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[Question]
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In this world, there are these inhabitants that have the belief that all animals and plants have souls and sentience. Animals (including themselves) were born/created long long ago from plants and would one day at death, return to the plants.
Each tribe of these inhabitants is situated in a forest, and at its center an ancient and colossal tree. They believe the central tree is the entire tribe's common ancestor/creator. It is their spiritual leader, their matron and their goddess. The forest, its other offspring.
To destroy the central tree of a tribe is to destroy the tribe, and tribes-people will take their own lives at the roots of their fallen tree as penance for failing to protect the tree and to follow the fate of the tree.
Given the context above, would they justify the use of wood or suffer severe technological drawbacks? How would they justify it?
[Answer]
**Pollard forest**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YTgZ6.png)
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding>
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> As in coppicing, the tradition of pollarding is to encourage the tree
> to produce new growth on a regular basis to maintain a supply of new
> wood for various purposes, particularly for fuel. In some areas, dried
> leafy branches are stored as winter fodder for stock. Depending upon
> the use of the cut material, the length of time between cutting will
> vary from one year for tree hay or withies, to five years or more for
> larger timber. Sometimes, only some of the regrown stems may be cut in
> a season – this is thought to reduce the chances of death of the tree
> when recutting long-neglected pollards.
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You do not need to hack the tree down and kill it to use the wood. You can take wood and let the tree grow it back. Pollarded trees are not unhealthy and can live longer than untouched trees. Wood collected by pollarding is like collecting the wool from a sheep or the milk from a cow. It is a gift from the tree.
If you want to give back, make sure when you die you are buried next to the tree. That should have been the last panel of The Giving Tree, with the tree sending up new sprouts like these pollard trees.
[Answer]
# Wood is the gift of the Great Tree, you don't reject such gifts.
Perhaps they worship the tree because of how central wood and woodcraft is to their lives. It provides homes, tools, weapons, heat and cooking (fire).
All things that are are gifts from the tree. To kill the tree of another tribe, is to take everything from them. All that was will ultimately be taken, tools and homes will rot, fire won't burn.
*What can life be without the tree?*
[Answer]
>
> would they justify the use of wood or suffer severe technological drawbacks?
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This would depend on the culture in question. Modern vegetarians and vegans abhor the consumption or usage and consumption of animal meat and byproducts **whereas Native Americans and Hindus are not as strict despite worshiping animal gods or spirits.**
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> How would they justify it?
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# By being considerate of their usage of the wood to *honor* the being it came from.
Consider how when Native Americans hunt animals they pointedly make use of every part of the animal. This is both industriously efficient and a ritual. I would expect to see something similar for your population. At a societal level this would impart a mix of ritualism in construction and industry possibly similar that seen in [Warhammer 40K with machine spirits](http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Machine_Spirit).
## Consider the inverse
If objects constructed from wood are 'honored', what would the destruction or ill-usage of such wood connote?
[Answer]
I've heard of societies like this before.
Specifically the forest elves from the saga "The Elder Scrolls" from "Bethesda games"
Basically things get dark very soon, because wood is the best material to build your house, your tools and almost anything. So let's talk about the other material used by the tribes of the world:
Bone.
If one can not use wood, the bone is another option along with the rock.
They are somewhat malleable if you are willing to carve for hours or days on them.
Bows, bowls, and any tool you imagine has been made with bone and/or rocks.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rqkQD.jpg)
Why would a society that adores trees will use bones? Where would they get so many bones? That depends on you.
But in the elves of the forest of "The elder scrolls" make use of human hunting and cannibalism in order to use the bodies of their prey and deceased as marterial for their tools.
[Answer]
**Good for the environment**
If they're living in harmony with their environment (including but not limited to their central tree), then it can actually be *healthy* for some trees to be cut down. As someone mentioned above, **coppicing** is a fairly long-established and ecologically friendly way of getting wood without killing your trees.
Also, if your characters are really in tune with their environment, and trees are semi-sentient, maybe they can sense the trees' wishes. If they're under attack, some trees might be willing to sacrifice themselves to protect the overall tribe/central tree, just as the people would.
The 2009 movie **Avatar** might also have some interesting ideas to pursue (more info here: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)>). Like your idea, they have a central tree which is of huge significance to them, and endeavour to live in harmony with their environment.
**Culturally significant**
If *all* wood is a particularly revered material, then maybe only certain items would be made with it. This could be along the lines of religious icons and reliquaries, all the way to wooden weapons that are imbued with tribal identity and significance. Such weapons could be very powerful both martially and psychologically - using such a weapon confers status upon the wielder, and importance upon the occasion.
If only *certain* types of wood are revered, then it shouldn't be a problem to use the other types. This could be diseased trees/deadwood, or simply different types (deciduous vs evergreen; fruiting vs flowering; rowan vs elder, etc.) - and then the culturally privileged wood would be used for less mundane purposes, or simply not used at all.
**Practicality**
If you're worried about technological drawbacks when unable to use wood, this question might be helpful: [Could a technological society develop without wood?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1406/could-a-technological-society-develop-without-wood). There are alternatives for wood as a heat source, light source, cooking utility, and building material - and your landscape might help with that.
Peat, brushwood, geysers, volcanoes... All are viable heat sources, depending on your landscape.
Caves, animal skin tents, stone buildings, igloos - these could all provide shelter, again depending on landscape.
[Answer]
How far away from other forests and tribes are they?
One solution could be that the tribes make war on each other and use the trees and woods from rival's forests to build their homes and make their tools.
They could use the wood from trees that have fallen or died naturally.
Alternatively they could make use of techniques like [coppicing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing) where trees are cut down for lumber but not actually killed. Coppicing is a very effective method of woodland management and is still used to this day in woodlands. It could be looked upon as akin to consuming milk or eggs as opposed to killing and eating animals.
[Answer]
**I'm not entirely sure they would not use wood**
In your scenario you described a mechanic where it is the goal of warring tribes to kill the other's tree as a measure of victory. In this regard wood in general is not wholly sacred only the select tree and surrounding plants.
With that in mind, a comparison can be drawn to Amazonian headhunter tribes who collected and shrunk the decapitated heads of bested foes as a religious/symbolic means of taking their power.
Similarly, your tribes could kill enemy tribes trees and craft weapons and tools from that wood as a religious/symbolic means of taking that tribes power to increase their own. The advantage of this perspective is that it continues the spiritual reverence of wood worship whilst allowing them to kill each other's trees and utilize wood.
This would also encourage them to make temples or palaces from enemy wood as monument to their victory.
Also, trees shed failed branches on occassion. It would not be unreasonable for a villager to collect a sacred branch and craft it into a cermonial object or weapon for good luck in war.
[Answer]
If they can't use wood then they'll use a lot of other materials as long as possible, like stone or bones. However wood is often better, say to have tools and weapons more efficient. Now different tribes will take different paths
* **Simply abandon their convictions**, progress over traditions, maybe they expanded outside of the forest and don't recognize the tree goddess anymore since they now are farmers, it's the cereal god who's workshipped.
* **Ceremonial wood**, wooden items are revered, viewed as brothers who sacrified themselves for the tribe. wood is used but it's precious and not wasted.
* **The tree mother's preffered childrens**, we don't betray our godess, it's just that she view us as her best offsprings and decided that her first childrens will be sacrified to not be a liability to us
* **"what there are other people out here using wood ? good one oak"** they simply don't know about other technologies for now as they're not pressured by more advanced peoples
Those are just examples because this isn't a bipolar question, you can invent all sort of justifications and interesting ideas even tough "they find a better way of surviving and stop following their traditions" is what would happen most likely it is better to take a more nuanced take wich is often more interesting.
