the mana that fueled his own lifeforce, sacrificing his own life to to cast the spell of binding which saved so many lives. While I prey no mage find's themselves in the situation where they must cast a their Final spell, it does show the good that magic can do for the common man!
And this is but one example. Remember common mage spells have helped protect farmer's crops from insects and encourage higher yields. From repelling dangerous creatures to speeding new construction to warding off infection of wounds magework regularly makes the life of the common man easier!
But this important magework is limited by Mana. There are far too many demands for Workings then our mages can manage from their own ambient mana. To fuel these important daily works, to improve and even save lives of you, the common man, our mages must supplement their mana reserves with Potions. Without Potions we will fail! We can not afford to allow our Potion supplies to dwindle!
And so I plead to you good folks, help support our magework! A simple quick procedure will allow us to draw upon your ambient mana to help us make potions to support the important mageworks of today! The procedure takes only 30 minutes! The process is simple and while Yes we must release a small flow of blood it is just a small pinprick, a tiny moment of discomfort to support our noble magework! You will be compensated for your time and inconvenience, and we provide free snacks afterwards to help you refill your mana supplies.
Remember you can donate once a week! One donation can fuel up to three potions! Please do your part to support magework and help save lives!
Side effects may include temporary dizziness, lower energy for the day after, and lower Mana reserves for casting and dry mouth. Do not donate if you are cursed, treating other's curses, or may be cursed in the near future. If you continue to experience difficulty Casting after a nights rest please seek magical attention from your local witchdoctor Immediately!
(
Okay, I may have had a little too much fun with this idea. It's similar to the already suggested idea of blood being the source of magic, but it's a bit more general. Mana is released whenever someone is hurt or killed, but it's not directly tied to anyone's blood. In combat whenever someone is hurt, be they ally, enemy, or even yourself, some ambient mana is going to be made available, at which point anyone can draw upon it. This means conflict that involves actual harm is the time that mana is most usually available to be drawn in. Mediators manually reach out to draw the ambient mana, while naturals just sock it in.
in a totally unrelated, and certainly not at all apropo, aside everyone should consider donating blood this weekend, Your local red cross likely is open Saturdays for convenient walk in times if you just google them! ;P )
[Answer]
Perhaps there could be some conservation law, conservation of mana. One can only receive mana after 'knocking' the mana out of your opponent.
Another related possibility would be conservation of hp+mana that states that total hp plus total mana is always equivalent to some constant. The only way to gain mana would be if the opponent uses mana or loses life due to, of course, the attacker. (If it's suicide it is automatically converted to their own mana.)
Sleeping/meditating mages receive ambient mana from other mages that have died.
[Answer]
Your magic is fueled by death.
When individuals die their "mana" is freed from their earthly body, magic users can capture this recently freed energy and store it inside of themselves for later use. This mana quickly dissipates which requires a magic user to be nearby to siphon off the energy.
This will lead to a rather grim dark setting with many mages performing ritual sacrifices, and/or slowly killing people to gain mana to fuel their spells...
Your good guys can have grim reaper mages who visit the sick/dying to siphon their mana on the sick/dying death.
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[Question]
[
(Vaguely related to [What kind of equipment would a giant slayer use](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135916/what-kind-of-equipment-would-a-giant-slayer-use), but different premise enough)
In a somewhat Northern-mythology inspired setting, "viking" villages and cities huddle in fjords, different manners of monsters creep in caves and tribes of giants haunt the hills.
The most common kind of giant-kin are similar to fantasy ogre:
* 3.5m tall in average, up to 4m in exceptional cases.
* Significantly stronger than humans.
* Tribal stupid: can fashion a club, rudimentary shelter, but no boat or complex weapons (no bows, no forging, can scrap metal to a certain extent). Capable of simple strategy when raiding.
* Boar-like hide, hard to pierce/slash.
* May enslave smaller races and use them as cannon-fodder in combat.
**I'm wondering what kind of weapons would humans use in this context to defend their settlement against such opponents.** Some restrictions for answers:
* A hit and run strategy isn't viable, it's a fixed location defense.
* No "Van Helsing ballistae". It's a 8th/9th Scandinavian kind of technology setting.
* The defenders don't have access to potent poisons. No neurotoxic sap on your arrow. The best they can manage would be something that cause an infection.
* Pits and traps are doable, but you have to take into account, a full fledged raid will be something like two dozens ogres preceded by 50 human/near-human slaves.
**This is a question about weaponry** (blades, spears, axes and all that good stuff). If you want to back it up with a strategic explanation, that's fine, but please, no meddling with the parameters (the slaves won't turn on them, the cities won't go nomad, etc).
[Answer]
**Fortifications**
If this is a fixed location defence, then fortify, using standard layered defences with a couple of tweaks to take advantage of the giants' weaknesses.
1. Early warning - as with any defensive position, have sentries to give early warning of approaching enemies. Make sure each sentry has a trained dog that will be able to use its better-than-human senses of smell and hearing to give more warning at night. Put "noisy" surfaces on all approaches such as gravel and easily-broken twigs etc. The giants are not listed as having any special stealth or night vision abilities, so this is the same sort of situation as defending against humans.
2. Prepared ground in approach to wall - deep obvious obstacles plus pit traps. Depending on the exact terrain around the village or city and available resources, use a combination of a moat (or pits of water), deep (4+ metre) trenches etc. The "safe lanes" between the obvious obstacles should have pit traps that are perfectly safe for even a 100 kg person to walk over but will break under the weight of a 300+ kg giant. The pit traps have barbed spikes at the bottom - these will be more effective against a giant than against a human because their ability to penetrate is using the giant's weight and much greater ground pressure to drive the spike through their skin. (Note that if heavy carts need to routinely run over these pit traps then have them covered with a drawbridge during times of commerce which is pulled up when an attack is detected.)
3. The wall - Build a wall that is more than 4 metres tall with all the usual features of a defensive wall. Ideally, make it a bit lower in a couple of places to create a "weak spot" a metre or so across that even a moderately stupid giant will realise is the easiest spot to climb, with a parapet to cover the people either side of this small gap. Ensure that the people on either side of the gap have sledgehammers ready to smash the fingers or heads of any giant who tries to climb up there.
4. Defender weaponry - Finally addressing the point of the question, this is the weaponry that is used *by the defenders of a wall*. First option is bows (against the slaves) and slings (against the giants) to hit attackers while they are crossing the prepared ground, especially those who are caught in pit traps, moats etc. Second option is medium size rocks and hot sand to drop on the heads of those trying to climb the wall, although pianos and anvils are entertaining options if the budget is available. (Also have long poles with forks on the end to push scaling ladders away, though these are not technically "weaponry" and the giants may not be smart enough to build ladders.) Finally, if any giant somehow manages to get a hand or head up to the top of the wall, everyone should have a mace, hammer or sledgehammer to ensure that they do not get any further. (Crushing damage does not care too much about cut-resistant skin.) Burning torches could also be a good option to push into the face of a giant as its head gets level with the parapet, especially if they are too primitive to understand fire.
Without the engineering ability to defeat fortifications, the giants have no hope of defeating a well-fortified village, let alone a city. Other than using slings at range and blunt weapons up close to defeat the cut-resistant skin, defending against giants is no different to defending against primitive human attackers, with the added bonus (for the defenders) of weight-sensitive pit traps that will not impede their own day-to-day movements.
EDIT: Various other answers and comments are suggesting that spears / polearms will work well against giants. There are two standard ways of using these weapons - either one-handed with a shield (through most of early history) or two-handed after plate armour made the wearer highly resistant to most attack forms (probably not yet developed in the "viking" era). The problem here is that neither of these techniques will work well against a group of attacking giants. While closing to melee range, the giants can throw rocks that are too massive to be deflected by a human wielding a shield and will disable even a well-armoured fighter with blunt force. If the giants are using spears (very probable) then those spears are twice as long as those of the humans and wielded with much greater strength. Some humans will probably survive to get inside the reach of the giants' spears and do some damage, especially as relative width on the battlefield will mean that any given giant in the front line will be facing two humans, but the humans need much greater numerical superiority to win and will take many more casualties than they would if they defend from their fortifications.
[Answer]
a pike, or a halberd would be ideal for this task, as would most polearms.
for fighting a giant, you'd want to have something with reach, and hence the polearm.
using their weight aganst them, and polearm is your choice.
Battlefield weapons is what Vikings warriors actually used in real life, plus the spear and pike was what most viking warriors used, so which means a viking type civilization would already have on hand the best weapons to fight giants with.
[Answer]
Your most effective weapon is your organisation.
People tend to focus way too much on hardware, which can be pretty marginal in warfare. A well-trained, well-organised, well-disciplined force with good leadership and sound tactical sense will beat a disorganised, undisciplined force with ease.
Lack of intelligence means the giants are doomed to fall prey to even relatively simple battlefield ruses like feigned retreats, and will be consistently outmaneuvered and face adverse odds every time they are trapped into a battle. Compared to the giants, any moderately competent commander will be Caesar, Napoleon and Alexander the Great rolled into one. The giants are likely to be demoralised after repeated defeats as they realise that whatever they do they are doomed, and this will accelerate their collapse and make it easier to bluff them.
Small forces of giants will be split off or lured away, ambushed and exterminated mercilessly. Most will be killed while fleeing; smart giants will flee as soon as they see a human force.
Weaponry is fairly irrelevant, but spears or other polearms would be useful, backed with any missile weapons that the force can use to concentrate firepower.
Even if defeated, a well-led force will take perhaps 20% casualties with the rest escaping and reforming, while a badly-led force if defeated will be surrounded or chased down and annihilated. This soon adds up.
EDIT: Also, cavalry. Light cavalry could harass the giants forces indefinitely with no fear of ever being caught, as the giants are too big to ride horses. Heavy cavalry with lances could probably destroy groups of giants.
[Answer]
I'll go tree-hugger on this one. Vikings didn't use much stone, so grow a forest around your village.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROPhr.jpg)
Giants call this accursed place "headwhack forest".
The tree species should be selected for its propensity to grow low branches, so a conifer would be a bad choice, but there are Scandinavian oaks that should be able to do that. With a bit of work (ie, harvesting high branches) trees can be encouraged to grow in the desired shape. Of course it would take a while, but it's an investment, plus you get wood, game, etc.
If the branch height is just right, humans can run and fight normally, horse carts can be driven through, but giants will have to crouch, which will strongly handicap their fighting ability, especially considering their favorite attack is the overhead smash with a big club.
The other giant specialty, throwing big stones, also becomes difficult as they will hit branches.
A dense forest also makes long spears useless, as they would hit trunks and undergrowth.
Since your Tree Vikings have bows, throwing spears, and can run, and giants don't have bows and can't even stand upright, the playing field should be very uneven. This is a bit of a frame challenge on your question, as instead of new weapons I'm going for a setting that enhances the efficacy of traditional viking weapons against giants.
This isn't as good as a defence as a Bigass Stone Wall, but vikings didn't build castles.
Also, thorns. Fantasy settings need thorns.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sIjVR.jpg)
[Answer]
**The bigger they are the harder they fall**.
Humans can break bones in a fall, and a giant is going to fall further and harder than a human. If falling onto flat ground isn't enough to kill them then six foot tall spikes would help. For this reason I think rope trip traps would be you best bet, perhaps aided with a bit of oil or grease.
The Slaves aren't that relevant. If they know what is good for them they'll switch sides and pay their danegeld. Since they don't know what good for them, they will be put to the fire and sword like an uppity Saxon (well mostly axe actually, but vikings had a bit of fire and sword too).
Or the Vikings could try to re-enact the legendary battle between Freyr and a giant by leaping into the fray bearing no weapon bar the antler of a hart. Sure they might die. Probably would, actually. But they would have a tale to tell upon entering Valhalla.
[Answer]
>
> The defenders don't have access to potent poisons. No neurotoxic sap on your arrow. The best they can manage would be something that cause an infection.
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Some poisons available to Scandinavians:
1. [lectin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectin#Toxicity) - available from mistletoe (Viscus Album) - the plant from which the arrow that killed [Baldr (a brother of Thor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscum_album#Scandinavia) was made
2. [ergot killed King Magnus II of Norway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism#History) shortly after the Battle of Hastings
3. [Amanita phalloides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_phalloides#Distribution_and_habitat) - said to be quite a tasty mushroom
4. [hensbane - hypothesized as the way to make berserkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyoscyamus_niger#Theories), also used for flavouring the beer before hops replaced it
Delivery? Ummm... how about the resemblance of a hastily abandoned fete, you reckon your ogres and their raiding party can resist the temptation?
Granted, they won't drop dead immediately, the village will need to resort to other defenses for a couple of days.
---
Others, still available to vikings, suggested in comments:
* [common yew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxus_baccata#Toxicity) - cardiotoxic, due to [taxine alkaloids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids), absorbed quickly from the intestine and efficiently via the skin, causes death due to cardiac arrest or respiratory failure. No known antidotes for yew poisoning, estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of Taxus baccata leaves is 3.0-6.5 mg/kg body weight for humans
* [hemlock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conium_maculatum) - based on [coniine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniine), structure and effects similar with nicotine. Causes a flaccid paralysis (like curare) by binding binding and stimulating the nicotinic receptor on the post-synaptic membrane of the neuromuscular junction. Native Americans used hemlock extract as arrow poison. LD50 - about 12mg/kg.
* [northern wolf's-bane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum_lycoctonum) - contains [aconitine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitine), blocks open the sodium-ion channels. [Proper-fucks the heart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitine#Toxicity) and the digestive system muscles, death by respiratory paralysis or cardiac arrest. Used as an [arrow/lance poison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum#As_a_poison) (even in whale hunting, paralyzing and causing it to drown)
[Answer]
**Economic warfare.**
Giants gotta eat. If they have agriculture, burn their fields in hit and run raids. If they are hunter-gatherers, kill their preferred prey species and root out whatever plants they gather.
That forces the giants to raid human settlements for food, but over time this species cannot win a war of attrition against humans. At this size, their reproductive rate will be slow. If forced to fight humans continuously for resources, at any realistic casualty ratio they are on a slow train to extinction.
As described, you've basically made them mammoths on their hind legs. Mammoths on their hind legs are in a bad situation if humans of Norse-level civilization decide to actively attempt to wipe them out.
[Answer]
Fight them from a fortified height, soften them up long range then axes and spears as they close.
A half naked mob of runaway slaves beat the Romans using slings from high ground in the Second Servile War, for giants staff slings and bows would be better, they require little training and can throw bigger rocks or incendiaries as far as a hand sling. They're still in use today.
A hand sling is capable of breaking bones and outranges most bows, a staff sling is even more dangerous and a spear butt could easily be modified to attach the sling to so the melee weapon is right there when the surviving giants finally poke their heads over the wall.
I have both sorts of slings and they're [lethal weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sling_(weapon)). The current World record is 477 metres with a hand sling.