[Answer]
Here's a related question: if all plants have souls, what do the tribespeople eat, and how do they justify it?
It seems like they must at the very least consume windfall fruit/nuts, in which case there is already a precedent for making use of the bountiful gifts provided by the forest. They can use windfall wood. This may not provide the best quality materials though, so good-quality wood (especially for weapons) may be rare and precious.
If a whole tree is actually felled via natural causes then there could be a sudden boon in the supply of decent-quality wood, and it may be that there are societal conventions based around such an event (a thanksgiving, or tree-falling party, or somesuch). Perhaps there would be similar conventions that grow up based around when it is physically possible to build shelter for new families and/or weapons for new warriors.
Alternatively, perhaps the tribespeople are allowed to eat plants (or bits of them) in certain circumstances, in which case the other answers referring to coppicing or pruning trees would seem to apply.
[Answer]
There are other religions which praise their deity sacrificing for the good of the people.
They can justify the worshipping of the tree as respect for the gods which allow them to get shelter and resources by using their physical body. In exchange the humans will feed back the trees when they will be dead.
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Hunting and killing is natural. The animals do it. Offering thanks for the animal that gave up its life are common in many native cultures on Earth. Also, pre-hunting prayers that an animal that is willing to die will present itself.
Similarly, cutting and use of trees shouldn't be forbidden. However, they should favor trees that are damaged or that are too close together for good growth, etc.
Otherwise, is this is a PETA culture where the trees and animals are more important than the people. They should just sit down and wait to starve to death.
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It could be that these tribes are warlike, and will conquer each other and fell their trees to use as wood, to please the desires of their own tree.
Alternatively, the species of tree they worship could drop large branches that don't reach the sun, and the tribe could simply make do with these. Also, certain species of trees could be seen to be in a metaphysical cocoon that they need to die to escape from, and it could be that the tribes you describe have no qualms with killing trees such as this.
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Another way to look at it, is it All trees that are sacred, or only some? A common point made by Vegetarians is the inherent issue of Pet vs Food-Source. What makes a pet a pet, and what makes livestock, livestock?
With regards to trees, perhaps its only pine trees that are sacred. Their evergreen nature is clearly an indication of their vitality and life, wheras the other trees "Die" in the winter and are reborn every spring. Would your tribespeople feel OK about harvesting their wood needs in the winter, stopping in the spring? Good practical reason for this to come about too - It's cold in the winter and less food is available, more wood is needed for hunting, heating and survival.
[Answer]
I can't seem to find it right now, so sorry for the vague reference. This post contains Spoilers, so beware
There is an old comic book from The Phantom where there was an island or a jungle that had trees that grew with gold instead of wood. The trees were sacred for the tribesman, but they also had various things made of the gold of such trees.
However, they only used the gold from trees that died either from storm or fell from old age.
So your tribe could restrict themselves to using branches that fell from the trees naturally, or even trees that fell naturally. I would advise to work with the weather of the area too, to justify the amount of wood they have used.
So they can use lots of wood, but they have constant storms/hurricanes, in which, for their religion, the Great Tree protects them from.
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[Question]
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**Setting**: close to present day. Aliens in ships about the size of the Pentagon are detected at about [10 AU, moving at about 100km/s, and will therefore take about 6 months to arrive](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10AU%2F6%20months).
Realistically at least one country will want to destroy them, which breaks the plot, so I need to know if they're told "no" by science or "no" for other reasons.
Nukes [aren't anything like so destructive in space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)), for various reasons. The space ships have "sufficient" radiation shielding, so nobody on board would die (or even get sick) from the radiation of a merely "close" detonation. Alien ships also have [armour plating designed for typical solar system material moving at ~100km/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield). So, a nuke would only destroy one of these ships if it went off *inside*.
At 100km/s it takes 4.31 milliseconds to go through the entire thing and come out the other side. I don't know if nuclear explosions can be timed that well. Also I'm sure the bomb won't survive contact with the hull due to massive deceleration well before that point, so {mystery solution, if it exists} would have to make a hole in the hull and the front-facing Whipple shield first.
For reasons, assume the aliens don't have any sensible point defence weapons of note at this scale, or even vaguely good radar. Our existing stealth is more than good enough to stop them from knowing the danger until too late.
**So, if this happened today-ish, could we hit these ships before they reach the [Van Allen belts and the nuclear option turns into a footgun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse)?**
So, for example, *any one of these being "humans fail" is sufficient to say "no"* (but other reasons for "no" are also welcome):
1. If nuclear warhead detonation is less precise than 4ms. (I'm assuming it is ~µs from the vague descriptions I've read about how precisely correlated the implosions have to be to avoid a fizzle but I see no specific numbers).
2. There's nothing to fit the role of hole-puncher. (I don't know if a [nuclear shaped charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge) do much more than a (series of) dumb rock(s) to a Whipple shield nor if either is sufficient).
3. Can't be built fast enough. (So if this kind of thing takes >6 months then the aliens would have already landed).
4. Can't be aimed or timed well enough, or would never get through the hull without damaging itself to the point of non-detonation.
[Answer]
## 1) If nuclear warhead detonation is less precise than 4ms
**Hitting a 4ms target window is chump change for modern semiconductor tech**.
Consider an average desktop computer might have a CPU speed of 3GHz. This means a single "cycle" takes approximately 0.333 nanoseconds or 0.000333 milliseconds, and that's just consumer grade hardware. Even with a hobbyist grade $5 microcontroller, comfortably operates on microsecond scale, with the limiting factor probably being the ADC which reads out a sensor value taking a couple hundred microseconds.
For a military system, like that which you'd find in a missile, doing things (reading sensors, computing things, making decisions) on the nanosecond scale is a relaxing stroll in the park. For example, the military has missiles that are accurate enough to fly through windows and detonate once they've traveled a certain amount of centimeters through the now-broken window (and fill the room with shrapnel). This takes good timing.
## 2) There's nothing to fit the role of hole-puncher.
**Yup.**
Aliens capable of interstellar travel and casually bringing their ship to a blistering 100km/s and withstanding impacts from debris and space material at these speeds is going to shrug off basically everything we can toss at it.
Consider that if they are traveling at 100km/s they, at minimum, are able to withstand 200km/s impactors due to relative velocity, and no sane designer would sign off on a "safety margin = zero" design. Realistically, they are able to shrug off much faster impacts, and if they lack "sensible point defense" then they are taking it all on the armor.
For a bit of mathematical backing, a 1kg impact that collides at a relative 100km/s has the energy of 1 kT TNT equivalent energy, which is a lot.
*Maybe* a staggered series of shaped nuclear detonations would do the trick. This is already how modern anti-reactive armor missiles work. They have two shaped detonators essentially stacked behind eachother: the first fires a lance to detonate the reactive armor panels on the target, and then the second fires into that now armor-less hole. Perhaps a similar strategy, but nuclear, could do the trick, especially if you used a long line or chain of many nuclear shaped charges, followed by a "conventional" bomb to detonate once inside.
## 3) Can't be built fast enough.
**I'm going to put a solid *maybe* on this.**
Fortunately, SpaceX exists, and this exact scenario of "needing to get something into space *now*" is something the US military has been playing with and awarding contracts to for a couple years now (keyword "Responsive Space").