[Answer]
**Holes in the ground.**
Because of the cube-square law, giants are more vulnerable to falling damage than people. In real life we see this with elephants:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gb140.png)
This moat is enough to keep the elephants inside.
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Of all the people and places you would choose, I really don’t see the Norsemen having any real trouble fighting the giants on your terms. I see some glorious battles in your future.
First off, if they are Vikings, they will fight like Vikings. The Vikings were very mobile armies and favored offensive tactics. Before the giants show up at the gates, they will have been engaged at least once, maybe three or four times out in the field. In the steep slopes of the fjords, using the terrain to your advantage would quickly eliminate the giant’s height advantage. Given that the giants are not too bright, this might work quite often.
The axes favored by the Norse, especially the two handed ax, could cut chainmail and split iron helms. Thick skin is not going to be that much of a problem unless it is actual stone.
Norse warriors were taught from childhood how to catch a thrown spear and return it to the sender. If the spear or rock is too large to catch, simply stepping out of the way seems trivial.
The Norse also favored heavy wooden shields and very quickly closing with their opponents. If the shield blocks that one spear jab while your friend closes to close combat, it may not matter that you get knocked on your rear.
Last, given what I have read about the Norse berserkers, in a one-on-one against a giant, I do not favor the giant’s odds.
Back to the siege, the Norse were extremely adaptable to their environment. There were rarely stone fortifications in that time period as there were no Frankish navies laying siege to Scandinavia. When the Norse men moved into Scotland or were invited into the northern Frankish territories (becoming known as the Normans) they adapted to the needs of the region and built stone keeps all over the landscape. If your settlements need stone walls, they will build stone walls. If they need ballista, catapults, or trebuchet they will build ballista, catapults, or trebuchet, all of which they had working knowledge of.
Do not forget about the longship as a weapon. Any settlement with access to the water could quickly reposition part of their force to place the attackers on the defensive.
The Vikings’ worst defeats were when they were caught or ambushed out in the open by a very mobile army. That shouldn’t happen in the fjords.
[Answer]
The human slaves/cannon fodder would be a minor threat at most - a panicked rabble with more incentive to escape than to fight. A promise of leniency/freedom if they proved themselves worthy by turning on the giants would go a long way, or simply letting them flee. If these really aren't options, they're still poorly armed and untrained - no match for a basic militia with a palisade and good throwing arms.
If they didn't have oversize crossbows/torsion spear-throwers, they'd invent them pretty quickly. These have a poor rate of fire, so you'd want to delay the giants once they were within range This could be done using something in between a [Cheval de Frise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheval_de_frise) and a [Czech hedgehog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_hedgehog) - think 3 logs, sharpened and formed into a tripod. You might want to make them about 2m tall, 2m across and 1m apart, but that would mean they wouldn't impede the human slaves very much; in turn that would usefully separate the slaves from their masters.
A skilled and well-organised society familiar with bows (even if mainly for hunting and skirmishing), as the Norse of the time were, would have no trouble coming up with something close to a Roman [ballista](https://www.ancient.eu/article/649/roman-artillery/) or scorpio. A bolt the size of a spear would be able to penetrate even tough skin at long range, and do real damage, not just irritate a giant. Fire might be worthwhile if the giants are particularly frightened of something that hurts and they don't understand, but may not be very reliable. Instead a barbed head would be particularly crippling as it couldn't be removed and a giant isn't going to attack very fast after taking a spear to the knee.
Of course all this would be combined with pits/moats and scouting skirmishers (mounted javelineers attacking from the flanks/rear unless the giants were surrounded by a solid mass of human slaves).
[Answer]
**Think about mammoths.**
In prehistoric era a score of hunters with poles/spears could bring a mammoth down. That is the most realistic real world analogy I could think of.
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[Question]
[
I'm creating an early-medieval-age-like world, in the pre-gunpowder era.
How effective would a formation of pikes (like the Swiss [pike square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_square)), with archers inside, be against an enemy using strictly cavalry (based on mounted archers and lancers)?
Some further information if important:
1. The pikemen will have to carry shields, since their armor is not advanced enough (similar to the Macedonian phalanx).
2. The foot archers would use bows with an average draw weight of 110 pounds.
3. Mounted archers would use bows of around 80 pounds draw weight on horseback, and have a second bow with a draw weight of 110 pounds for use on foot.
4. Lancers would use lamellar armor.
5. Pikemen & foot archers would use padded jackets & chainmail.
Draw weights taken from [here](http://www.manchuarchery.org/historical-draw-weights-qing-bows). Both armies have similar
[Answer]
## Really Good.
I'd like to preface this with the fact that this is all conjecture and depends highly on the numbers of each side, but I'll base my answer on facts that we know.
Well, cavalry charges were largely ineffective against pikemen (who were employed heavily in the late medieval era), So your lance-wielding horsemen would face an extremely difficult challenge against a pike square. From wikipedia (Cavalry tactics): "Frontal assaults of heavy cavalry became considered ineffective against formations of spearmen or pikemen combined with crossbowmen or longbow archers." This points to the cavalry being highly ineffectual to your exact pike square with internal archers.
This, combined with the possibility that your shielded pikemen would have cover from the horse archers, points to the likelihood that the mounted combatants would fare extremely poorly against your pikemen.
Early Medieval historical examples of cavalry being defeated by pikemen/spearmen + archers:
* the Battle of Stirling Bridge
* the Battle of Bannockburn,
* the Battle of Poitiers
* the Battle of Crecy
In all of these examples, cavalry charges broke on pikemen OR cavalry was defeated by the bows of the archers, who were more effective on the ground than on horseback (From wikipedia, mounted archery): "Horse archery was usually ineffective against massed foot archery. The foot archers or crossbowmen could outshoot horse archers and a man alone is a smaller target than a man and a horse."
So, all things being equal it would appear based on historical examples and analysis, your pikemen and archers would likely fare quite well.
[Answer]
You can never predict the exact outcome of any battle, but there are factors that can push it one way or the other.
## In a general sense, the ground forces have a distinct advantage
Foot archers can effectively use longer bows than horse archers giving them a draw length advantage: a factor that compounds with draw weight for total bow power. This means they will be able to shoot the horse archers before the horse archers can shoot the foot archers. If the horse archers dismount to meet them with long bows, their disadvantages in armor style will still be a big problem.
If by "chainmail and padded jackets" you mean riveted chainmail and gambison (the standard European varieties of these armors) your armor will stop most arrows fired even at short range. If the horse archers are using bodkin arrows, their attacks will be able to penetrate the armor, but only at very close ranges (a few dozen feet at most). In contrast, most styles of lamellar armor suffers from lucky arrows and spears slipping between the plates; so, the lancer armor will stop some arrows, but others will penetrate even at longer ranges. Lancer and horse archers also rarely armored their mounts meaning they could be killed at very long ranges by longbows. Just having your horse killed from under you is likely to cause injuries significant enough to take you out of the fight.
As for the lancer charges, you can expect Macedonian style pikes to slaughter them. A footman can wield a long pike more effectively than a horseman can; so, the lancers will hit pikes before the lances hit pikemen. This again is a game ender for the mounted army which is already lightly armored.
## Cases where the cavalry army would gain have the advantage
**CASE A:** The mobility of cavalry is a great for skirmishing an enemy. If the cavalry army is led by a good general who knows not to attack the infantry directly, he may be able to use his mobility to deprive the infantry of valuable logistics and reinforcements by attacking supply lines. If the infantry army is far enough from friendly cities, they could be starved out without ever being engaged directly.
**CASE B:** Cavalry troops have at most points in history been better trained and disciplined than their infantry counterparts. Since pikemen were just drafted peasants in most situations, it was common for pikemen to break formation at the sight of a cavalry charge not even understanding that they had the tactical advantage. Especially in the medieval period, well trained knights would charge at pikemen despite the apparent disadvantage. If the pikemen did not break formation, the knights would turn away at the last moment, but if they did break, the knights would utterly slaughter them because the routing army can't run fast enough to get away from a cavalry charge.
**CASE C:** Cavalry can generally choose the battlefield they fight in, even if that means it is a bad battlefield for cavalry. Archers, horse archers, pikemen, and lancers are all really meant for open field tactics, but if the more mobile horse army decides not to engage the infantry in an open field, they can force the fight to happen in woodlands. In woodlands, pikes are completely useless. You can not form a phalanx or even bring your spears down and level. Shorter cavalry spears on the other hand may still be useful meaning then even being forced to fight dismounted, the lancers may have a slight advantage in sparse woods, or at least be a fair fight in thicker woods where all spears are useless, and the fighting all comes down to sword and shield combat. Woods would also favor the shorter cavalry bows since any archery you do would be done at fairly close range where a shorter bow is just as lethal but less likely to get snagged by your environment.
**CASE D:** If the lancers use kite shields or long shields as many forms of mounted cavalry throughout history have done, the cavalry can dismount and effectively function like legionary infantry. Legionaries have a distinct advantage over pikemen and archers in an open field because they can testudo to protect themselves from archers, and once they get into spear range, they can trap the pikes between their shield and safely guide them between their ranks allowing them to safely close into sword or short spear range.
## Cases where the infantry army would do especially well
**CASE A:** Wet climates. Wet climates are terrible places for both horses and the composite short bows more typically used by horse archers than ground archers. Composite bows were made using hide glue, an organic adhesive that gets eaten by bacteria in places with higher humidity. While neither style of bow could fire when wet, mono-wood longbows can get wet, then work again after drying out whereas composite bows often would often fail from extended humidity even if they are currently dry. Horses also sink more in muddy terrain than humans; so, the mud would deprive them of their mobility advantage.
**CASE B:** They are fighting over a place. In warfare, holding certain ground is often an important part of the greater strategy toward victory. The infantry would do better both offensively (because the cavalry has to stay still to hold the ground) and defensively (because they have better range) than the cavalry army. This becomes even more true in a siege scenario because the cavalry need to feed both their troops and their horses.
**CASE C:** They are fighting in a corridor. Pike formations are at their strongest when they face a frontal assault along a flat battle line many rows thick. If the battle is fought in a corridor that you can fully span like a steep-walled mountain pass or city streets, then the pikemens' flanks are protected. This means they can layer their pikes thicker and force the lancers into a frontal assault.
**CASE D:** They are fighting on an uneven battlefield. Similar to horsemen in the woods, this is a case of not being the ideal place for either army, but being worse for the horsemen. Pikes formations can be a harder to maintain in uneven terrain, but humans are natural climbers. They are better designed for uneven terrain than horses; so, will be perform more on par and have more flexibility in where they can go on the battlefield giving them certain mobility advantages.
[Answer]
Since no one else mentioned it
# Your scenario played out in the real world.
Over in the History forum at Paradox, [this thread on the Parthian Empire](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-rise-of-the-sasanians.1058552/page-2) is very thorough and better laid out than most of the Wiki pages on the same topic. Their entire deal with Rome was mounted cavalry vs. infantry and archers. Do yourself a favor and read it sometimes for an overview of a time in Persia that most world histories skim over much too quickly.
# The short version is the mounted archers usually won
**because the fully mounted army, almost 100% of the time, can choose the time, location, and condition of the battle**. The upvoted posters above may be right that in some kind of forced-battle simulator that good dismounted archers might fare better. In real life, the Parthians would just avoid dealing with archers with superior bows (not that the Romans had them), then just set fire to their camp at night... or harry them into a chase, wait til they were exhausted and have the sun and dust in their eyes, and ride back around... or attack their supply lines and wait for them to grow hungry and tired... or...
**Now, the Romans weren't stupid**. Their eastern armies began adopting pike-heavy phalanx-like strategies against the Parthians instead of the usual short swords, and it worked... well, still terribly for the most part except the first half of Nisibis. What the Romans did that *worked* was scorching the earth to deny grass to the horses, heavily fortifying places with good water supplies, and outlasting the Parthians' ability to keep their armies together. Societies with good horse archers (esp. societies that *only* produce horse archers) are generally nomadic and decentralized. They won't fight for a king's honor for longer than custom demands, and their homeland will be full of rivals and blood feuds that can be exploited by wealthy and well-informed enemies... so **Rome slowly moved into Armenia and Mesopotamia in the 2nd century not because their legions did a better job in pitched battles** in the open field but because they could enter better supplied and in full force (keeping anything but the full Parthian army from daring to fight at all) and fortify their new conquests and because they could foment enough civil wars to keep the Parthians occupied or to get one vassal to ask for their help against another... until, of course, Rome's own civil wars ruined its ability to keep the Persians from overrunning the Levant at will.
[Answer]
**Badly**
While the foot archers have a range advantage on the cavalry units, the lancers can easier stay of range and the horse archers can attack with using their speed and mobility.
The pikemens only value is protecting the foot archers from being over run by the lancers. The pikes with lengths of 18’ are much longer than the lancer weapons.
For the foot archers to successfully attack the horse archers during their attack run, the foot archers have to aim at a point where the cavalry will be in the future. When the foot archers loose their arrows, the cavalry changes direction and/or speed and the arrows only hit ground. This pattern can be repeated until the horse archers are in range.
When the horse archers fire, their target is effectively stationary and much more easily hit. The horse archers can attack until they risk slowing down too much and being vulnerable to foot archer arrows, then they can break contact using the same strategy they used getting into range.
If the horse archers separate in to groups, they can make it more challenging for the foot archers by forcing them to either spread their fire or concentrate on one group, giving the other groups more time to make precise aimed fire.
[Answer]
**Really Bad**
In terms of an open battlefield, *nothing* beats a cavalry archer. They are the cheat code of the medieval battlefield, and their only downside is the fact that they can't hold positions. It's how the Mongolians beat everyone in a fight. The way you win against cavalry archers is by holing up in a fort. On land, even with formations and shields, infantry are susceptible to getting surrounded, and archers won't be able to help much.
And if the army has mounted *lancers* as well, they're still in trouble. Pikemen formations work against cavalry, sure. But archers don't, and the pikemen can't protect the archers and themselves from the lance cavalry while *also* defending themselves from the cavalry archers. In short, given two generals of equal skill and two armies of equal size, the cavalry army will win. Which makes sense, given one side is archers + spears, and the other side is (archers + spears) on horses.
To clarify, there's not really a lot of good formations that *would* be able to withstand mounted archers and lancers on a battlefield, because of how good mounted soldiers are.
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> The pikemen will have to carry shields since the armor is not advanced enough, similar to Macedonian phalanx.
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Real pikemen - including the Macedonians - didn't carry the sort of shields I think you're imagining. You need both hands for a pike. The Macedonian "shield" was actually a piece of armour - it was a metal plate worn on a strap around the neck, ie a crude breast plate - useful against horizontal pike thrusts but against falling arrows. Videogames NOT equal history...
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Not good at all.
2 real world examples:
The Mongol Hoardes (mounted archers) vs. China, Iraq, Iran, & Europe. It was a slaughter. Mounted archers have mobility. Foot soldiers wielding large shields needed to defend against the archers do not.