A Falcon 9 rocket is "available enough" that provided the political and financial lubrication, it certainly would be on hand in an "alien defense" scenario. I think they could scramble together a launch in under a week.
Unfortunately, nukes are heavy and the F9 rocket isn't a heavy lift vehicle. The payload that it can shoot out of the Earth/Moon system is maybe 4 tons, which isn't much. Falcon Heavy is significantly better, being able to send almost 17 tons, but FH launch vehicles would take more than a week to scramble, although it could probably still be done within a month.
Similarly, NASA's DART mission demonstrated that we have the technology to hit the target. They managed to hit a 160 meter-sized target in deep space at about 7km/s relative velocity. Still, this was quite the feat, and this isn't some equipment that NASA just has lying around on the shelf. I'm unsure if we could crash-develop a similar guidance package and spacecraft within the time window, and hitting it at 100km/s relative would be significantly trickier (although the aliens might want to start to slow down before they reach the Earth/Luna system).
For storytelling purposes, maybe NASA has one or multiple DART prototypes or testing duplicates lying about that they could repurpose?
The trickiest part is probably the set of, preferably many, staggered shaped-charge nuclear warheads. Shaped charge nuclear weapons were analyzed during the Star Wars era of US military strategy, however as far as the public knows, none were ever tested or developed--the most theory work was probably done on this topic by the team behind Project ORION. Regardless, this isn't an "off the shelf" solution like conventional nuclear weapons.
For storytelling purposes though, I don't think it's unrealistic that the US developed these in secret some time during the late cold war as some 'end-all be-all' bunker buster to destroy even the hardiest of Soviet nuclear silos.
## 4) Can't be aimed or timed well enough...get through the hull without damaging itself..
**Doable. Maybe.**
See previous response on DART. NASA managed to nail a 160m target (of which the position had only been estimated by the wobble of the larger body) at a relative 6.6 km/s on a budget of merely $300 million out in deep space. While hitting target that's an order of magnitude faster would doubtlessly be more difficult, provided that the equipment can be built in time, I think it could be done. The target is bigger, and there are 'fate of humanity' concerns that would motivate the engineers and politicians.
As for surviving entry into the craft, I think this is also doable. We have bunker-buster bombs today that are designed to first penetrate many meters of reinforced concrete and Earth. Then, once they detect open air around them and assume they've reached the human-inhabited parts of the bunker (again, nanosecond speeds), they blow up.
Using a staggered-shaped-charge nuclear lance to first punch a hole that the follow-up bomb(s) then "fly" into the now-open space before detonating should be doable.
## Conclusion
If sold properly, I think it might be possible to "realistically" shoot down the alien craft provided the parameters in your question. Regardless though, this relies on rather "stupid" aliens and a lot of luck/crunch on the side of the humans.
Therefore, to answer the secondary question about saying "no", I think that you'll need to find a reason other than "technically impossible". Based on the various points I've outlined, I don't think it's unreasonable that the USA specifically comes to the conclusion that they have a realistic "shot" at success, or realistic enough that it's worth attempting if they decided doing so was the right course of action.
[Answer]
## Frame challenge / "no" for other reasons
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> Realistically at least one country will want to destroy them
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This is false. If an alien ship reaches our solar system, our scientists will tell our leaders that these aliens are necessarily far more advanced than us.
You do not start a fight with somebody who is 10x bigger and stronger than you. Even if you blow up this ship, you have to assume they can send another -- and the second ship will be coming here to annihilate us.
None of the countries on Earth that have access to nuclear weapons will be reckless enough to unilaterally start a war with advanced aliens.
[Answer]
"Can we hit the ship" - yes, reliably, provided they don't change course (which I frankly expect them to be able to, anyway they are to shed off 100km/s delta-V to stick to Earth orbit) and don't actually launch anti-missiles. "Can we damage the ship" - yes, probably, and we don't even need a nuke, just a good old kinetic impactor on the counter course, 105 km/s delta would provide more energy than a nuke would! "Can we destroy the ship" - unlikely, even if it would be hit dead center, the area of damage would only expand about 0.05 radians each side (speed of sound in metal divided by speed of impact), meaning that a 200-meter long hole left from the impact would expand to about 10 meters from the center line, leaving the majority of the ship unharmed, although maybe thrown off course. And now remember, there are *several* ships out there and close enough, and should even one reach us in a capable condition, we're dead.
So, the proper answer would be **"No, for other reasons"**, namely we are unable to destroy all of those ships reliably to prevent direct conflict. And there is another reason to not touch them - they might be plain flying past, just happening to visit a promising star system, that somehow was sending a weird spectrum of radio waves several bongs ago. In case they are hostile, we could do better reading their power capacity before delivering a decisive strike, be it a nuke or something else, so that they won't escape, and in case they are at least neutral, we still are better not doing any premature hostilities while they are yet in interplanetary space.
Frankly, the only way we could detect those ships that far away is if they would themselves emit at least infrared radiation, which is expected by hard science, then say James Webb would be able to find an unexpected dot during its sky survey routine. The levels of emission say enough of the technology used, as the emission is effectively blackbody radiation with a determined temperature and a red/blue shift depicting their motion towards or away frm the observer. Assuming the scientists would decipher those emissions as having a too big blackbody temperature, they would determine that such emission is beyond our own technology, and possibly (plot reasons) beyond our knowledge of physics. So if the ETs know more than us, they might also have ways to stop our best attacks that we can't imagine, which is a "no by science" way to answer this question.
PS: your proposed reasons of "humans fail" are all false. A kinetic impactor really does better than a nuke at this delta-V; building a rocket in time is *now* decently easy, just ask kindly off SpaceX to launch a Super Heavy; and other reasons do not apply if the weapon is purely kinetic.
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Your best bet is to rely on the "can't be built fast enough" side of things. There are only two countries that can launch an interplanetary payload on six months' notice: the United States, and China. The only other countries with more than two successful launches in 2023 are India, which doesn't have a heavy-lift vehicle that can launch on short notice, and Russia, which hasn't successfully operated a spacecraft outside low Earth orbit since 1988.
This isn't an absolute guarantee, but expecting two countries to be sensible is far more reasonable than expecting a dozen or more.
[Answer]
**Can We hit it? Yes.**
There's a multitude of ways such an object *could* be hit. Let's go through your points:
* 4 ms response time - Easy with modern electronics, Next.
* Nothing to fit the role of holepuncher - I'll come back to this.
* Can't be built fast enough - Humans can build stuff *exceptionally quickly* if sufficiently motivated. I'm reminded of the BunkerBuster bombs made in 28 days for the Gulf War or taking 42 days (eventually) to build a liberty ship in WW2
* Can't be aimed/Timed - This is either easy if they aren't able to jink/change direction easily *or* a deal breaker if they can.
* Never get through the Hull to cause damage - I'll also come back to this.
Right - you'll notice a bunch of things where I said I'd come back to it - well now it's time for a....
**Frame Challenge!**
So, you have stated your goal to have the Governments with this sort of capability to not attack it. Realistically - that means the US, UK/Europe, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Maybe North Korea.
You have an unknown object of unknown capability *and no information about it* - How does your government *know* it's armored? How do they *know* it's radiation shielded? How do they *know* it has no short-range detection and point defense systems?
Consider the [Cargo Cults of the Pacific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) - how they would build mock-ups of ships/aircraft in hopes to invite the others back, without any appreciation of what those things are and their capabilities.
Without any information - a Government (let's say North Korea for example) is likely to go 'Sod it, let's try it!' - which, as you say, breaks your narrative.