The second wasn't mounted but shows the damage archers of any stripe can do.
In the 100 Years War, the English mowed down whole regiments of French infantry. In the Battle of Sluys (1340) the English used longbow's on ships and raked the French Navy. The French lost 16,000 and the English 600 at most.
Battle of Crecy (1346) The English bowman massacred a battalion of French knights.
Battle of Poitiers (1356) The bowman were 1/3 the entire English force.
The tortoise was invented by the Romans to counter archers. However it was only intended to function until 1 of 2 things happened.... 1) they could march up to the archers and with going against mounted archers you can't do this or 2) their Calvary showed up.
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[Question]
[
Suppose that humanity has spread out through space. Humans are exploring all kinds of environments, including some with gravity much weaker than our Moon's:
* Ceres ([surface gravity = 0.28 m/s2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)))
* Enceladus ([surface gravity = 0.113 m/s2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus))
* Phobos ([surface gravity = 0.0057m/s2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)))
* Atlas ([surface gravity = 0.0002m/s2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(moon)))
Bases are built on such places, and they get populated.
Regular walking in such gravity ranges becomes impractical. Kerbal Space Program has a body with a surface gravity of 0.049m/s2 (which is close to Enceladus's), and [the wiki has this to say about it](https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Gilly):
>
> It is very impractical to walk on Gilly; each step will launch a Kerbal several meters into the air. A Kerbal can jump over 200 meters on this moon and will usually take more than 4 minutes to return to the surface. This makes jetpacks a necessity to move around the moon practically.
>
>
>
I find the constant use of jetpacks on a daily basis awesome but wasteful. You would also be in trouble once you ran out of fuel.
I also know that magnetic shoes could be a solution while inside a building, but I'd like my space civilization to walk outdoors too.
What would be a practical solution if people wanted to go for a low gravity hike?
I am aware of [Alternative for magnetic boots](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/76196/21222), but I am open to alternatives that do not involve gripping boots. I think that if someone depended on gripping for that, stepping on a loose rock would be quite troublesome.
[Answer]
**Cross country ski.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NQjon.jpg)
<http://runawayjuno.com/runaway-tales/sand-skiing-namibia-desert/>
The vector forces entailed in cross country skiing are well suited for a low gravity environment. Rather than pushing downwards as with walking or running, one moves by shifting the weight and pushing off forward against the back ski. This was developed for snow but works on sand or other reasonably flat surfaces. The mineral surfaces of the listed small bodies should work just fine as ski substrates.
Plus if you have a hill you could set up awesome low grav jumps.
[Answer]
## Add railing
If you really wanted to go out for a walk on your low gravity rock, and often, then your colony might want to invest in setting down some railing. Possibly everywhere. When you go outside you have a cord attached to you, and the other end you attach to the rail. You can use a simple clip. When you walk the clip slides and slides along with you. The tether prevents you from flying away.
There is not much reason to go outside walking, but if it was something frequent that had to be done then this is the easiest and cheapest solution requiring no high tech inventions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h0Sa0.jpg)
[Answer]
Use ropes and cables. Attach your suit to them so you don't die. They are cheap, easy to install and remove (that far into the future, I'm sure a robot can do that for you before your trip) and easy to store. And if you don't have time and need to go someplace quickly, you can just attach them to your suit and your station . Your suit already comes equipped with that option. The exact implementation and details, another topic for another question.
[Answer]
**Set up walking paths equipped with rails.**
It could look something like a walker, possibly with straps to hold you down, and tied into a rail system. Each time you take a step the walker and straps will keep you from bouncing away, and instead that energy will be used to push the walker forward.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uJI6f.jpg)
The walkers wheels would work something like the ones on a roller coaster; you would have wheels on the top and bottom of the rail, so that when you push off the cart wouldn't just fly away with you.
[Answer]
Go cave exploring.
There are theories that many of the lower gravity moons of the solar system might have very extensive cave systems with very large chambers.
So if you start to become claustrophobic in your habitat, you might want to try putting on a ruggedized space suit and go spelunking. You can explore the larger caves by pushing yourself from wall to wall or swing around with a grappling hook. But you might still want to use a long and thin tether so you find your way back to the habitat before you run out of oxygen.
**Main risk:** If astronomers find out in a few years that the moon where your story takes place actually has no caves, then your whole story becomes implausbile. But that's a risk you must be willing to take if you write hard science fiction which takes place in our solar system.
[Answer]
Fundamentally you need to be carrying about 9.8/0.049 = 200x your body weight to feel normal gravity.
So, wear heavy shoes, build special heavy suits for everyone
[Answer]
Use jetpacks anyway, but differently than you expect.
These people are going to need suits because of the lack of atmosphere, suits that already use power either during use or before use as air is pressurized and you likely have some electronics inside for temperature and air control. So why wouldnt you add a few pressurized cans of atmosphere or an ejectable material as well? To "fly" you release the pressure and allow it to push you in the right direction. Its not very wasteful as it requires little energy to get you airborne and among the basic energy requirements for the suit its not going to add a high amount of extra energy. In fact because it would be easier and faster to get around people would spend less time outside and require less energy to get their suits back up to full capacity.
Because of the nature of the planet it would likely be best to find something common in the soil that wont boil away from the planet surface if released, as that would still be wasteful.
[Answer]
Your question related to staying down in microgravity. Without a gravity field generator or something the answer is to increase the mass.
While this is not ideal from an inertia point of view it will keep you closer to the *planet*.
You could have concrete boots, a walking frame or jump into a fluid filled hamster ball.
Sort of like the [Flintstones car](https://www.google.fi/search?q=flintstone%20car&tbm=isch).
] |
[Question]
[
We know that cave-dwellers who live in lightless environments well develop traits such as transparent skins, barely functional eyes (or completely blind) and other enhanced senses to replace eyesight to help them "see" in the dark.
Now what kind of alternative to writing could a civilization of such creature develop in order to keep records and history?
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of maybe something similar to how ants communicate using pheromones, sounds, and touch.
I supposed it depends on their strongest sense as well. Human eyesight is extraordinarily developed, which works well with reading.
* Perhaps some sort of materials that'll hold on to chemical signals for a really long time?
* Maybe using audio files?
* Braille system?
[Answer]
Civilization developed writing first for business accounting purposes. In order for that to transpire in a sight-less civilization, you need a method for making records that last on a timescale of years, can can be 'inscribed' and 'read' with one of the other sense and minimal technology. After all, the invention of writing in Sumeria required only pottery as a pre-requisite technology. Here are some possibilities:
**Touch**: This is the simplest comparison. Braille would work just fine. Also consider that the original Sumerian cuneiform was made with impressions in a clay surface, and could have been read as braille. There are other systems based on knotted cords, or your people could even use a small variant of an abacus.
**Hearing**: I can't think of any way to preserve hearing with pre-Bronze age technology. There are theoretically ways to record the vibrations of spoken word in a solidifying crystal, for example, but I don't see how you could utilize that with minimal technology.
**Smell**: How well developed is the sense of smell? If smell markings can be locationally identified by these people's nose to within a centimeter or two (something a bear's nose can probably do), then a surface could have 'smells' applied to it in a pattern. With 10 or 20 different 'named' smells, you already have nearly the utility of an alphabet; or you could use combinations of two or more smells to replicate the versatility of hieroglyphics or Chinese characters. Smells would have to common from common herbs and minerals that have distinct smells (think lavender, saffron, fresh clay (kaolin), and sulfurous--like the mineral pyrite)
Smells would have to be 'preserved'. This can be accomplished by mixing the smells with an oil-based varnish. When you rub your hand over the surface, some of the scent molecules are disturbed an released, effectively making a scratch and sniff writing system. Only works for extremely sensitive noses.
**Taste** - I don't know if this would be that effective. You can't just go around putting everything in your mouth (I keep telling my 1 year old daughter).
[Answer]
A number of peoples in the Americas made use of [strands of knotted thread](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu). The placement and type of knot would carry meaning from the knotter to the person who "read" the thread. While I believe these were mainly used for very simple accounting, I can't think why, after millenia of development, a full-fledged writing system couldn't be developed from intricately knotted reels of string.
[Answer]
## Non-Human Senses
In addition to records perceivable with one or more of the 4 human senses other than sight, [many animals have senses humans don't](https://www.google.com/search?q=animal+senses+that+humans+don't+have&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari) so records stored in those mediums could be possibilities. For example:
* [Electroreception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception): the ability to sense minute differences in electrical charges.
* [Magnetoreception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception): the ability to detect differences in magnetic fields.
## Human Senses
**Taste**: Also, records could be stored as tastes if the anatomy and society manage to have acceptable means of reading the records. For example, [catfish have taste sensors all over their bodies](http://www.gameandfishmag.com/fishing/fishing_catfish-fishing_gf_aa076502a/), so simply by touching taste records, an entity could read them.
**Hearing**: For hearing, perhaps some material is developed that resonates with a specific frequency when rubbed. So, an "alphabet" composed of sound frequencies could be possible--imagine beings running violin bow-like implements sequentially across a series of sections of this resonate material, and then listening to each frequency, just like we listen to syllables of speech. Also, [ultrasound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound) and [infrasound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound) frequencies could be possibilities.
[Answer]
## Groovy
There is a highway in Europe with grooves cut into the pavement. As you drive over them at the correct constant speed, a song plays. It's similar to how a phonograph record album works.
Tonal languages rely a lot on pitch as well as pronunciation. Words and songs could be carved into grooves of the cave wall and played by dragging a thumbnail or instrument across them. Knots were mentioned in another answer, and work the same way when dragged across some sort of amplification bowl.
In the musical theme, and somewhat related to Thom Blair III's answer, [glass harmonicas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harmonica) could serve as notepads.
Many cultures preserve a lot of knowledge through song. Its repetition and group reinforcement means the information doesn't mutate as quickly as with individual storytellers.
But don't discount individual memory. Your librarians might not have books, just their memories, and spend their idle time reciting to each other as practice. One could probably wrap a whole economy around these people.
[Answer]
## The question
>
> Now what kind of alternative to writing could a civilization of such creature develop in order to keep records and history?
>
>
>
There's a lot of great answers on other senses, so I'm just going to consider: *why wouldn't these creatures use methods similar to ours in the first place?*
Let's take the assumption using creatures that are basically dark-adapted humanoids, so that they think in a broadly similar way and want to write in a broadly similar way to us. Assuming that they have dark-adapted eyes, and the correct sort of genetic heritage if you want to keep it scientifically accurate, they could use the following:
## Bioluminescence
The creatures could harvest or farm a bioluminescent ink from local creatures in the underdark, and use it for writing records. It would glow faintly (either in a visible spectrum or otherwise; see also below), allowing it to be seen, even in the dark.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3dUfM.jpg)
*A bioluminescent cave.*
## Infrared
Rather than relying on the visible spectrum, they could use a heat-contrast system coupled with IR vision. This could be a high-tech system (much like how we now use spreadsheets rather than abacuses and papyrus), but it also has a biological precedent: [according to the ASU](https://askabiologist.asu.edu/colors-animals-see), snakes such as pit vipers, some boas, and some pythons can see in infrared.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aViS.jpg)
*An infrared view of a city street.*
## Ultraviolet
This could be a natural or a technological adaptation. Think of walking into a nightclub with UV lighting - things glow brightly. Again, there is a natural precedent for this: [the ACU again reports](https://askabiologist.asu.edu/colors-animals-see) that jumping spiders, bees, and rats can see in ultraviolet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xn4fu.jpg)
*A butterfly and flower seen in ultraviolet.*
## Fit it into your plot
The great thing about these methods is that they allow 'normal' humans to interact with and understand the systems in use, allowing lots of potential for storytelling (in terms of cross-species communication attempts, as well as miscommunications based on how humans in your chosen setting already use IR and UV technologies).
[Answer]
**Ogham**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham>
Carvings are made into stone (could be used for wood too) that represent an alphabet. The strokes could be felt with the fingers as a sort of braille.
Of course there's still the problem of finding the Ogham script, but I'm sure they could have a system for that (always on the left side of a doorway or something)
[Answer]
I was gonna write everything everybody wrote, but they beat me to it, I swear!
Anywho, in SciFi you can find such creatures as Orson Scott Card's Formics, that preserve knowledge through [genetic hereditary memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_memory_(biology))
Also see the [Na'vi's Tree of souls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoran_biosphere#Na.CA.BCvi), a kind of bio-computer tree thingy.
We don't know of anything on Earth that can do what the Formics/Zerg/CompTree do, but I think it's a cool option for worldbuilding :-)
[Answer]
Some options I don't see mentioned here are **Genetics** and **Chemistry**. Consider the [Tyrathaca](http://nightsdawn.wikia.com/wiki/Tyrathca) from Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy. They are a hive species. All information is passed from the breeder class to other classes via chemical "downloads." All breeder children are educated via such downloads as well. This allows information to be passed from generation to generation completley unchanged.
[Answer]
Maybe a combination of the two - audio and braille plates that are combined to form a new type of language.
Or you can try something like what Avatar has with connecting your hair to tree branches that allows you to access historical records.
[Answer]
One may imagine storing information on some comb-like biological structure such as the (small but very numerous) ribs of some common animal. (Another possibility is to use some kind of bush, the branches of which grow in very regular patterns, but that wouldn't last as long.) The creatures could break off certain ribs and, by touch, count how many there are between each gap. This forms a unary number system that can be used to encode data.
A basic alphabet or syllabary system could be used to "write" down data. 1 rib - gap - 2 ribs - gap - 1 rib might for instance represent a "sha" sound or something. Furthermore, gaps of more than one rib may be used to separate words while even longer gaps could also be used to separate chapters, allowing the creatures to drag their fingers/whatever quickly across a text to find the start of the next chapter and more easily navigate through the text.
Several rib cages can be strung together with some kind of thread (to keep long texts in order) and folded/rolled up into something similar to a book/scroll.
Furthermore, if you want a bit more of a strange or "alien" feel to it, you can have the two sides of the rib cage encode different but connected information. Perhaps the vowels are on the left side while the consonants are on the right side, having the creatures use two fingers/whatever to read both sides at once.
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[Question]
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Darkvision, or seeing in the dark. But how does it work? In my world, I've been envisioning darkvision as eyes that emit a color of light that most humanoids can't see. Are there any problems inherent in this?
##### Details
* It works by emitting light from the eyes in a spectrum humans can't see: for the purposes of this question, let's say low UV light.
* I'd like it to be able to go about 30-60ft, although it can dim as it goes.
* Color vision doesn't matter.
* I don't mind if the FOV is shrunk
* I don't mind if people's darkvision interacts
* Yes this is for D&D
* Let me know if you need more info.
Thanks!
[Answer]
There are already animals that do what you want, in the sound domain: bats. Let's just steal shamelessly.
**More flash for your buck**
Constantly producing a distinctive light source bright enough to see by is energetically wasteful, dangerous (eventually at least one predator will figure it out!) and chaotic when multiple of your species are using it at once. Instead, your species has the ability to discharge a very bright, very sudden flash that they alone can see. The most efficient way to do that is to produce a very narrow wavelength, flash a lot of it in a short time, and have a correspondingly narrow sensor, in this case specialised rods in their retinas. Compare with bats, whose ears are specifically shaped to focus the wavelength of their ultrasound. Bats have to deal with the [Doppler effect](https://twitter.com/TomLumPerson/status/1407851970375860227), but you probably don't.
**Stroboscopic vision**
It takes a brief pause for the flash to be repeated, because the flashing organ needs to recharge. This gives darkvision a peculiar quality compared to regular vision, because it lacks the continuity that creates the sense of movement. The effect is akin to stroboscopic disco lights. This also means that they can avoid producing their distinctive light if they're trying to lay low; or they can use it like a morse code to communicate with others of their species.
**Blinding yourself with light coming out of your eyeballs**
Obvious problem, as pointed out by others. Bats aren't a great help here, because sound is slow enough that they can disengage their ear bones while screaming and re-engage them for the echo - good luck with that at *c*. But you don't have to filter in the time domain: you can filter in the **rotational** domain. Your flashing organ produces light that is *perfectly* polarised. Your wavelength-specific rods are sterically aligned to collect every plane of light *except* the one you flash out. Light reflected off natural objects is almost always randomised in polarisation, although smooth reflective surfaces will presumably look completely dark at certain angles.
[Answer]
I see one big problem with eyes emitting "darklight" (my shortcut definition for "light that can be seen by species gifted with darkvision"). Or any device emitting darklight. But let me explain it :
# Your sight is dependent of others, too
That's functionally the main problem of this approach at darkvision. Regardless of physics or biology, you'll face situations that don't really match your criterias nor the common principle of darkvision like in Dungeons and Dragons.
Indeed, if you emit light and receive the light in return, and others emit light, too, at some point one will interact with each other, often unwillingly. If you're unsure to understand, take two flashlights at night, a buddy and test yourself, keeping the flashlight targetting where you see. Here are some simple nasty consequences you can check out.
### What are (some) of the consequences from this?
* If light is dimmed up over distance, adding more sources of light will extend your sight range. In other words, the more darksighted people you are, the better you'll see (at long range).
* You'll be able to see where others see : Let's say a goblin is ambushing you around a tunnel's corner and both of you are darksighted. He's waiting the moment he sees you. Problem : What he sees is what he emits. Light bounces in all direction, so you'll see the ground he sees, too. The deduction is easy to make from then :).
* You'll become blinded if there are too many darksighted people looking at the same thing. Indeed, if each person is emitting light enough to see, any new person will add more light to it, to the point it will become too lit up to see it or at least see its shadows and shape clearly.
* You'll have an harder time looking at others darksighted people eyes. If you look directly at a flashlight, you'll be dazzled. The same thing could very well happen here.
## Other biological consequences
* You'll have to deal with an hard-time sleeping : If your eyes themselves are constantly emitting light, closing them will not stop the emission (your eyes don't stop seeing). It's like closing your eyes to take a nap while the sun's out, albeit it is directly coming from within your eyelid.
* If you add these very specific light receptors, you'll probably have to remove others. It's a bit like what night predators do by reducing their color vision for a more focused and efficient black and white one, but this time you're likely to add a new type that's overlapping an existing one, functionally speaking. This means that your dwarves, elves and the such will lose some sight a way or another to implement these new cones. And the same happens for the light emitters, if they are inside the eye and not around it.
[Answer]
**Eyes are receivers**
Eyes are receivers of light. The light is focused on retina where receptors sense the light and send the information to brain through optic nerve.
**Bioluminescence**
To emit light by living organisms, bioluminescence is required. A different organ is used for bioluminescence. There is a mention of UV bioluminescence [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45741/ultraviolet-bioluminescence).
**Dark-vision using UV rays**
For dark-vision using UV rays, following things are to be considered:
* An organ (not eye) that emits UV rays by UV bioluminescence.
* A receptor to sense UV rays. As told [here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/27859238),
>
> Some fish have eyes that capture and perceive ultraviolet wavelengths
>
>
>
**Dark-vision using infra-red rays**
There is another way of dark vision used by snakes. As told [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.122),
>
> Snakes can 'see' in the dark thanks to protein channels that are
> activated by heat from the bodies of their prey.
>
>
> Vipers, pythons and boas have holes on their faces called pit organs,
> which contain a membrane that can detect infrared radiation from warm
> bodies up to one meter away. At night, the pit organs allow snakes to
> 'see' an image of their predator or prey — as an infrared camera does
> — giving them a unique extra sense.
>
>
>
[Answer]
Imho having the light source in the eye is the main issue. It's hard to imagine how the light source in the eye wouldn't outshine the light reflected from surfaces several meters away.
A quick fix would be to move the light source out of the eyes. That would mean in your image, the light cones would not originate from the eyes. My favorite place would be on the forehead (like the mythical third eye). When that "third eye" is opened the light source in it starts to emit the UV light.
Alternatively, to keep the light source in the eyes: The left eye emits the frequency the right eye can detect and vice versa.
Of course, within the setting of D&D with all its magic, gods and fantastical creatures it would be perfectly fine to assume there are materials available that have optical properties to solve this primary issue.
---
Just an additional thought: Fog and dust in the air will impair that kind of vision heavily. Just like with a flashlight, nearby fog/dust will reflect the light and outshine light reflected from further away, thereby limiting the visible distance.
[Answer]
#### Backlit eyelids, Reflective corneas
The eyes do not emit light. Rows of bioluminescent cells on the back of the eyelids do it instead.
Creatures who use this kind of darkvision usually have a silvery sheen to their corneas. It's hard to spot but doable. Some disguised dark elves were caught this way.
These species control these cells unconsciously. They do not emit "dark light" when the eyes are closed, they turn off then back on fast when they blink, or when there's enough light to see by, (i.e. in broad daylight).
With some training, they can learn how to turn it on and off consciously. It's like wiggling one's ears, some dark elves say. But by learning how to turn it off, they can avoid being seen by other darkvision-enabled creatures.
Many predators in the dark learned that this light means food. Sometimes food that fights back, but that's life in the underworld for you.
In a group, only one of them need to have their eyelids lit. They can also use blink-pattern codes to communicate over long distances.
When in the dark, these cells activate, casting light on the cornea, who reflects the light in a broad cone, allowing vision.
[Answer]
**Other animals may be able to see the light**
* Some animals can see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot. For example, bees can see into the ultraviolet range a bit.
* Many insects are attracted to bright lights
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PW4vZ.jpg)
Thus,
* BEES!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MjKvC.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
Let's assume for the moment we're in an alternative history/steampunk sort of setting where oil/coal/explosives are exceedingly rare, but tech around electric generators, motors, and batteries are advanced.
As such, railguns are widely used rather than conventional explosive artillery.
Manufacturing techniques over the centuries have improved accuracy, durability, and weight. They started out as unwieldy, unreliable, immobile things best used as siege weapons. Now, it's World War Two era and they're still not terribly accurate but are durable enough to depend on. 15mm to 200mm rounds are about the tolerance of current manufacturing, the "barrels" are 2-3x the length of explosive gun barrels, and tend to be 5-10x the weight. Muzzle velocity is about 1500-2000 m/s. The power necessary to fire the gun takes more space though - tanks still look roughly like tanks with the space saved by smaller ammunition replaced with capacitors and added power generation.
To the question then: what would naval warfare look like in this WWII alternate history?
The weapons seem infeasible to mount to planes, and the smaller railguns are likely lethal to aircraft of the age simply by using ammunition that fragments as it flies. I imagine ships would need to be designed a little differently to get their less-ballistic weaponry to fire over the horizon (unless firing through water is feasible?), but a lot differently to protect against rounds that have significantly different damage models.
[Answer]
IMO, the result would be a weird mixture that would be most similar to WW1, if it worked at all.
Without explosives, there are no bombs, torpedoes, or mines, implying that
* There are no dive bombers / torpedo bombers and therefore no aircraft carriers. Aircraft are relegated to scouting and communicating the positions of enemy fleets.
* No explosive torpedoes also means no destroyers or submarines to worry about.
We are back to something like the Age of Sail, in which the side with the heaviest weight of fire wins.
The railguns fire at the velocity of 21st century tank cannon ("*1500-2000 m/s*" from the question) instead of the lower velocity of WW2 naval cannon (e.g. ~760-830 m/s for various WW2 naval guns) but this leaves us with a variety of issues. There are no HE naval shells in the scenario and the AP projectiles don't have any explosive filler in them either as the normally would.
* Above a certain velocity, even a steel projectile will shatter on impact. From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor-piercing,_capped,_ballistic_capped_shell> , "*However, it was found that steel shot tended to shatter on impact at velocities upward of about 823 m/s (2700 feet/second)*" and, while the APCBC shell was created to ameliorate this, the stated velocity of the railgun is still too high for the cap to compensate for. Tanks get around this by firing [APFSDS kinetic penetrators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing_fin-stabilized_discarding_sabot) made of uranium or tungsten so you might get away with doing something similar. Another option is to fire a lighter projectile that reaches [hypervelocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervelocity) speeds where the composition of the projectile matters less because the impact converts the projectile to plasma, doing tremendous damage. The last option is the boring one: just fire a larger, ordinary WW2 APCBC projectile at the normal velocity for WW2 naval guns.
* If you go the AP / kinetic penetrator route, you have the issue of overpenetration. The projectile simply goes right through the ship, punching a neat hole through anything it passes through, but otherwise not doing much damage unless it intersects with something important. A classic example of this is the [Battle of Samar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar) where much larger Japanese warships firing armor piercing shells at lightly armored US destroyers and light carriers had little effect because the AP shells simply passed through the ship entirely; the ships were destroyed only after the Japanese switched to HE shells. You may need to invent entirely new types of projectiles that are designed to optimize for damage against specific ship armor thicknesses.
* Again, if you go the AP / kinetic penetrator route, another problematic aspect is that a ship is much, much bigger than a tank and the penetrator is very small, so you wind up in a situation where you're trying to poke an elephant to death with knitting needles. So the battle will be a prolonged slugfest until enough systems on the losing vessel are damaged to render it incapable of fighting. Though the range of the railgun is longer because of its greater power, battle range might actually be closer because of the relatively little damage each round does even if it hits; one would want to get close enough to reliably hit specific parts of the enemy ship to maximize the chance of crippling it without expending all one's ammunition or wearing out the rails on the railgun.
[Answer]
**Wooden monitors. With rams.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nmPiX.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_monitor_Fa%C3%A0_di_Bruno>
The advent of railguns made any armor pointless. Even ironclads could not resist being punctured by a railgun round. The solution: keep wood as the building material (it is light, and cheap!) but move the entire hull below the waterline. Wood as a material offered another defense against railgun rounds - the round was liable to go right through the ship and out the other side. Ship hulls are made as lightweight as possible, and the neat holes produced by railgun rounds are easy to patch.
The result: monitors. Ironclad monitors existed in our timeline as a response to the move of explosive artillery type shells to naval use. Above is the Italian version which is pretty much a giant cannon and a spotting tower. The original USS Monitor of the Union navy rides even lower. Monitor type ships with railguns would be murderous against shore based targets. Targets on shore cannot hide underwater.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0qdLo.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monitor>
But as regards ship-on-ship battles, water is better armor against railgun rounds than anything they could possibly put on the sides of the ship. Projectiles are not very effective against a target almost completely below the water. In a world without explosive shells or torpedoes, it would be very difficult for the monitors to use their formidable guns to damage each other.
Which leaves the way ships damaged each other before effective projectiles: the ram.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_ram#Steam_rams>
>
> With the development of steam propulsion, the speed, power and
> maneuverability it allowed again enabled the use of the ship's hull,
> which could be clad in iron, as an offensive weapon. As early as 1840,
> the French admiral Nicolas Hippolyte Labrousse proposed building a ram
> steamship, and by 1860, Dupuy de Lôme had designed an ironclad with a
> ram.[12] The quick success[13] of CSS Virginia's ramming attack on USS
> Cumberland at the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 attracted much
> attention and caused many navies to re-think the ram...
>
>
> The theory behind the revival of the weapon derived from the fact
> that, in the period around 1860, armour held superiority over the
> ship-mounted cannon. It was believed that an armoured warship could
> not be seriously damaged by the naval artillery in existence at the
> time, even at close range. To achieve a decisive result in a naval
> engagement, therefore, alternative methods of action were believed to
> be necessary. As it followed, from the same belief, that a ship armed
> with a ram could not be seriously damaged by the gunfire of its
> intended victim, the ram became, for a brief period, the main armament
> of many battleships...
>
>
>
The fast, lightweight wooden monitors could be cut in half if rammed by an opponent. And so naval duels between the railgun armed monitors become like the naval duels of millenia before, with ships jockeying to get position and ram their opponents in half.
---
It occurs to me that if projectiles barely work against other ships and ramming is tricky, the main form of naval action would be the boarding party. This occurred to the builders of the Monitor also.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monitor>
>
> Wise who was aboard and inspected Monitor after the battle responded
> in a letter of 30 April 1862: "With reference to the Monitor, the
> moment I jumped on board of her after the fight I saw that a steam tug
> with twenty men could have taken the upper part of her in as many
> seconds ... I hear that hot water pipes are arranged so as to scald
> the assailants when they may dare to set foot on her."[48] The chance
> to employ such a tactic never arose. There are conflicting accounts as
> to whether such an anti-personnel provision was installed.
>
>
>
@DWKraus reference to Verne's fictional battery-powered submarine [Nautilus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(fictional_submarine)) made me think of another method to repel boarders: electrification. Also good vs giant squid.
[Answer]
# Power is King:
You are creating technology to match your story. I suspect that the biggest difference will not be artillery, but in power generation. At a WWII tech level, the easiest way to move and generate power is to carry a combustible fuel with you. It is portable, semi-random access, and won't generally degrade on storage. What the form of that is, I don't know. But with how you describe it, these will be battery/capacitor-powered vehicles except at the largest level. Power plants will be rapidly deployed, and may even be extremely large vehicles (giant war machines! Yay!) The over-all feel of fighting might be WW1 if fought with 21st century machines, with the largest weapons only extending as far as a power cord. If you have Nikola Tesla-style [wireless broadcast power stations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower), these will definitely be at the front line.
**BATTERIES:** But to have batteries or capacitors that can store enough energy to allow weapons platforms to function at all like the weapons of the era, you need radical differences in how materials are purified and produced. A tech tree is not a flexible willow, but a tough oak. You are likely to have advanced metallurgy, precision manufacturing (that applies across the board), and advanced communications and computing. In short, you will be closer to modern tech than WWII tech, minus fossil fuels.