In order to know the things which would make any current military intervention pointless, you have to know a thing or two about what you are facing. If I know the capabilities of an MBT and all I've got is a pistol - I know that I'm not going to pick a fight with it.
**My Suggestion then** would be to have a partially damaged scout craft from said Alien Civilization crash to earth - damaged enough that the occupant wasn't able to avoid crashing to earth, but not so much that it can't be reverse engineered/understood - from there make it so that the capabilities of such an intervention are known to not be sufficient.
You could even weave this into your narrative as to why the ships are arriving (could be an innocent rescue party... or an invasion force) - but you use the small scout vehicle as the basis to assess the Alien Tech so that the Governments know that our current weaponry is insufficient to damage it.
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> Realistically at least one country will want to destroy them, which
> breaks the plot, so I need to know if they're told "no" by science or
> "no" for other reasons.
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Tom already talked about this, so ill keep it brief. Even the simplest Interstellar spacecraft, such as [Project Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)), carry a stockpile of nuclear warheads with them that could easily kill billions. Any even just slightly more advanced propulsion system, let alone the really good stuff like Antimatter, would be able to do an untold amount of damage by simply being turned on. So this is the first reason why you dont attack the Aliens, their drive can probably end the Human race in an afternoon.
Second, there is the first rule of Warfare. Never assume you know all the cards of the deck. Isnt it convenient that there is just a small number moderately big spacecraft moving at a very low velocity ? Perhaps we do not know the full extend of the Aliens might. Perhaps, this is a decoy, or a Test, and the moment we launch our missiles a god damn moon sized spacecraft leaves Warp and obliterates the planet. You dont know what the Aliens war capabilities are, and you would be very wise to not try and find out.
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> For reasons, assume the aliens don't have any sensible point defence
> weapons of note at this scale, or even vaguely good radar. Our
> existing stealth is more than good enough to stop them from knowing
> the danger until too late.
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I would really like to know these reasons. Because there are non. You dont cross interstellar space without a radar system capable of detecting sand grain sized elements several light seconds out. Similarly, there is no stealth in space. And there is absolutly no reason to believe any Human stealth would be able to avoid detection by literal alien tech. Also, you mention todays tech. We dont have any stealth platforms for space, let alone nuclear tipped missiles capable of reaching mars in less than a couple of months.
[Answer]
# Nukes are actually more destructive in space than on Earth
(As an aside, first I'd like to tell you that a nuclear fission reaction typically is over within 100 "shakes," a shake being 10^-8 seconds, so that means the whole fission reaction takes about a microsecond. A few milliseconds is plenty of time for that.) Now, onto my main subject...
Earth has an atmosphere, which absorbs a great deal of the energy from a nuclear explosion, reducing the damage dealt. In space, you get hit harder because you don't have the atmosphere to shield you.
What you get hit with is neutrons and photons instead of an air blast, but when the neutrons and photons hit your ship, it goes boom. Specifically, the radiation penetrates into the hull of your ship and heats up the metal to the vaporization point instantaneously. It also instantly melts a lot of the metal that's too deep to actually vaporize. This vaporized and melted metal rapidly expands, causing a shockwave, which spreads through the ship, smashing things. It's as if someone had strapped a large amount of dynamite to every square cm of your hull on the side facing the nuke, and detonated it at once.
In addition to the shockwave, the vaporized metal explodes away from the ship, which causes a very sudden and powerful reaction force on the whole ship, like a rocket engine - indeed, like Project Orion. This extremely sudden acceleration breaks things all over the ship, if you don't have a huge shock absorber facing the nuke like Project Orion does.
Since you thought space nukes were less dangerous and linked Project Orion in support of that, I should tell you why the nukes used in Project Orion wouldn't destroy that ship, and it's not because the ship's in space. First note that Project Orion would use the nukes to climb out of the atmosphere *as well as* in space. Second, nukes are powerful, but a few meters of steel goes a long way to withstanding them. Project Orion has a huge pusher plate that protects the back of the ship. The other sides of Project Orion aren't so protected. Third, Project Orion has an enormous shock absorber between the pusher plate and the main ship, without which the extremely sudden acceleration would be breaking the ship even with the pusher plate. The shock absorber is a large fraction of the length of the ship. And fourth, the nukes used in Project Orion would be small fission devices, not the huge thermonuclear weapons I'll be talking about.
The DNA damage from radiation is also much, much more dangerous in space than on Earth. If Earth didn't have an atmosphere or the ground/buildings to protect us, the 50 MT [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) would have irradiated every single human being on the planet; a person 12,742 km away, on the exact opposite side of the planet, would have received around 1 Sv dose, which is possibly fatal. That's what happens in space.
So I'd like to frame challenge by considering what happens if a big nuke does *not* penetrate, but just explodes nearby. It could easily destroy the alien ship or kill everyone inside if their ship is not sufficiently prepared for such an event.
We're serious about trying to stop those aliens and they do have a really big ship, so let's imagine hitting them with a "Big Nuke" detonated 1 km off to the side. The weapon we'll be thinking about is a 100 MT (4.184 \* 10^17 J) thermonuclear weapon - the original design yield of the Tsar Bomba, if the Uranium tamper had been included. I like this because 100 MT is a nice round number. I'll go ahead and show you some example calculations so you can adapt them to your setting and decide whether the aliens can survive it.
First, the explosion damage. The ship will receive 3.3e6 J/cm^2 of neutron and gamma radiation. Converting, this is about 800 grams of TNT per cm^2, or 8000 kg TNT per m^2.
You indicated the ship is 431m long; let's suppose the hull area exposed to the blast is 400m \* 200m = 80000m^2. This would be the equivalent of **640,000,000 kg TNT strapped directly to the hull** and set off.
Could the alien ship survive this? This is more of a judgment call, but it's unlikely.
I've done a calculation indicating that if the ship has a steel hull, the top 10 cm of steel will turn into vapor, and the atoms in the vapor will have an average speed of 8000 m/s. All those atoms will practically instantly go flying off to the side, and from conservation of momentum, the rest of the ship is punched the opposite way. If (and we're being very generous here) the rest of the ship masses 100x more than the vaporized 10 cm of steel, that means the rest of the ship would instantly be moving at 80 m/s after the punch. Any humanlike aliens inside the ship would be killed by that, when the wall hits them at 80 m/s. Crash couches wouldn't save them. Plenty of equipment would be destroyed by the sudden g-forces as well. The hull, also, would cave in and cause massive damage, even if it was meters thick.
One possibly useful comparison is the [Mark 48 torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo). This torpedo has a 293 kg warhead, which it detonates *under* the enemy ship to break its keel. In other words, just like our nuke, the Mark 48 doesn't penetrate, which is why it is a possibly useful comparison. Clearly, the Mark 48 delivers many orders of magnitude less energy per m^2 than our Big Nuke does.
Another thing to consider is, how much of the hull would directly melt or vaporize because of the heat from the radiation? It's a bit of an involved calculation; we may use the number that [an inch of steel](https://modernsurvivalblog.com/nuclear/nuclear-radiation-shielding-protection/) reduces radiation intensity by about 50%. The heat of melting for steel I take to be 700 kJ/kg, and the density of steel is 0.007859 kg/cm^3. The formula I came up with is: 0.272893 e^(-0.272893 x) \* (energy deposited in units of J/cm^2) / .007859 = 700000, with x being the depth of steel hull in cm that will immediately melt. For our case x = 19 cm. So steel plating will be directly vaporizing or melting to a depth of 19 cm. Of course, most of the damage will probably be from the shockwave and the whole-hull stresses, not the direct melting.
Next, we can check how much radiation shielding the aliens would need to avoid dying from irradiation. Based on slide 15 of [this slideshow](https://www.icrp.org/docs/Hans%20Menzel%20Doses%20From%20Radiation%20Exposure.pdf), neutrons are far more damaging to the human body than photons for a given energy, so we can ignore the photons for a ballpark estimate. The neutrons that would deal most of the damage would be high-energy 14 MeV ones from the fusion reaction. These would be a fraction of the yield, certainly less than half (half of the Tsar Bomba yield is from fission). Let's say 10% of the yield is 14 MeV neutrons. Based on the chart from the slideshow, 14 MeV neutrons deliver about 450 pSv cm^2 of radiation dose to the human body. This means, if you are hit with N neutrons over an area of A square cm, you will receive 450 \* N / A picoSieverts of radiation dose. If you get more than 1 Sv dose, you may die.
This radiation dose is in terms of number of neutrons, so we need to convert to Joules. Each neutron has 14 MeV = 2.243 \* 10^(-12) J of energy, so the dose per J/cm^2 is 450 pSv cm^2 / (2.243 \* 10^(-12) J) = 200 Sv cm^2 / J. Multiply this by 3.3e6 J/cm^2 \* 10% and we find that an unshielded alien would receive 6.6e7 Sv.
To bring this down to a safe level we need to add radiation shielding. From [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb#Effects), 30 cm of concrete will reduce the radiation damage by 90%. The alien would need 8 layers of that - **240cm of concrete** between the alien and the blast - to bring the dose below 1 Sv. It would be more efficient to use lead. From [this blog](https://modernsurvivalblog.com/nuclear/nuclear-radiation-shielding-protection/), the radiation halving thickness of lead is 0.4 inches, or about 1 cm. The alien would need about **26 cm of lead**.
You can decide what this all means for you. Really the hardest part would be getting your nuke within 1 km of the enemy. Why wouldn't they avoid it? There are ways you can make the nuke stealthy - you can put it on a ballistic trajectory (no thrusting) with angular radar-reflective surfaces, like a stealth bomber. But this will only work if the enemy also travels in a predictable trajectory without thrusting at all, which they wouldn't do if they expect any trouble.
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[Question]
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Suppose there is a species similar to humans, but with the difference that their eyes change color based on their emotions. For example they would turn *red* to signal *anger*, *pink* for *lust*, *rust* for *rage*, *black* for *gloom* and so on.
In this type of setup: Is it possible to lie undetected?
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What you've got there is a slightly more refined and biologically pre-installed version of a polygraph machine, and it has all the problems inherent in a polygraph. There's a silly number of people who have taken a polygraph test and gotten a false positive or false negative.
The thing you're measuring is essentially the emotional response to the question and the response... Given the question "did you kill this person?" the subject may exhibit:
* fear of being discovered, fear of being unjustly blamed;
* anger at what provoked the murder, anger at being accused;
* happiness for having killed someone, happiness that someone you hated is gone
* no emotions because they're a sociopath, no emotions because they're innocent and just don't care about the person.
Emotions are an unreliable indication of guilt, far too easy to control and far too easy to misattribute.
Edit: Something I forgot to mention...
The biggest fault of the idea of a lie detector is the same as the biggest fault of human witnesses in the first place. Specifically, even a perfectly accurate lie detector can only tell if the person saying what they believe the truth to be.
A person who has sufficient belief in the truth of their statement will pass any lie test you can dream up, regardless of how wrong their statement is, simply because it is true according to their version of reality. After all, everyone has their own version of reality based on how their experiences and how they processed those experiences Subjective reality is the source of many faulty eye witness reports. A person's emotion response is to what they believe not to what is true.
You cannot feel guilt for something you believe you aren't responsible for. You can't feel grief for something you believe you haven't lost. For the human mind, truth is subjective and reality always loses to belief.
You could make a religion out of that...
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Well, I can think of a fairly big loophole. Their eyes may show their emotions, but there's nothing stopping them from **lying about *why* they're feeling that particular emotion**. It's a specific circumstance, but it's still a circumstance in which they can lie.
Consider a detective investigating a murder. He's talking to one of the victim's friends and notices that his eyes keep flashing rust-red for anger. He inquires about it, and the man explains that he's angry with the police for having not found the murderer yet. In reality, he *is* the murderer - he and the victim had had a falling-out. But for now at least, he's covered that up with a perfectly plausible lie.
[Answer]
### You can hide your eyes
In such a culture it might be normal to hide your eyes so that you would normally not show your intentions to others. If this is the norm than the eyes are no problem in normal everyday conversations. It would be difficult if you knew someone really well and wouldn't hide your eyes normally. That would be extremely suspicious and it wouldn't help if you were for example interrogated and forced to show your eyes.
### People in such a culture would adapt and learn to better control their emotions in certain situations
Lying is one of those situations that quite often arise. The little examples are "Have a good day!" when you really want to say "Just leave already!". Just like people in our society learn to control their voice and keep their emotions enough under control to not necessarily show their intentions these people would learn how to keep the signals they are sending with their eyes to a minimum.
It would take a lot of time and effort, but the skilled people could tell eyes and just keep at a relaxed, peaceful green - because they learned to think about something else while telling their lie. It would be difficult and probably not possible for a lot of normal people, but that's not too different from our society where some people are naturally good at lying, some people are exceptionally good at learning to lie systematically and some people can be read like an open book.
It's just one more signal that shows that you are lying - like little tics where you touch your necklace or wrist watch, twitch your eyes, look to the upper left corner of your eye, dart your eyes around, start sweating more, turn away slightly, ...
[Answer]
Telling a lie is not an emotion. Your response and feelings about telling the lie, however, are.
If you are able to lie without getting emotionally involved or conflicted, then yes, the lie can go undetected by any emotional detection system.
Your mind/body first has to detect that it is a lie, then it has to react to your telling a lie, then it has to apply an emotional tag to it. If you have learned not to get emotional about lieing (some people can) so it becomes routine, then there is no emotional component. For instance, you have to believe that lieing is wrong, in order to generate a negative emotional response.
However, there is a difference in the brain function between telling a lie and telling the truth. With a lie, the brain has to CREATE the response. When telling the truth, the mind RETRIEVES the memory. Different pathways.
In a 'yes' or 'no' answer, the body first compares the two (question and memory recall) and makes a sub-conscious decision. This generates a tag, which then is translated into your answer. It is normally an internal dissonant result that creates the emotional response in humans, when their response does not match the result of the comparison. That is, your mind first determines (behind the scenes) if the two are the same or different, and then in a separate process it generates the outward verbal response. The mind will know if they are dissonant or not. So if your detection system works on this dissonance, and not just emotion, then yes it can detect a lie.
[Answer]
## Yes if the person is overwhelmed by emotion
So in addition to the answers previously mentioned if the person intentionally brought to mind emotions.
So if I were saying I am not attracted to X and held in my mind someone who I was not attracted to I would not be feeling an emotion so the person reading my eyes might be fooled.
This is not so different from reading micro expressions on the faces of real people ( <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/deception/200904/micro-expressions-and-good-liar> ) . There are techniques that are useful in decieving other people and techniuqes useful in reading past the techniques that people use. Your question adds another factor and if this is a rare lone case people questioning would not be trained the read the eyes.