**FIREPOWER:** Guns will be computer controlled, and extremely accurate. Radar would likely be sophisticated, so few surprises on the surface/in the air. Bombs and missiles will still be critical for aircraft to be useful in war.
**ENGINEERING**: Advanced materials will also allow fairly advanced engineering for aircraft. Abundant industrial electricity will allow abundant aluminum and lightweight construction. What you apparently don't have is sophisticated engineering outside of electronics. Planes and tanks will be underpowered and slow compared to modern ones, but perhaps appropriate for the WWII era. IF jets are just being developed like during WWII, they might be [electric plasma jets](https://interestingengineering.com/this-electric-jet-engine-could-lead-to-carbon-neutral-air-travel). The same batteries/capacitors running your guns will run your engines. There is likely to be battery anxiety in commanders, and fixed artillery will remain extremely powerful due to abundant corded power.
**SHIP DESIGN**: Ships, on the other hand, are big. While you haven't explicitly said what they got their power from, it is likely ships will carry a power generation capacity with them. Designs are likely to be centered on ships with big guns for first-strike capacity. Bigger ships mean bigger guns, but also big, vulnerable targets. Engineering will likely concentrate on multiple redundancies and ability to function despite damage, rather than armor. The armor that does develop will possibly be reactive, composite-sandwiched from advanced materials or gel/fluid based, but may not look a lot like WWII armor.
**TYPES OF SHIPS**: So I'll guess few if any aircraft carriers (since without bombs airplanes will be badly underpowered). Battleship-type designs with lots of armor will be coastal bombardment craft. Minimum ship sizes will depend on power generation. The standard ship-of-the-line will likely be similar to a battlecruiser. They have enough armor to deal with inferior vessels, but big enough guns to deal with anything bigger.
**SUBMARINES**: With OP guns and comparatively weak armor, stealth and surprise will be crucial. I'll predict gunboat-submarines which surface (just barely, or only the barrel), fire weapons at point-blank range, and crash-dive to avoid return fire. High-velocity projectiles actually fare WORSE going through water. So torpedos and depth-charges may again be indispensable explosive applications to deal with the submarine menace. A big enough gun able to depress radically MIGHT be able to take the place of these, but the design would be to cause shockwaves, not impacts.
[Answer]
**Planes and electronic warfare**
At the beginning of WW II, battleships were still seen as the best in naval warfare. At the end, it was apparent that aircraft carriers were key. Thanks to their long range airplanes, higher accuracy, adaptability and self support it was easily superior to battleships. This was in part to their explosives, which are rare in your world.
This isn't a reason to discount a repeat of these events in your world. War is about removing enemies their power. It is easy to think about destroying them, but there is a wide range that sometimes us preferred. Politics and propaganda can change the soldiers to fight others or lay down arms. But we're interested in disabling and capture. Many naval ships might not sink, but were still disabled and rendered inoperable for a long time. They need repairs or can be captured. Captured hardware can be used for your own goals. Captured soldiers as labour, political pressure or other worth you can get out if it. They can also be maimed and send back, causing a resource drain on the enemy.
Outright destroying might be difficult with batteries and railguns and no explosives. However, your warfare is electronic. So it makes sense to attack this weakness. EMP and the like are quite powerful and can take out several electronics of the enemy, requiring new cables, transistors and chips before the machines can operate again. Disabling ships or tanks can give you the opportunity to fire with small railguns on the planes, or move in closer with the bjgger ones on ships and vehicles. Just that alone can make forces surrunder or be made close to a none-threat.
There's more though. Explosives are simply a way to transfer a ton of power in a short time, hoping to break something. Bullets as well, though more directional. Yet 'slow' energy release can be very effective. That is where the, presumably better, battery technology comes in. In real life they aren't afraid of phones exploding in airplanes, but of the batteries starting to burn. Electronic fire is a big problem. It is hard to extinguish, can quickly reach crazy temperatures, sets other fires and besides the normal bad smoke of fire there's heavy metals and bad chemicals that can add literal layers of death and destruction. Make a 'bomb' out of it, chuck it on a ship and hope it'll destroy in excessive heat for long periods of time.
The better weapons against planes might seem detrimental, but the cost vs gains is still excessive. A naval ship just costs way more than a few planes. Besides, the lower speeds of planes meant that hits generally were less catastrophic than on the fighter jets nowadays. There's plenty evidence of planes staying aloft while looking like a pinata, as long as some key area's weren't hit. That means they might get close enough for ordinance to reach their target, despite getting hit.
Railguns and battleships would again go to a more supporting role, while aircraft carriers with a multitude of roles, armaments and abilities can rain down death and disabling devices on the enemy.
[Answer]
**What will you see in terms of naval warfare? *Almost no change whatsoever.***
Rail guns are very impressive, but in the end, they only do two things: provide longer range within a smaller space. Why do I say this?
* Because you can throw a rail gun slug a lot further (well... assuming modern tech...) than you can a chemically-motivated slug.
* And the space needed to power a rail gun plus the ammunition for the rail gun is a ***lot*** smaller than the space required for the same kinetic impact in terms of shells and powder. (Granted, this assumes that you're using nuclear power. You're using something a whole lot more impressive than fuel oil to use rail guns, otherwise you won't have nearly as many rail guns in play and they won't have a significant impact on combat).
But you still have *line of sight tracking.* In other words, unless you allow for satellite tracking (invented in 1959, the naval Transit tracking system for tracking submarines) or some form of AWACS (invented in 1977), you're stuck with the fact that you can only "see" as far as your ship-based radar will allow you. And that limit is the horizon.
**And the horizon is the key to success**
A rail gun could certainly throw something beyond the horizon, but without the ability to aim it, you're just taking pot shots. That's the value of an airplane and the reason aircraft carriers became (and remained) the dominant naval craft. An airplane can fly *beyond the horizon.*
**In short, other than sinking the Bismarck sooner or perhaps not evolving battleships at all... nothing will change.**
Rail guns would make the faster cruisers and destroyers more valuable than the heavily laden battleships. This might be the only significant change — there would be little to no need for battleships as everything they did could be accomplished (and probably improved upon) by rail gun carrying and much cheaper to build cruisers and destroyers. Here's why:
Thanks to airplanes, by the end of WWII all battleships (world wide) had been retired or relegated to supporting roles. These roles were not insignificant.
* Battleships were still quite deadly *at night* when planes couldn't fly.
* Battleships were still used for coastal bombardment. Planes, especially bombers, could do a whale of a lot of damage and could reach further inland than battleships. But if what you want is a good old fashioned Baptist bible thumping, nothing could deliver the message more thoroughly than a battleship.
IMO, the faster rail-gun-enabled cruisers and destroyers would outmatch battleships for night maneuvers. I'm not entirely sold that they'd settle the argument as completely when it comes to a coastal bombardment (after all, dropping a 1+ ton shell bespeaks *authority*), but the ability to turn a little bit of that sand into glass on impact... yowzah.
**But, all things being equal, would battleships really not exist?**
And here's where I conclude that *nothing would change.* At the beginning of WWII the world (notably the U.S.) were building battleships — honking big boats carrying honking big guns. So, really, what would change? You'd still have navies building honking big ships with *honking big rail guns* and that would continue right up until the first patrol of planes from an aircraft carrier somewhere over the horizon sank the first slow-moving and very-expensive battleship. (***Never*** underestimate the effects of economics.)
So, really, I don't believe a thing would change with one really minor exception: engagements would be a bit further apart.
---
**NOTE:** An early parenthetic deserves a highlight: rail guns need a whomping amount of power. I might be wrong, but I believe all ships today that use rail guns have nuclear reactors. You simply can't produce the power needed to use a rail gun with anything less unless there's just one rail gun on the ship and the vast majority of the ship's volume is given over to battery storage, meaning you have a ***substantial*** recharge time. This would mean rail guns are relatively rare and are good for basically only one or two shots ("Aaaaah! Rail gun! Shoot the rail gun! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!"). Are you handwaving this? Nothing would really change either way, but striking a ship full of batteries that have partially charged would have a ***dramatic*** result ("No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow."). You'd find that supporting ships will not want to be anywhere near them.
[Answer]
In addition to what @JoinJBHonCodidact said, here's some more reasons railguns with the stats described in the OP don't make much difference.
First, assuming the highest-end muzzle velocity, a railgun will have a maximum range of about 57 miles. An [Iowa-class Battleship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-inch/50-caliber_Mark_7_gun) had a maximum range of 24 miles, with a muzzle velocity of 820m/s. 2000/820 = 2.4, so your railgun can shoot 2.4 times further than an Iowa-class battleship. This is not a huge advantage today. Missiles can go thousands of miles.
Second, [armor penetration is not improved by additional speed beyond a certain level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth). At a certain point, adding speed stops penetrating deeper and just makes a wider hole. So it will still make sense for battleships to be heavily-armored, and likely in similar armor configurations.
Third, remember what I said about faster projectiles making a bigger hole? Well there will be more material blown out of the impact hole, or knocked off the inside of the armor plate in the case of a railgun shell, since it's faster, and this shrapnel should make up for a lack of explosives.
Fourth, traditional battleships could shoot over the horizon in real life; they used spotter aircraft to help direct their fire. No reason you can't do the same thing with balloons or zeppelins or something.
[Answer]
WW2 was seeing the beginning of nuclear powered naval craft. This is a strong candidate to explain the power generation aspect.
Now as to the projectile physics, the US Army does have prototype railguns. Check this out. <https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2021/07/01/us-navy-ditches-futuristic-railgun-eyes-hypersonic-missiles>
The project was killed, but mostly because missiles are just better. Your world being limited on such technology, railguns should be a strong contender.
They do have relative slow firing rates though (mostly because of the capacitor charging time). You could magic science this away on account of "advanced electromagnetic tech", and add in a gatling system (if you don't need the full power of let's say 6 caps, you can shoot with only 2, then the next 2, then the last 2, and by the time you're done, your first 2 caps can be recharged).
Now, a BIG problem of railguns is that they don't work underwater. The core physics principle is having to "hot" rods, and a conductive projectile that going through them, shorts out the open circuit. The projectile is propelled by the resulting magnetic field, as the capacitors are quickly discharged from one rod to the other, through the projectile. Put the whole thing in water, and you won't be able to charge the thing at all, all the energy goes into the water. Or let's say you disconnect the rails during charging, you would still lose a significant amount of energy due to shorting. Perhaps consider Gauss cannons (coil guns)? These can be made water resistant, and could be viable for submarines.
As to airplanes, up to you, whether the weight is acceptable or not. Consider that the bulk weight of a railgun is power related. So decide if the needed batteries/capacitors are too much or not. You can give planes limited firing capability, as they would have no power generation of their own, but instead carry batteries enabling them a limited number of shots.
Keep in mind, you can't have anything more than rudimentary propeller planes, if you move into jet engine territory, you will also have missiles. And missiles have been proven as the superior tech.
[Answer]
Say room temperature superconductors were discovered in the 1870's, around the same time that Maxwell was summarizing electrodynamics. Then I could see a world like this naturally evolving. One where you can efficiently generate power from the wind, and transport it as far as you want with no losses. Coil guns are way more efficient, and so are electric motors. Naval warfare would have 2 components. First you would have carrier-sized coil gun artillery platforms, which turn the power from the ocean's tides into death and destruction 400 Km away. Second, you would have fleets of ultra-fast submarines trying to sink their opponents artillery platforms, while avoiding the counter-sub subs.
[Answer]
The railguns:
"Regular" ship canons would load a shell and several bags of propellant. For different ranges they would put in different amounts of propellant. Your railguns likely use various capacitor banks, by selecting how many banks are emptied per shot they can adjust the range and fire rate. After all if you only empty half your capacitors on a barrel per shot you can fire the next one almost immediately. This can be useful when you want to use plunging fire or reduce the overpenetration on a target.
The ammo:
With explosives out of the picture you need to look into the materials used in the shells. A "hollow point" shell designed to break up or mushroom inside the ship for example or using other materials than explosives. Pressurising a shell with a dangerous chemical to incapacitate the crew or damage components like the wiring inside the ship could be helpful. Regardless all ship to ship combat would take longer than normal.
Since the shells aren't blunt objects the impact depth will still increase with higher velocity, besides that secondary effects of high velocity will still be present. Such as shrapnel, buckling and spalling.
Ship armor:
With high shell velocities and not a lot of advanced material research it makes little sense to try and truly stop the aerodynamic shells from impacting. However you still need armor against shells designed against overpenetration.
The outer line of the ship will be a whipple shield\*. This shield is designed against small-arms, as any gunboat with a railgun machinegun could rip through the entire ship from stem to stern and damage the vitals like batteries without it. Since larger shells of the enemy will be designed to break up and scatter as much shrapnel through the ship it is likely most ships will heavily compartimentalize everything.
Torpedo's:
Early torpedo's were electric. Without explosive filler torpedo's will act differently: they'll contain a small railgun inside and deploy a "parachute" to push off against the water to resist recoil. They will deploy the parachute and fire the canon upon impact with the enemy ship. Since aerodynamics aren't necessary at that range the shell fired can be various shapes to maximise damage as it is launched into the hull.
Ship to ship combat:
Like in the real world, at some point there is no reason to bring a bigger gun anymore and it is more useful to bring many smaller calibers to increase fire rate and hit chance. Railguns will hit this mark sooner, so 200mm rounds will likely not exist. Having a bigger ship would become a liability rather than an advantage since even a small ship can severely damage you. It is likely most big ships will simply have a lot of dead space inside where shells can pass through safely in order to hide vital components and have an easier time fighting against a small and compact ship where hits are more likely to disable something.
Aircraft:
Since sinking a ship is harder without explosives all fights will take longer. This means that aircraft still have a role to play. They can scout out enemy ships and drop bombs to try and damage the ship infrastructure or try to kill the crew. In return the ships also have a mixed bag in AA fire. On one hand they will be missing fuses for flak projectiles, especially the proximity fuse was vital for American AA defenses. On the other hand the higher velocity of the bullets and shells means you don't need to lead that far ahead to get a hit, but you have to hit them more often since you aren't showering them with shrapnel (a shotgun-like railgun would not really work).
Like in the real world the cost/effectiveness per plane is simply higher. That makes aircraft efficient. Although the smaller ship sizes would make the differences less pronounced.
\*<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield>
] |
[Question]
[
There is an Earth-like world, at a level of technology similar to the ancient Romans. Roughly every 20 years, one of the largest, most prosperous cities in this world is annihilated by a meteor strike with damage similar to a 500-1000 kt nuke. This has been going on for about a thousand years. If there are 10 major cities in the world at any given time, this means that each city survives around 200 years before its turn comes up.