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One aspect of coloring that isn't mentioned in other answers is the ability to discern the correct color.
You can change the appearance of a color by changing the color of surrounding or adjacent colors. The link below is a small sample of optical illusions that can change the perceived color of an object.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/27/12-fascinating-optical-illusions-show-how-color-can-trick-the-eye/?utm_term=.e1022fb65ed1>
There are many other illusions to be Googled that show more than just a black/grey/white color illusion like many are on the linked page, so it's not just those colors involved.
Also, men and women tend to see colors differently.
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> <https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/>
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Men also have a higher possibility of being color blind.
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> Men are much more likely to be colorblind than women because the genes responsible for the most common, inherited color blindness are on the X chromosome.
> <https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about>
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On a less scientific side of things, my mom (graphic designer and general artist) will tell me about 30 shades of red by name, while I (programmer and non-artist) will see about 15 shades of red and call them all red. So that tells me that you can be trained to determine the shades of colors, given your eyes are up to the challenge (non-colorblind).
Back to objective matters, colors on different media as well as different lighting can change the color of something. When I do image editing, an image might appear green on one of my monitors, but be white on another monitor. Something that looks white outside at noon might look yellow indoors under fluorescent lighting.
<https://superuser.com/questions/127533/colors-differ-in-the-dual-monitor>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature>
Besides what I've mentioned, there's a whole range of color representations that can cause you problems when discerning colors, and they all boil down to color space:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space>
Colors are great, but in my experience in trying to use colors, don't try to name them or nail them down to "one thing." (Is that rust or burnt sienna? (It's f'n *red*!)) That only leads to arguments, headaches, and exasperation. ;-)
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Since it's something I've done a fair amount of, I immediately thought of [acting](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/how-actors-create-emotions-a-problematic-psychology/284291/) (emphasis mine):
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> Goldstein looks at three categories—pretense, lying, and acting—as they fit into a trio of cognitive parameters. First, what is being presented perceptually and if it is actually happening or is just pretend; second, what behavior is being shown and whether that behavior is a cue to reality; and finally, **whether the exhibited behavior is intended to fool the audience**. On the first parameter, Goldstein says, all three categories are in agreement. In the cases of pretense, lying, and acting, “what is being presented perceptually, what we’re seeing, is not real.”
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particularly [modern techniques of it](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/stanislavsky_c.html):
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> To reach this "believable truth", Stanislavsky first employed methods such as "emotional memory." To prepare for a role that involves fear, the actor must **remember something frightening, and attempt to act the part in the emotional space** of that fear they once felt. Stanislavsky believed that an actor needed to take his or her own personality onto the stage when they began to play a character. This was a clear break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor's job was to become the character and leave their own emotions behind. Later Stanislavsky concerned himself with the creation of physical entries into these emotional states, believing that **the repetition of certain acts and exercises could bridge the gap between life on and off the stage**.
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as well as [therapeutic techniques of psychology](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/use-your-mind-change-your-brain/201106/don-t-believe-everything-you-think-or-feel):
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> . . . we often assume that whatever we think or feel must be true simply because we thought or felt it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as Sarah learned. In many cases, we are actually looking at life through the lens of deceptive brain messages [and] seeing our circumstances, other people or ourselves from a distorted and inaccurate viewpoint. It's only **when we are able to identify and dismiss the faulty logic of deceptive brain messages and believe in ourselves that we begin to break free and change our behaviors** so that they align with our true goals and values in life.
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bearing in mind that we are positing a person whose actual intention ("true goal") is to deceive, and that there is nothing inherently preventing the aforementioned techniques from being put to that purpose:
someone trained to maintain confidence in their feelings, resist emotional manipulation, and 'summon' emotional memories of their choice can lie effectively, (barring flawless mind-reading - and eye-color change based on present emotion isn't flawless).
[Answer]
Relatively simple answer:
# Drugs
Probably in the form of either and eyedrop to change the color temporarily, or a hormone that causes / trickes eyes to think that the being is feeling a particular emotion.
This option comes in a veriety of flavors for your world:
* These drugs can be advanced, or they could come from a plant.
* They can have side effects
* There can be different qualities and types
* They could be made illegal (and in turn create a black market)
* A person cought with the drug would probably be considered untrustworthy, and would lose his reputation
* Other people can be framed, causing them to lose their trust and reputation
And, as @cobaltduck suggested in the comments, colored eye contacts would work as well. Beings found with them would also be no longer trusted, can be illegal, and have different qualities, etc.
[Answer]
# Consider the point of words, not whether they are technically lies
Being "caught" on a lie because your emotions are known doesn't take out the effect of words.
You're angry at your wife because she embarrassed you at a party.
"That dress makes you look fat as a hog, but I guess you already knew that because your diet clearly isn't working."
You're lustful for your wife and you're trying to get the foreplay going.
"You look so sexy in that dress, and all the other men at the party were checking you out."
In either of those situations, from the point of view of the other person, would it matter if those statements were technically lies?
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# Consider that humans already give away their emotions, and tell lies
Humans already display their emotions through a number of tells, such as facial expressions and body language and vocal pitch. Most of the time, and for most people, people are not trained to exert great control over these tells, and so our emotions are not especially challenging to read if one cares enough.
And yet telling lies is still commonplace.
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> Can a person lie if his eyes tell his emotions?
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Yes.
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# Consider that human behavior has several causes and motivations
For example, I'm angry at someone at work and want them to feel bad about something, so I tell a lie about some of the work they did.
"Your proposal was complete garbage. I know why you failed college."
"Why are you so angry?"
"Because my neighbor's teenage kid was speeding through the street and killed my dog this morning."
It's obvious that the original speaker is angry because of eye color, but it's not obvious which one of those statements are lies.
* Was the proposal actually garbage?
* Or was the presentation of the proposal garbage?
* Or is the underlying idea of the proposal garbage, but all other parts were pretty solid?
* Did the other person actually fail college?
* Did the other person actually go to college?
* Did the other person earn a bachelor's degree, but drop out of his master's program?
* Did the other person fail a class at college, but actually earn a PhD in some topic?
* Did that person's dog actually die that morning, or last week?
* Was it actually the neighbor's teenager, or their adult child?
* Was it actually speeding, or did the dog run in front of them while they were driving the speed limit and looking down to adjust their phone because they just got a text message about their grandma in the hospital?
Any combination of those options could be lies or not lies, and yet it wouldn't change the emotion or effect of the speaker's words.
[Answer]
Assuming there was an accurate way to assess lying with the color of the eyes indicating it is a lie.
Well, is it a lie if it's technically truthful?
Consider the following scene from the Comic Book story "52" from DC:
During the course of the series, Superman has not been active because he lost his powers just prior to the story's beginning. A new hero named Supernova has appeared in Metropolis and Clark Kent landed the first interview with him. Lex Luthor thinks that Superman is merely hiding and waiting for Luthor to return to his old tricks, so he has Clark Kent kidnapped and drugged with a potent truth serum (and yes, it works). The the following (paraphrase) conversation occurs:
Lex: Who is Supernova?
Clark: I don't know.
Lex: Did he seem familiar?
Clark: A little, but I can't place him.
Lex: He reminds you of Superman, doesn't he.
Clark: *Laughs in Lex's face* I could tell from our meeting that Supernova is definitely not Superman.