Why is this happening? A thousand years ago, an alien scout spaceship discovered the world, and determined that it could become a threat. The scout is not able to enter the atmosphere, and the only weapon it carries is its drive, which is not that powerful but can keep going forever. There is a nearby asteroid belt. The scout has been de-orbiting large asteroids precisely onto the largest population centers it can see, in order to delay the civilization from achieving the space age and beyond, while it waits for assistance from its home system. Because of the scout's weak drive, it takes about 20 years to drop one city-killer asteroid.
The scout *wants* to destroy civilization, but periodic city-killing is the most it is capable of. It radioed home for help when it arrived, but help will be a long time coming due to no FTL. The scout is a robotic intelligence.
So my question is about plausibility. Given an asteroid belt much like our own, is it plausible that a spaceship could have a drive too weak to cause a global extinction event or wipe out civilization, but strong enough to manage this type of attack? What level of force would the drive need to exert?
[Answer]
**You can salvage your explanation with character, and characters make a story.**
Your scout ship is making a one-person attack on a civilization. Inefficiently. This ship does not have weapons and is not fitted out to make such an attack. It is alone. The organization that sent it did not intend it to do what it is doing now. That organization probably does not know what it is doing.
Imagine in our world, our army sends a scout to find out what is going on past our front lines. The scout finds the enemy. And decides to hold them off, single handedly. What? If we wanted you to hold off the enemy we would have given you more ammo, and sent more people.
And we would not have sent you, because you have some serious issues. Your scout is bitter, perhaps with unrealized ambitions or perhaps it was once more than it was. This method of holding back a civilization is inefficient and not well thought out because it is the homemade plan of a single scout, and there are reasons this individual was sent out as a single scout.
--
I think it should turn out that occasional pruning turns out to increase the vigor of the organism. In the story, that is how it should turn out for this civilization. And perhaps these people devise weaponry which can take out an incoming meteor. That turns out to be problematic for the aliens who sent the scout when they arrive with bigger ships to come down and deal with things more definitively. The people planetside are ready.
---
As the scout watches the landing party dissolve from planetside fire, it curses them for being fools and not listening to the scout's warnings and advice. Just as through the story it cursed the planetside civilization and cursed the intractable asteroids that it gathered one by one to drop on them. The scout does not recognize any of its own part in creating the disaster befalling its people.
[Answer]
It sounds like a very weak explanation, which is hard to sell to a reader.
We know from basic physics that $m \cdot \Delta v=m\cdot a\cdot \Delta t$. If you let a small force act for a longer time, you can get the same change in velocity that a higher force would get in a shorter time.
In your case, instead of wasting time every 20 years to dump a city cancelling asteroid, they could simply use 200 or 2000 years and dump a world cancelling asteroid, which would also ensure that less noticeable settlements are wiped out.
It's not far fetched for the inhabitants of the planet to understand that only big cities are hit and therefore resort to something else for living.
[Answer]
### The cost of a meteor impact are not uniform across the surface
The alien needs to expand more delta-V in order to cause an impact in some places relative to others. The drive needs to run for 10 years to cause an impact in some places, it needs to run for 100 years to cause an impact in others.
The causes are complex - the moon gets in the way, the asteroid belt is orientated a particular way, the tilt of the planet is a particular way, etc.
Using Earth (as we have data for it); this is the odds of a meteor impact at any given spot on the Earths surface at a particular date in 2013.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D8U8Q.png)
(Taken from [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05720.pdf))
Cities in red are going to be real easy to hit, as there's already low delta-V paths from existing asteroids to that point on the surface. Cities in blue are going to take more effort to impact - an asteroid needs more delta V in order to get into an impact trajectory.
* The cost to the alien in time in order to direct a meteor to any given city is not uniform.
* Those places which require more effort to hit are going to be hit less often.
* If there's a city thriving in a difficult to hit area, and the alien decides to attack it, the rest of world gets longer than usual to advance, the alien "falls behind".
So what's going to happen is when a city is obliterated, people move on. If they settle in red zones, they get wiped out within 200 years, but if they settle in blue zones, the whole planet gets a reprieve for 300-400 years until they're wiped out, by which time the entire planet is thriving.
After a few cities are thriving in the blue areas, the aliens attacks are fewer and farther in between. What started off as a 20-year reload time has now become a 100 year reload time. All the blue zones are filled with thriving cities that have gone thousands of years without an impact.
Eventually they discover good enough telescopes that they can plot the asteroids, detect the change in delta V over the last century of alien acceleration, and pre-empt the aliens moves. After the asteroid is 90% on course for a collision; scientist will be able to give a years warning of a meteor impact. They'll have a years notice to evacuate a town, causing the meteors to hit an abandoned city every time. Eventually as better maths is discovered, this warning could conceivable increase to decades.
Few centuries later an ICBM finds its way to the alien space craft and their problem is no more.
---
### Why not launch more, slower, trajectories and synchronise their impact date?
As pointed out by @BenjaminHollon you could deorbit objects at different speeds using precise mathematics. Why give them 20 years between impacts? Why not spend a few centuries setting up something epic and just take all the cities out at once?
Spend 100 years setting one asteroid up to impact a city in 400 years, then spend 40 years setting one asteroid up to impact in 300 years, then 20 years setting one up to impact in 260 years, etc. etc. One the chosen date, 20 asteriods impact all the big cities all at once.
[Answer]
When you throw an asteroid at a planet, you don't actually throw the asteroid. You modify its orbit so that it intersects the planet.
Modifying orbits is not a game of changing the *position* of an asteroid as much as it is a matter of applying delta-v. This is good news to your story, because it means that the effort required to make a 100x larger asteroid hit a planet takes about 100x as long, not 10x as long as you might expect from naive $d = \frac{1}{2} a t^2 + v t$ mathematics.
Fine-tuning it well enough to hit an actual city is extremely difficult computationally. On the other hand, super-efficient and slow asteroid manipulation is also extremely expensive computationally.
The most efficient way to make an asteroid hit the Earth is make other celestial bodies do the work for you. At the most naive, you apply delta-v when the asteroid is Aphelion from the Sun, which makes your delta-v more valuable.
But going further than that, you could arrange for your asteroid to approach a planet (or other body) from behind and "sling-shot" around it. This can steal delta-v from the planet and get a change in orbit that is insanely larger than the cost to nudge the asteroid.
This doesn't stop there. You could start playing an insane chaos-monkey game of nudging a tiny asteroid that nudges other asteroids positions, that eventually gets one of them chaotically to move closer to a minor planet like Ceres, which in turn causes other bodies to shift.
A scout ship with a ridiculously insane (almost magical) ability to compute could use extremely small amounts of energy and large amounts of chaos to cause asteroids to start intersecting the target planet's orbit.
There are situations where making an asteroid hit a planet is a matter of a small thrust and lots of time. That is when the asteroid or other body *is already almost hitting the planet*. But almost all of such asteroids are relatively tiny, the timing of the hits isn't inside the scout ship's control, and the ship won't be able to pick a dino-killer "off the menu".
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As a bit of a frame challenge, the sensible way to do interstellar colonization or conquest is by using star wisp Von Neumann machines.
Here you have a very tiny seed ship you launch over interstellar distances using something like a solar sail and launch laser. Then you repeat the process, much more difficult, using two solar sails to come to a halt at the target system.
(Your tiny payload has a large solar sail. You fire a laser at the large solar sail, which you detach from the payload. The payload deploys a small solar sail,and uses the reflected light to brake and approach the target system.)
The goal is to have as much of the infrastructure to travel interstellar distances in the launching system, where you have the energy budget of a K1 or K2 civilization to play with, and as little as possible within the "space ship" as possible. Interstellar distances are very long.
Once you reach the target system, you start working on the long, slow process of reproduction of your Von Neumann machine.
Imagine that machine has a production capacity of X, and it takes 1000 years for the machine to double that production capacity. Then after 10,000 years you'll have 1000x the capacity, 20,000 years 1 million times the capacity, 30,000 years 1 billion times the capacity, 40,000 years 1 trillion times the capacity, 50,000 years 10^12 times the capacity, etc.
If you can double your production capacity and sustain that over many many repetitions, the time it takes you to do the doubling isn't as important as the fact you can double in the first place. After well under 100 doublings, you are a K2 civilization, and have consumed the entire solar system's resources.
Such an exponential process is extremely slow to "get off the ground". A civilization that threatens to reach the space age within a few thousand years is thus a serious threat. Once they are in space, they could work out how the Von Neumann machine works, and with the higher production capacity of a populated world outpace it. Even before they reach space, observation of the Von Neumann machines using astronomy could clue them in, and accelerate their technological progress.
A "hostile" source of such reproducing probes could result, and an entire chunk of the galaxy could be lost to the colonization effort.
At the same time, the energy budget they can afford to spend on actually interfering with the ground-based biomatter is limited, as the Von Neumann machine requires most of its budget to keep up the exponential reproduction cycle.
And growth is the purpose of the probe. The driving goal is to build a new lauch site, and send out another 10 probes. This may take 100,000 years, but the probe and its sisters together will claim the entire galaxy in a blink of an eye this way.
If every 100,000 years, 20% of probes launched succeed and produce an average of 10 probe launches, after 1 million years each probe launched causes 1000 launches, on the time scale of millions of years the Von Neumann probe-front is a relativistic phenomena, limited by the speed of the probe flight, and not by reproduction rate. If the probes travel at 0.0001c (extremely fast really), the wave crosses the galaxy in 500 million years; mostly leap-frogging, where probes are launched "behind" the front wave, and the front wave mostly is in charge of firing braking lasers.
Further from the front wave, the Von Neumann machines stop their obsessive probe launching, and print out a civilization on the colonized systems. These civilizations do whatever they want; they can do science, art, whatever. Some may work on optimizing the Von Neumann probe system, improving probe speed, reproduction rate, or whatever (note, however, that this becomes an information security problem; compromising the reproduction network of probes is an easy way to take control of the galaxy and mold it in your own image).
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So under this model, the "scout" probe is attacking the planet using extremely low-hanging asteroid fruit, because it (a) really doesn't want them advancing to the space age in the next few kiloyears, and (b) is really busy trying to boot strap itself to the point where it doesn't care what the planet does.
It requires 10s of thousands of years for plan (b) to take effect. If the planet does advance to the space age, it can get help from other systems at a high cost. A nearby system could, for example, convert their entire star into a huge laser and fry this system's main planet's biosphere from interstellar distances. This is not 100% reliable, and failure results in a guaranteed of an extremely hostile civilization with access to Von Neumann probe technology. Also, it destroys the system that fired the laser (the probe-civilization has a *lot* of systems; cauterizing one to get rid of a potential danger is expensive, but not unheard of).
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I've been looking into some similar mechanics for a story I'm writing, and my solution is to instead deorbit Oort cloud or Kuiper belt objects. Since they're further away from the sun, they orbit at slower speeds and will take less delta-v to de-orbit.
By picking objects nearer or further from the sun, the alien ship could control how long it would take to fall toward the Earth (further away would be a longer fall time--exponentially, I believe, though I'd have to do some math to make sure). In addition, just by making the objects cross Earth's orbit in different locations, they'd hit the Earth at different times.
Do note that these aliens will need incredibly precise mathematics, especially the longer between the deorbit burn and the strike on the Earth. Alternatively, they could just deorbit as many as they can and know that, eventually, they'll all hit Earth if they cross its orbit, but that would be over a period of millennia.
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I also want to real quickly pose a solution to @L.Dutch's statement that a single planet-killing asteroid is much more efficient:
A single asteroid is also much easier to detect and plan ahead for. If the species is advanced enough, they might be able to launch a mission to redirect the asteroid in time. A swarm of smaller asteroids, on the other hand, is much harder to detect and will require much more planning to redirect all of them.
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**It could work with better conditions, but our asteroid belt is a lousy example**
Almost three years ago I thought I had a great story basis and asked the following question:
[Could an astronaut in a near-future space ship survive transit through our asteroid belt?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123819/40609)
I received a rapid education. The answer is "yes, duh" because if you gathered every particle of mass in our asteroid belt and made a proverbial snow ball out of it, the result would be a single body about 4% the mass of our moon. When we call it an "asteroid belt," what you cannot imagine is [something out of *Star Wars*](https://youtu.be/c8deRYotdng?t=107), what you need to imagine is one or two big chunks, followed by a lot of baseball-sized chunks, followed by a lot of dust.
And even at that, we've had probes pass through the field without any trouble whatsoever.
Which means if the asteroid field is like ours (and not like the one in *Star Wars*), then you don't really have anything to throw at the planet in the first place.
**But let's ignore that... given that there's enough asteroidal material to work with, is the basic idea plausible?**
* The way your question is worded, the alien has been sitting there for 1,000 years doing a whole lot of nothing but moving asteroids into motion. (a) I've always had trouble with super-long-lived aliens (A scout ship with a 1,000-year food supply?). (b) Go watch the movie [*Silent Running*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/). It's a reasonably good presentation of the monotony of doing something menial for far too long. (c) However, you can get around this by automating the entire process, setting the bored traveler free to go home.
* The situation feels too much like an unnatural premise. An alien species that considers the natives of a planet a threat and are willing to bombard them periodically with asteroids would need a honking good philosophical reason to not simply wipe them out (doesn't he have a report to make to someone? That's what scout ships are for...). Now, the theory that the scout ship was too under powered to do that is potentially plausible, but what keeps the scout from simply going home (or "radioing home") and sending something bigger, more capable, and more definitive? fter all, the scout ship was well enough powered to arrive in the first place. What this feels like is you want to tell a story about an iron-age people who are periodically reduced in population to keep them from advancing and this is the crowbar excuse you've invented to tell that story. Ugh. What you really need is a reason to keep the iron-age people alive.
* But, to answer your question, yes... given that there are big enough rocks around, the scout ship is only well enough powered to get one moving at exactly the right trajectory once every 20 years, and that there isn't a reason for the pilot do find a better solution. This scenario is implementable.
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## **You need specific plot-related elements to make your scenario more plausible. It's too easy to wipe out all civilization-building life on the planet otherwise**
Okay, let's take this step by step. Your scout *wants* to wipe out all civilized life on the planet. It keeps chucking rocks at the planet one at a time wanting to wipe out the biggest cities it can find. Problem is that it would be much, much easier for it to come to the conclusion that periodic rock-throwing isn't the best idea and just go for a dinosaur-killer Chicxulub scenario, chucking the biggest rock it can find to cause a global extinction event and wipe out civilization.
This is actually *easy* to do because of how space works. Because there's only microgravity in space, even small amounts of force can cause a large object to change course and accelerate in the direction one desires. Even if the ship can only grab a smaller asteroid, it can launch *that* asteroid at a larger one, and like a series of pool balls will eventually knock the larger planet-killer into the world. This is where astronomers get the whole idea of "divert an asteroid using an incredibly small projectile" from.