Now, keep in mind, Clark doesn't lie at any of these points... but he doesn't clarify anything about the lie. Lex Luthor wants to know who Supernova is, but Clark doesn't know, though does admit he seems familiar (I'd spoil the story by revealing, but Clark met Supernova's unmasked personality a while back. Luthor would also know that since he covered some heroes and superman stories, a flying caped man in a mask could seem familiar to Clark, given his work.). Lex then asks if Supernova reminds Clark of Superman.
Now, for the uninitiated, Clark Kent has some very good reasons as to why he knows that Supernova is not Superman, but doesn't want to tell Luthor. So his response is given in a truthful statement. Clark can truthfully say that having met, he could tell that Superman is not Supernova. After all, he's gotten to know Superman quite well over the years of covering him.
So have your character tell the truth... but in a way that is deceitful.
Take another famous moment in real life history: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
Legally that is a true statement... under Washington D.C. laws at the time what was alleged to have occur between the speaker and "that Woman" was not part of the legal definition of "sexual relations". The speaker would have known this, but was hoping that the people hearing him say that would would consider the specific allegation under the common term "sexual relations".
As a final note, when writing this character, the proper frame of mine is reflected in this wonderful conversation from Deep Space 9:
Brashir: But which of the stories [about Garak's banishment] is true.
Garak: My dear doctor, they're all true.
Brashir: Even the lies?
Garak: *Especially* the lies.
[Answer]
Since posting my last answer, I have come across further research which is perhaps germane to the answer. The OP has not really clarified if we are to look at this as an alien emotional response, or human emotional response. If it is an alien emotional response, then the question is not answerable without further knowledge of the alien emotional response.
If it is with respect to human functioning then the following is pertinent. I referenced it in a comment, but I am now referencing it in an answer. Humans do not change their eye color, but they do detectably change their pupil size. See [Eye-Opener: Why Do Pupils Dilate in Response to Emotional States?](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eye-opener-why-do-pupils-dialate/)
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> "Pupil dilation can betray an individual's decision before it is openly revealed," concluded a 2010 study led by Wolfgang Einhäuser-Treyer, a neurophysicist at Philipps University Marburg in Germany. Participants were told to press a button at any point during a 10-second interval, and their pupil sizes correlated with the timing of their decisions. Dilation began about one second before they pressed the button and peaked one to two seconds after.
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> For more than a century scientists have known that our eyes' pupils respond to more than changes in light. They also betray mental and emotional commotion. In fact, pupil dilation correlates with arousal so consistently that researchers use pupil size, or pupillometry, to investigate a wide range of psychological phenomena. And they do this without knowing exactly why our eyes behave this way.
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So it is not far-fetched to posit that eye color could also change with emotional changes. The evolutionary purpose of it would be hard to posit, however the purpose for a great deal of evolutionary changes in earth-bound species is hard to fathom.
I found the notion developed in this article that pupil size reliably, predictably, and autonomically changes with cognitive effort particularly intriguing. Lying takes greater cognitive involvement than telling the truth. The lie has to be fabricated. So add this factor to eye color change with emotion, and the resulting effects could be interesting.
But I also mentioned in a comment elsewhere herein, that the cultural zeitgeist would also have to be considered. In Western justice systems, we superficially believe in the basic tenant of law that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Under such conditions, it is difficult to prove guilt in a lie detector test. The bias is towards innocence. It is thus harder to prove someone is lying.
But in a culture that believes in guilty unless proven innocent, once charged, the burden of proof rests with the accused. They would have to prove they were NOT lying. Under such a system, any sign of lying would be sufficient proof of lying. Sort of like the inquisitions of old. So any world built on such species would have to clarify the cultural and legal mores around such a trait.
COULD it be used is a very different question than WOULD it be used and generally be accepted as proof of lying. This would be a very interesting plot line to develop.
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[Question]
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A shaman society secret to normal humans, in the late 2000s era where phones and the internet exist: why and how would they still put to work their black feathery friends?
They were crucial before all these fancy shmancy phones and the world wide web stuff came around, but now a Samsung flip phone can do their jobs faster.
What jobs would the shamans give them instead?
Notes:
* most normal people don't really believe magic exists, so most of them don't really try to uncover the truth.
* there exist evil shaman factions that may try to steal that information through using "cyberphantoms", spirit familiars that can go steal info on the web; or try to capture the crows themselves.
* these sapient crows look almost identical to regular crows.
[Answer]
Haven't you seen the LoTR? What uses has Saruman for the flock of crows? They are used to spy and refer to their Lord.
You can do the same. A smartphone, no matter which generation it is, still requires a person behind it to be operated.
A sapient crow instead can scout and survey autonomously, or also following pre assigned rules, priorities and rules of engagement.
Basically an AI powered drone, with feathers.
[Answer]
Crows can do many things that phones can't.
For instance, they can deliver many things besides messages. Small things, to be sure, but quite possibly of magic significance.
They can wriggle into places that are far too small for a human, and easily fly to places that require magic for humans.
They can operate automatously as guards, or spies, or simply watching over experiments.
They have probably done these things all along and regard phones as a way to ease their burdens.
[Answer]
Messages sent via phones and internet are sent via multiple parties: the local providers at the end, and one or more backbone providers. Each of them can be compromised, either because they are hacked, or they are forced to by law enforcement. Which means, your messages may not be secret and even if you encrypt them, you will still be leaving trails. Worse, you don't know whether the message you did send was inspected, or even tampered with. Furthermore, a state level actor can just shut off the phone network and/or the internet.
Sentient crows are much harder to intercept, and it's even harder to intercept such a crow, and extract the message it is relaying without the crow knowing this has happened.
Besides, sentient crows are just cool, and shamans like cool stuff.
[Answer]
**Feathernet**
You've probably encountered the terminologies of "email" or "snailmail" when it comes to short text-based messages. However, there is also an informal/jocular terminology for when you want to send larger data packages: you can send data via "internet" or "[sneakernet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet)".
Basically, "sneakernet" is when you decide to put files on some USB thumb drives or portable hard drives or something, lace up your sneakers/shoes, and physically walk/deliver the drives to their destination. Sometimes it occurs because the cost of a plane ticket for "a guy with a backpack full of HDDs" cross-country is less expensive than transferring terabytes upon terabytes of data over the internet, other times it occurs because walking a 64GB thumb drive down the hall is faster than transferring the files over the office's old ethernet, or other times it is simply easier to verify "chain-of-custody" for high-security applications when your data is literally escorted from Point-A to Point-B.
The fact that the last few generations of shamans are digital-natives does not simply mean that everything gets done online all the time. Just like 90s kids traded burned CDs (because downloading entire albums via 56k could take literal days) 90s shams probably traded thumb drives - with the added speed and convenience of being able to just send a crow to fly across town instead of finding your friend at school the next day.
[Answer]
**Normal people might not search for the truth... but governments do**
Governments have a nasty habit of [not liking ignorance](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/11/07/how-did-law-enforcement-break-tor/?sh=7a7dd62c4bf7) about the people within their borders. Oh, they may ignore those people completely... but they try not to misunderstand them. And the government would be delighted to know all about sapient crows because they'd use them the same way your society uses them.
*To keep things secret.*
Absolutely, modern smartphones and the internet are great ways to communicate... if you enjoy everything exposed to the government at best... and exposed to the public at worst. Members of your society may absolutely love using voice, text, email, messaging, and social media. But it's an *absolute taboo* to talk about the crows.