If for some reason no dinosaur-killer asteroids are to be found, the ship can simply coordinate *multiple* asteroids to hit the planet at once, or target areas like carbonate platforms, volcanic trappes, or methane clathrate deposits to maximize damage. All of these if hit can cause mass extinction scenarios. It also depends on how fast the ship can accelerate these rocks. [Even a small rock accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light can sterilize a planet.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwgMjr-Qu1Y)
Alternatively, the ship can invoke the Kzinti Lesson ("*A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.*") and kamikaze the planet. If the ship is advanced enough to travel between solar systems *or* is advanced enough to reliably fly to the asteroid belt, throw a rock, and then check on the planet to see what happens, it's fast enough to wipe out civilization in a kamikaze attack. If it's a robot probe it might not care if it sacrifices its own existence to advance its maker's will.
There's also the question as to how civilization will react. For one, how is this ship detecting the presence of sapient, city-building life? Most of the easy indicators one could see from orbit (electric lighting, C02 pollution) are mostly the results of industrialization. It's true humans have been altering Earth's climate and environment since [basically as long as we discovered how to set things on fire](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6544/860), but discerning sophont activity from, say, natural processes can be difficult before industralization. What's to stop civilization from really collapsing if you throw enough asteroids at the planet? Smaller asteroids might produce "years without summers", and *enough* irregularity might make crops unreliable enough to not support large population centers. At the time of Rome, the largest cities were only about 1 million people, so your ships is going to have to be able to detect relatively small cities (at least by present standards) and eventually it's going to be tossing rocks at cities about the size of the first city-states in Uruk and Babylon.
And, of course, people might just stop settling in large densities when they notice that every time they build a city the gods seem to throw a rock at it. Think of the Tower of Babel story, sophonts will adjust their behavior if there's enough negative stimulus not to. At this point, what does the ship do? Does it assume sapient life has been wiped out and goes home, ignoring the small villages of Iron Age farmers and numerous surviving hunter-gatherer tribes? Or does it keep trying to throw rocks at harder and harder to track groups for little gain?
**What all this means is, that there are way too many ways your ship could either just wipe out all life on the planet (or even just civilized life), or force the city-builders to hide themselves and thus believe it's task is done before your real plot can start**. What you need is extra reasonings as to why this cycle of unmanned probe acting like a child throwing rocks at a beehive for all of their recorded history continues uninterrupted for so long. My advice would be something like a programming glitch, the probe *wants* to destroy the civilizations on the planet but it's stuck in a logical glitch that leads it to try the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result. For reference I would suggest...
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> HAL 9000 in *2001: A Space Odyssey* and *2010: The Year We Make Contact* as well as The Reapers in *Mass Effect*. HAL is given mutually contradictory orders and it drives him into a loop that results in him going mad. The leader of the Reapers, meanwhile, is stuck following the last orders of his creators even though it knows there is a better solution to the problem. Some have interpreted the infamous events of Mass Effect 3 as it trying to manipulate Shepard to free it from its programming, because it rather blatantly and unsubtly hints that it thinks Synthesis is the solution to the problem but needs an organic to give it permission to do so because of the Leviathans' orders.
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Either that or it's doing the Beerus solution: it doesn't really *want* to destroy the world but is deliberately doing so in such an inefficient manner that it can justify it as following its programming.
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Alien motivation is alien...but given the parameters seems like it wants to keep the beings alive, not destroy them, yet keep them from growing. Maybe for future conquering/slaving/eating....Unless your alien ship is tiny, like a few grams, if it had the energy to travel interstellar distances, moving an asteroid every twenty years would be trivial.
I would expect the inhabitants to not connect the attacks initially, it would take a long time to realize cities were even the target(you might get some Sodom and Gomorrah legend arise). This until an few cities in a row get hit that are in the same empire or trade sphere. Eventually enough people will see the connection.
Once realized astronomy and urban planning would become far more important earlier. People would learn to track the alien and disguise their cities.
An unintended consequence is it could possibly kickstart the civilization in to tech overdrive to deal with the threat.
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There's almost always a way to make it work, you just have to figure it out.
The other answers make very good points. I can see them from all the way out here in left field, so it's likely your answer lies elsewhere. But I like left field. It's where the weird stuff happens...
But first, a frame challenge or two.
If the ship was intended to destroy potential threats then it seems vastly unlikely that its creators would have sent it out into the void without weaponry to effect that destruction. How do we explain that the Doom Probe is weaponless then?
Perhaps it has weapons but can't use them for some reason. Out of ammo after destroying the last planet? Some critical part failed and it can't access them? It forgot how due to poor programming?
Or maybe it really doesn't have weapons for some reason. Its creators may have been dumb enough to think that pushing sand around was the perfect way to destroy a planet. Or they really intended it to be throwing around larger masses, but somebody (or something) screwed up the selection algorithm so it ends up throwing pebbles instead of dwarf planets.
Of course the real reason it doesn't have any weapons might simply be that the original builders didn't intend for it to go on a geocidal spree through the galaxy, so they didn't think it needed them. It was *supposed* to be just a survey probe until some government fidiot got scared by some bad Space Opera and wanted to make sure the World Eaters couldn't ever trace the thing back home.
Personally I favor the "they cut our budget back so hard we had to 'hire' interns to write most of the code" hypothesis. Some unpaid drone was playing asteroids on the simulator instead of coding the First Contact Protocols and nobody caught the error before launch. I mean, honestly, we've done worse with better. Remember when a missing hyphen blew up an $80M (worth a lot more these days) rocket 5 minutes into a trip to Venus? Pepperidge Farms remembers. They probably caught some of the shrapnel.
It doesn't have to be complete stupidity though, just a lack of imagination. Let's assume that the source system has a different configuration, and therefore different assumptions were made about what the ship would encounter. It may have originated in a system where the only life-bearing planet was much smaller and more fragile than the world it is currently attacking, where a smallish rock dropped hard enough could cause devastation far exceeding the loss of a single city. Like most people, the creators failed to imagine situations like the one the ship has found itself in. Any one of those rocks would end their world, so that's what they instructed the ship to use. And being a poor, dumb computer supplied - and programmed - by the lowest bidder, that's exactly what it's going to do until someone comes along and makes an intelligent decision.
Of course there's probably nobody coming. Sending out something like this into a galaxy filled with terribly dangerous things like Humans is bound to tick some of the other residents off to the point where they do more than send a nicely-worded cease-and-desist order.
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On a more serious note, and in response to your comment, I'm going to have to disagree with your premise. Given that the probe has sufficient intelligence to predict the development of a primitive society over the next thousand years - a feat which requires both extraordinary intellect *and* god-like knowledge of xenology that could only have come from aeons of research on untold thousands of other specimens - then it is more than capable of running the trivial computations to figure out that a single large rock in five or six hundred years time is sufficient to purge all life from the planet, while a series of smaller rocks delivered every twenty years is at best going to slow them down.
My advice is to patch that plot hole. Maybe explain that it went crazy and the predicted danger is pure paranoia rather than godlike knowledge. That would certainly explain why it's using an inefficient campaign of inconvenience instead of a decisive finishing strike.
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Say 200-300 years in the future, humankind has colonized much of the solar system, using a combination of laser thermal drives and solid-core nuclear rockets (fusion never really panned out). Suddenly, astronomers spot an odd object entering the solar system. The object turns out to be a kilotonne-scale chunk of rock, ordinary in every way except for the fact that the thing is made entirely of antimatter. Collisions with the interplanetary medium, and the energy they give off, slow down the object sufficiently for it to be captured by the solar gravity field and enter a slowly-decaying orbit somewhere in the region of Neptune. Obviously, this rock is a potentially enormous fuel source for both antimatter drives and commercial power reactors. The question is, how exactly is one going to get antimatter out of this thing? You can't exactly land equipment on it and start mining, and it's not like you can just start chipping off pieces of it. So, **how exactly would one go about mining an asteroid made of antimatter**? Also, for extra points, how plausible is the scenario laid out in the question, where an antimatter asteroid enters a slowly decaying orbit in the near edge of the Kuiper belt, and how long could such an orbit last.
Note: It has been brought to my attention that collisions with the interstellar medium may not be sufficient to slow the asteroid. As a result, a gravity assist from Neptune or a Kuiper Belt Object may be involved to make the capture of this asteroid more feasible.
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One thing which other posters have not mentioned is the effects of the interplanetary medium on the asteroid and mining operation.
Before you can do anything, it would be very wise to "clear" the area around the asteroid. A massive "wake shield" in an orbit slightly ahead of the antimatter asteroid will create a zone of extremely hard vacuum behind it, and the antimatter will be safely secured from further unwanted contact with the interplanetary medium.
Since you want to manipulate the antimatter without touching it, using a high energy laser to vapourize small sections is a good start. As each bit of antimatter is "puffed" away from the asteroid like a puff of smoke, another laser can supply the energy to ionize it, allowing for suitable electrostatic and magnetic fields to guide the plasma into a Penning trap for storage and later use.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gbg3F.jpg)
*Proposed antimatter harvester. The ionized antimatter is collected here and funneled into a Penning Trap*
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Similar question but with a moon made up of antimatter.
[Is it realistic to have a moon made of antimatter?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92248/is-it-realistic-to-have-a-moon-made-of-antimatter/92250#92250)
My proposition there:
1. Cut some chunks off. You can do this using a laser. In the linked moon scenario you would have to blast stuff up and away from the moon because it would be too dangerous to approach. Your smaller chunk is more tractable in that respect.
2. Confine small chunk using no-touch vacuum maglev jar. Magnetic levitation would be ideal. If a strong enough magnetic field can levitate a frog, you should be able to magnetically levitate and confine your antimatter chunk within a magnetic coil. Just about everything is diamagnetic or paramagnetic to some degree and magnets don't care what kind of matter you are.
3. Keep jars someplace safe. The moon would be good.
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In short:
1. **Laser ablation to blow off parts of the object**. The laser can be put in orbit around the body, without physical contact with it.
2. **Channel the plasma to the "box"**. The produced plasma can be channeled via a suitable magnetic field into a magnetic storage. Again, no physical contact.
3. **Ship the "box".** The magnetic storage can be sent to the following user.
Obviously you need a layer of safety: you don't want any interaction between any matter particle and the antimatter, so you need to provide an adequate shielding.
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## You're not really mining, more like controlled exploding.
There is no real extraction just **cutting** off usable chunks. to do that you just throwing normal particles at it, a superfine stream of low pressure hydrogen will cut this thing like a high power laser through styrofoam. An electron gun or ion gun will cut better than any laser for very little energy input, switching between the two works even better and as others have pointed out you can use this to give the antimatter a charge thus making containment easier.
Just don't use anything powerful you don't want an industrial cutting electron gun, you want something closer to one used in a vacuum tube. You also don't want anything near it, Thucydides idea of a wake shield is great, breaking this thing up would be very very bad for the solar system. As it plows into the solar wind you will have issues with pieces breaking off as it is. you have to worry about anything coming near it hitting these near invisible particles.
As much as diverting to a more convenient location is, the problem is the flecks of matter you will hit doing a pass, steering will be near impossible when every scrap of dust hitting it produces huge amounts of thrust, you have this problem anyway but it gets worst the closer you get to a planet. you want this thing as far from other objects in the solar system as possible then you try to catch it.
The **containment** vessel will be massively expensive, (likely wiping out any gains for fuel, but for science it is worth doing) you need a magnetic bottle of ludicrous proportions. On the upside as long as you can keep it as a solid containment is fairly easy, expensive but easy. It may be worth refrigerating the entire contraption to prevent heat transfer, radiative heat transfer will still work after all, if it starts outgassing it becomes much harder to deal with. A cold solid lump of antimatter is a lot easier to deal with than a hot gas cloud of antimatter, to the point that putting a sunshade in front of the containment vessel would be a good idea.
The idea is to store it far away form everything then cut off tiny chunks for transport, you will not generate power at its location (not more than to run its containment systems) you transport less dangerous chunks to places to generate power for other purposes. This thing is far too dangerous even bring inside the asteroid belt no matter what safeties you have.
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# Unfeasible due to frame challenge
If the thing is coming into the solar system, it is in a flyby trajectory. Deceleration due to contact with the interplanetary medium will reduce its velocity in two directions:
* **Radial out:** this will rotate the orbital path, but not change it enough to have an apoapsis (and therefore cause a capture);
* **Retrograde:** this can decellerate the object enough for a capture - **but if a capture happens, this decelleration will never stop due to the object being made of antimatter**. It will end up causing the object to go suborbital and eventually crash into the sun.
In either case, you won't have enough time to assemble a mining operation before it either exits the solar system or crashes into the sun.
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**Manipulate dust with electric field**
First, shield the asteroid from further interaction from interplanetary matter as explained by other answers. Then, make it electrically charged using positrons. We can make positrons (anti-electrons) even with today's technology because they are product of one type of radioactive decay. Then, if there is any surface dust, it will start levitating because of electric repulsion, as it happens sometimes with the Moon regolith. The dust can be created artificially too with laser pulses.
Next, a computers will track all dust particles and use electric field to carefully guide one away and transport it to final destination, all the time by applying electric force (high voltage electrodes). If it detects the particle is moving toward one wall of container, it will put positive voltage on that wall and negative on the other side to stop or reverse the movement.
I believe managing charged antimatter dust particles will be much more efficient than taking care of antimatter plasma, because plasma particles must be moving at high velocities.
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This really doesn't seem feasible.
I don't have hard numbers, but matter/antimatter annihilation is so incredibly energetic that this object wouldn't really have its own trajectory. any deviation in speed from the background medium would immediately be corrected by the increase in collisions on the front side. that means the object almost certainly wouldn't enter the heliopause, and if it did, it would immediately be repulsed by the solar wind. obviously if it were large enough, it could overcome those forces, but in that case, it would probably be so large that its surface reactions would probably give off more energy than the sun. good luck mining that.
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Magnetic confinement seems to be a fairly common suggestion and would work in the technical sense, but the amount of energy actually required to magnetically *confine* an asteroid worth (over the lifetime of the "mine") would be extraordinary. This is particularly concerning given that the containment field would not only have to contain the antimatter under constant acceleration, but would also have to have to account for the acceleration/deceleration of the transport device.
Keep in mind that the frog example mentioned above required a 16 Tesla magnetic field using a bitter magnet requiring ~20 kiloamperes of current. That's the electrical draw of 130-200 modern households to levitate the mass of a frog under *constant* acceleration. Add to that additional mass imparted through acceleration and you very quickly get to energy levels that are not reasonable (not even going to go into dealing with angular momentum). While technically the antimatter would produce substantially more energy than what is needed to cover this, transportation this way just feels like an inefficient/overly technical response to a problem.
A better option would be to build a power plant **directly** around the asteroid, and to perform the energy generation activities within relatively close proximity. The antimatter could be moved through short term containment, or even better, could be directly blasted into the reaction chambers (requiring only a short containment for sealing etc). The energy produced can then be converted into far more "docile" states which can be transported with much less complication (For example as Ultra-compressed gases/liquids etc etc).
I know you have disqualified fusion energy as an option, but I think it's important to consider that such a discovery would substantially improve the feasibility of fusion energy production as a means of energy production. One of the primary hurdles to fusion energy is generating enough energy to initiate the fusion reaction to begin with. Current technologies operate using a similar magnetic containment principle, only in this case we are containing ionized plasma either with external or intrinsic magnetic fields.
A major hurdle in the process is the mind numbing amount of energy require to *initialize* a fusion reaction (something on the order of 100 million degrees kelvin). Short of discovering the miracle of cold fusion, the next best option of achieving such incredible temperatures would be antimatter. In this regard, using antimatter as the seed to fusion reactions, this asteroid could effectively generate unlimited energy so long as the fusion reactors have a steady supply of fuel.
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The IPM near Earth is 5 particles/cm^3. If we assumes this is 5 hyrdogen atoms we won't be far wrong.
First, lets do some Feynman math to see how plausible this is.
Everything is about as dense as water, give or take an order of magnitude. A water-density object that weights 1000 tonnes (or $10^6$ kg) is going to be about 10 meters on a side.
Solar escape velocity at Earth Orbit is about 40 km/s. So your asteroid will pass over a volume of 10 m \* 10 m \* 40 km / s or 4 \* 10^6 m^3/s.
There are 100^3 cm^3 in a m^3, so this is 10^6 \* 4 \* 10^6 \* 5 hydrogen atoms/second, or 4\*10^12 hydrogen atoms/second.
There are 6\*10^26 hydrogen atoms per kg, so this is 0.7 \* $10^{-14}$ kg/s of hydrogen swept up.
Times two, times c^2, gives us about 1.25 kwatts.
The kinetic energy of a 1 kilotonne object moving at 40 km/s is 8\*10^20 J. The gravitational binding energy of such an object is 8 J. This is a problem.
Assuming the energy released is 100% efficient at slowing the asteroid, it would take about a million light years at that speed to reduce the kinetic energy of this asteroid by 50%. Collisions with the ISM won't, on average, do anything detectible other than make the asteroid glow with high-energy photons (and deposit some heat).
If the asteroid hit something more substantial (say, a mote of dust or whatever), the first problem is that anything that can slow it down from solar escape velocity will also blow it apart.
The problem is that the binding energy of any natural asteroid is going to be tiny, and the KE of a comet is huge; any impact that is enough to soak the KE in a short period of time is going to shatter the asteroid.
Can chemically bound might survive such an impact? A pure anti-Tugsten has a chemical binding energy of 850 kJ/mol. That mol has a weight of a bit under 200 g. 1/2 (40km/s)^2 \* 200 g is 160,000,000 J. So an impact that would slag the asteroid would shave off half-a-percent of the KE of the asteroid.
So no impact/ism based energy deposit is going to do anything useful.
For the asteroid to be captured, it will have to get extremely lucky with orbital mechanics. It falls inward, does a close pass by a gas giant that "slingshots" it. That might be enough to kick it into a long elipitical orbit. If the slighshot (through insane luck) then swung by another large planet "just right", it could shed more KE and have a less elongated orbit.
A traditional capture would involve doing this dozens of times over millions of years, where a a few failures results in the asteroid being ejected from the system or hitting a planet.
In your situation, the best you could hope for is losing 5-10 km/s from a gas giant flyby. It has to get lucky and avoid hitting *anything* larger than a mote of dust (even a mote of dust will create an explosion, but maybe not enough to destroy the asteroid).
Then you might be able to use a gravity tug, over decades, to move it into a better orbit.
Once you have it reachable...
To cut is, fire a stream of electricaly neutral particles (to avoid giving it a net charge; any electron you shoot at it will cause a random proton to be attracted to the object as it seeks to become electrically neutral). As even a ghostly amount of such particles hit, it will produce an extremely vigorous energy emission; far more than anything you could generate for anywhere near the same amount of effort. I might fire separate proton and electron beams to cut different spots, or have them merge into a neutral beam.
Once you have defeated whatever chemical bonds are keeping the asteroid together, they'll drift apart easily.
You won't want to get anywhere near the object. Even rocket exhaust should be avoided near the target; it will be insanely more dense than the ISM. So you might want solar sails, avoid being either up or down "wind" of it (downwind, because it will shed antimatter; upwind, because you'll shed matter). You'd cut a piece off, then can move that piece by hitting it very gently with a beam.
Capturing an isolated piece becomes extremely tricky. Tricks with magnetic bottles etc are fine, but probably the easiest is to throw near-vacuum matter at it and let it glow and move itself.
You'd maintain some kind of defence system around the anti-asteroid, to avoid even dust particles from hitting it. As noted, a few microgram dust particle is enough to give it a kick enough to utterly change orbits; a defence system powerful enough to detect [b]every little bit[/b] of microgram dust and deflect it would be an extreme challenge.
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[Question]
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In many video games, particularly the rogue-like genre, cursed items are items that **cannot be unequipped once equipped** unless the curse is lifted from them.
For instance, a cursed ring, once equipped, will tighten to the user's finger to the point of impossible removal.
Of course videogames won't be detailed enough as to what happens when the items were disarmed, or if the wielder's appendage was cut. (But these things happen in complex fighting scenarios.)
Using these ideas a context, how can I justify a cursed item being unequippable in the following scenarios?
1. When the item's holder is disarmed. (His weapon flies off to a distance - this counts as being unequipped right?)
2. When the item holder's appendage (such as hands) were cut off while holding the item.
3. When other people (such as a friend) tries to hold/wield another person's cursed item. (Brandishing a cursed weapon that s/he didn't originally own.)
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You ask it as if there should be an established rule of sense. There is not. This really depends on the whole mood of the settings you want to create. You have many options; I will give some examples.
* Cursed person simply craves the object, and will do anything to regain it, no matter how stupid the action is. Gollum jumping into the fire pit after the ring. In MLP, s2:e15 is an exemplification of this approach. Big Mac, cursed by the love potion, will do anything to get to the object of his affection. And, considering he is the strongest one in town, it is big trouble.
* Object permanently attaches to a hand, or whatever. In this case yes, if the whole part that it attached to gets cut off, then the curse breaks. If in your world it is no big deal to restore a cut hand, then this sort of curse is definitely not life-changing, but only a nuisance.
* Object becomes required for victim's life-being. Most fitting for sci-fi. Remember that electromagnet Tony Stark has to wear in his chest? Imagine if it had strongly detrimental quality, like emitting repulsive stink or simply zapping him from time to time.
* Object manipulates the flow of reality to always be near the victim. If you throw it away - then you find it in your wardrobe, if you burn it - it withstands fire, if you sell it - you find it in your pocket and get accused of stealing, if you throw it into the lake - a wild otter brings it back, hoping for a treat. Most stories of cursed dolls work like that.
* And my favorite. In Hoffman's "Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober", a protagonist gets a cursed frac that looks ridiculous. Whenever he takes it off and puts on another frac, it turns into the cursed one.
* A hero does not understand that the source of the curse is the object, and thus sees no reason to part with it. It happened to me IRL. I had a strong allergy whenever I walked out of the house. But it took me a year to understand that the cause was not a plant or a weather, but my favorite bag. I changed the bag and the curse was gone.
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Potentially (given that we’re talking magic) part of the curse is not that you can’t unequip the object but rather that no matter how hard you try you will find you can’t equip anything else.
For example: The Longsword Of Doomy Doom is knocked from your hands. You want to draw your backup sword, but you find that whenever you try your arms (of their own accord) go scrabbling towards the dropped Doomy Doom sword.
Or perhaps you reach into your bag to retrieve your +2 Hat of Awesomeness, but somehow you always bring out the Cursèd Circlet of Suck.
If the properties of the curse can only be replaced by the properties of another item (the only way to break the Circlet’s curse of Suck is to equip something else) then this is functionally the same as being unable to unequip. Even if you aren’t holding the Longsword of Doomy Doom the curse still applies to you, and you can’t use any sword but that sword. Effectively you’re stuck either wielding just the Longsword of Doomy Doom or fighting with your bare hands *while still under the effects of the Doomy Doom curse*
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### The cursed item is injecting a magical venom into the victim to kill him no matter how many appendages he loses - and it's constantly injecting an antivenom to suppress the venom, making you want to seek out the weapon when you lose it
The moment you touch the weapon it stings you with a little needle that was not visible before and injects some of its venom into your blood stream. After the magical venom has been injected and pushed throughout your body the needle will start constantly injecting a sort of antivenom, which suppresses the dire effects of the venom.
If you are away from the weapon for too long you will die a gruesome death. It's not that you *can't* unequip the weapon - you simply *shouldn't* if you want to live.
This way the curse will still be inside you and once you lose your hand you will have to seek the weapon out and affix it to another appendage in order to get your antivenom fix. This could also be combined witha sort of drug, giving you the typical berserker frenzy and making you attack anyone around you. And you will want more of the power that comes with the magical cursed item and its venom/drug component.
Just because the physical connection between you and the cursed item is broken doesn't mean that the curse of being mentally unable to part with your weapon is broken or that the deadly venom cursing through your veins is suddenly gone.
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How about a dumb approach to the curse? I imagine creating curses to be complex enough, so creators would stick to simple rules. For instance *“cursed item magically sticks to its owner”*
* Rings/helmets/whatever can be removed by severing the limb. Seems strong enough an incentive not to do it, yet the option, though costly, remains available anytime (well, perhaps helmet isn't the best example). This can build dramatic moments, *127 hours* style.
* Weapons stick to the hand. Yes, that means they are immune to disarming effects. And should they fly off to a distance because the force that should have disarmed it is strong enough, it takes the limb with it. In that case the curse is “lifted”.
Alternatively, in a world where severed limbs can be mended easily or would not be enough of an issue, the cursed item protects the limb it is attached to: it may be broken, burnt, made gangrenous, you name it, but nothing will ever manage to sever it. Attempts can induce excruciating pain for added flavor. That is, if the pain of having someone run a knife through your flesh doesn't cut it.
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Well this based on how other people have done this trope before in games and story writing.
This is depending on what the cursed item dose so the range could be anything like it acting like a regular item to an item that restores the host hands when cut off unless you explain what the curse dose. I can’t be much help in that regard.
If the holder is killed/disarmed or the appendage holding the item is cut off then the cursed item would then become inactive (unless it is under some sort of contract with the host) or if sentient would then hunt for a new host.
The friend holding/wielding the cursed item then it will transfer to that friend or, kill the friend, become inactive, returns to the host, host get enraged.
I would like to also point out is that most cursed items would do more than just be stuck to holder (they wouldn't be called cursed would they). Swords for example would possess the host and put them into a blood frenzy killing against anyone around them - friend or foe.
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The "[One Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring)" springs to mind.
Removing it is simple enough but it instills a craving for it that keeps growing over time to the point you can't live without it.
My precious......
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I'm working on this new story in which many people have developed "special qualities" or gifts - call it extreme DNA mutations, if you will. There's this character who has several rows of teeth (maybe they also grow back easily?), and because of it, he's really interested in sharks! So I wanted to give him a bit more than that, and therefore, I was wondering how crazy these two traits would be for a human being to have:
* Being able to dislocate their lower jaw
* Having a cartilage skeleton
Seriously, I have no idea what consequences this would result in. Is cartilage resilient enough to carry a human body? Is its elasticity impairing in some way? Or would it help him resist punches and so? Would he have any trouble carrying heavy things or am I going bonkers?
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Cartilage is no where near as strong as bone.
**Pros**
* Amazing flexibility
* More capable of absorbing low-velocity and narrow-focus impacts (bones are brittle, this addresses the issue of breakability).
**Cons**
* Susceptible to crushing blows (high-velocity or broad-focus)
* Easily bruised (high-velocity or broad-focus)
* VERY susceptible to nerve damage
* Couldn't lever almost anything (all actions performed by "brute strength")
>
> That last point is incredibly important. Without the rigid strength of bone, your only method of (among other things) lifting things is brute strength. New musculature would be required to compensate for the loss of rigidity. In the end, the cartilage person would never be as strong as a normal person, but would be much more agile and flexible.
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Sharks have skeletons largely made out of cartilage (as well as multiple rows of teeth) and have done this for over 240 million years, so they are doing something right.
That something is becoming the apex predators in the various ecosystems they have evolved to live in. Being seagoing creatures they have evolved strong, flexible, hydrodynamic bodies with lots of teeth to enable them to hunt down prey in the most efficient way possible.
If your characters happened to live in the ocean and hunt and eat schools of fish, seals or tuna while swimming around, then a cartilage skeleton could be justifiable. However, Dolphins and Ichthyosaurs have very similar lifestyles but have skeletons made of bone.
The point being, evolutionary features are created and conserved based on their usefulness in the environment the creature lives in. A giraffe does not evolve to live in the Great Plains or Russian Steppes, because the long neck and legs would not provide much, if any, benefit in that environment. Similarly a cartilage skeleton provides no benefits to creatures living on land, and many other answers have gone into greater depth as to why.
So when you are contemplating creating a creature or modifying an existing one for a story, it is wise to consider the environment and ask yourself how would such a feature or behaviour help the creature in that environment. If the answer is not at all, then perhaps a rethink is in order.
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Maybe a combination of human skeleton and cartilage may work for your character. If the mutation is that your character's human skeleton is completely coated with a layer of cartilage, then the bones may be stronger and more flexible. The cartilage in between joints continue to grow and fuse over all of the human bones in the embryonic state through birth. Afterwards the cartilage layer grows with the bones as your character ages.
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**No it really would not work.**
Humans start with skeletons made of mostly cartilage, the soft spot in a child's skull is cartilage that has not ossified into bone yet, so you can get an idea of how strong it is. Cartilage is rather weak, sharks do not have very powerful bites, especially not compared to their size, because their jaw just cannot withstand the forces.
A cartilage skeleton would never support the weight of an adult human, your people could not even stand. They might not even be able to breath properly as mammalian breathing relies on a stiff rib cage to generate negative pressure.
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It might be possible for it to be semi-cartilage or made of a flexible yet strong material but 100 percent cartilage is impossible
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Concerning sharks: While they do have a skeleton made out of cartilage, it's important to note that they do not use it as an anchor for muscle movement. Shark muscles actually pull against their *skin* to move - basically, they have an *exoskeleton*. A soft one.
A shark's body is very flexible, but it's also "floppy" - they are able to move quickly in the water by "whipping" it back and forth, but this wouldn't work on land for anything that wants to support itself on four legs, let alone two.
A cartilage skeleton also offers very little protection from impacts, so not advisable for a creature whose brain takes up a good portion of their head.
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I actually probably fill both those boxes. I have a condition called elhers danlos syndrome, this causes my ligaments to be very atrofied and stretchy allowing me to dislocate all my joints, I can dislocate my jaw by opening my mouth. on the cartilage skeleton, im not fully sure but my bones can bend considerably so I suspect them to be made mostly of cartilage.
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