*And I'd bet if there's one thing that's taboo, there are others. In your society, there may be all kinds of things the leaders don't want the government or the public to find out about.*
So the crows are still used, just not as often. When the inner workings of the society (its faith, rituals, ceremonies, meeting, dogma, etc.) are discussed — out come the crows. And wouldn't you know it, they're also used to discuss things like (\*ahem\*) tax evasion, welfare milking, the current location of the proverbial Federales (and any other government or organizational representative the society *doesn't want to deal with.*)
Those crows are mighty useful.
[Answer]
Crows actually think for themselves and make value judgments, and remember people and situations, based on research and my own experience interacting with them in the back yard. They solve puzzles.
So crows are more like autonomous contractors than even the most "intelligent" gadgets, which continuously remind us that they are semi-mindless parrots under that facade of "artificial intelligence".
They also teach knowledge to each other, so they could pass information in the open if they used a secret language with key words. How would we know?
Gadgets, or even a one-time pad (if you get hold of both pads) can be hacked, but a thinking message courier can lie, evade capture, or trick observers into thinking they're just some dumb crow.
[Answer]
They could still be used for communication. The internet and cellphones are vulnerable for critical communications because they're out of the shamans control. Plenty of criminals have been caught by phone tapping even in the old dial up days.
[Answer]
Just like Mary C I am convinced crows can think for themselves. That makes them more than instruments of deception.
They can be ambassadors, but without the need for diplomatic passports and official recognition. They can observe and understand what they see. They can relay messages and explain the intention behind them. They can negotiate on behalf of others.
Maybe the crows can even be thought of as being a network comparable to what the [Pugwash Conferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugwash_Conferences_on_Science_and_World_Affairs) tried to be during the Cold War: Enablers of off-the-record contacts and behind-the-scenes influencers for peace and stability.
[Answer]
## Sentimentality
The modern phone and internet communication has taken over the post's former job of sending out communication between people.
But for personal touches, letters are still sent out to those who we care about.
And some still prefer to communicate by written letters too - despite it being much slower, they find some comfort in holding a written letter in their hands.
And much in the same way, especially for a shaman, I imagine sending messages by crow may just feel 'right', and in keeping with a time-honored tradition of messaging by crow.
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1. Shamans, being shamans, have very little tolerance or indeed knowledge of modern technology. As anyone who tried to teach his/her/their aged mother to use the internet can surely confirm. They stick to the crows because, well, phones are difficult and complicated. Modern phones even more so.
2. [An adult crow can lift maybe 0.15kg](https://www.birdsadvice.com/how-much-weight-can-a-crow-carry/), which (barely) makes her able to carry a (very light) hand grenade. (OTOH, ravens can carry significantly more weight). Consequently, some of the crows with a compatible psychological profile (think special forces or assassin guild) are quite successfully used in assassinations or industrial sabotage. Though the job is slowly being taken by drones, but drones are noisy, not autonomous, people know about drones and might become suspicious seeing a drone above, but a crow is something completely innocent...
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**Magical Information**
The information being transmitted between the Shamen is somehow inherently magical in itself - it goes beyond the sounds of a phone call, text, or even pictures of the text. Maybe it carries an "aura" (for want of a better word) which is vital to the message, whether they use magical ink or normal ink in some kind of magical way.
But there doesn't exist a protocol on the phone network to carry it.
And seeing as nobody knows about them, and the Shamen aren't techies themselves, it's unlikely one will be invented any time soon. Or perhaps it simply isn't something that can be digitised into bits and bytes.
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# They can go further than the net
In norse myth crows can travel the nine realms. In some indigenous north american belief systems, crows make the bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead.
So unless you got a VPN that tunnels you to Hellheim, or until you've got a physical link to a router in the spirit world, you've got to use the services of a crow.
# They are actually intelligent
Ask ChatGPT about your enemies weaknesses and it will deflect the conversation into non-violence. Hack it by asking in some unusual language (seriously!) and the AI will hallucinate some useless, random garbage text.
Ask a crow the same question though, and the critter will give you all the info you need and more. All the little guy wants in exchange is dibs on the eyeballs.
# They are metal af
Gravitas is always half the battle. Who do you think has more presence and authority: a pimply faced nerd, wearing a shirt that says "bazinga" and holding the latest Android fondle-slab; or a witch or warlock holding a gnarled staff, with a cape made of black feathers and a scavenger bird perched on their shoulder?
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The crows petition for the reintroduction of the public hangings and cagings - aka ritual food offering of humans to the crow community. They are also currently suffering a much worser plague then humanity and thus would communicate similar to a medieval community with a outbreak.
Finally they would demand weapons to murder all cats and there owners. The sneaky enemies and there human supporters have to go. The crows would like to trade for poisoned throw darts goods and services.
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[Question]
[
I just want to know if there is any purpose to having a water navy in a sci fi universe where you don’t really worry about countries on your own planet attacking you, since you’re the only one there.
I just realized that perhaps I should talk about technology, as this could help. The technology is not as advanced as seen in other sci fi series. So, for weapons, all military in the small patch of stars with all these civilizations use the standard array of military planes. Fighters, bombers, attack, cargo, all that. They also have helicopters or something similar, like for example this neighboring alien civilization which our Union of stars tends to have conflict with use ornithopters. Most planes have spaceflight capabilities, and helis can be sent down with the help of cargo aircraft. Some planets use airships, which are kept on the planet. There’s always an army, which can be sent down in large spacecraft. The army uses standard guns, although there are railgun and coilgun artillery and large laser weapons used to cut aircraft apart while they are flying. They use tanks with normal gunpowder fired shells, as well as shell firing artillery. There’s a specialized marine force as well which use high tech multi environment suits. There’s a space force for planetary Defence. Space combat would work like in the expanse, with basically the same weapons. Gatling guns, missiles, railguns, as well as coilguns which aren’t seen in the expanse I don’t think. As for what technology I would think that these naval ships would have. Well, ciws Gatling guns, small cannons, ship to ship missiles, torpedos, aircraft, if it is an aircraft carrier, as well as railguns, coilguns, and lasers. I also imagine there would be stealth submarines.
[Answer]
Depends on the exact details of your planets, but some uses for a Navy/Coast Guard:
* deal with pirates
* deal with smugglers (probably of contraband, not for tariff evasion)
* other law enforcement on the high seas
* rescue operations at sea
[Answer]
## Subs
There might (I stress might) be a role for submarines as part of a planetary defense/security system. You could hide key facilities deep underwater and use subs for crew transfers and re-supply etc.
If your government is dictatorial having a squadron of nuclear missile armed subs available on any planet with large oceans would also be a deterrent against rebellion.
You could just as easily put these in orbit either as satellites or on a station etc but given time the rebels can always locate these since orbits are by default predicable. Also people would presumably travel up to and down from orbit on a regular basis and its possible (although perhaps unlikely) that rebels could take control of orbital weapons and disable them. They can't do that with subs if they have a human crews.
Also most of the subs would be at sea at any one time. This means even though the rebels would know they existed and could perhaps attack/infiltrate their home ports (secure island bases would make this harder) 7 out of 10 subs or more would always be out of reach. Albeit no system is fool proof unless some tech exists that lets you track them is real time subs would be really hard to locate, not before they launched anyway.
Beyond that? As per the other answer all such planets, regardless of waht type of government they have might find a coast guard/air sea rescue service to be of value.
[Answer]
**Aircraft/Spaceship carriers**
An external surprise attack would obviously start from fixed defence facilities on land. Among them there would be also the airports to prevent a counter attack. Submersible Aircraft/Spaceship carriers would remain underwater constantly moving to avoid detection by spy drones end emerge when needed.
**Too much water**
Ground support on a planet almost completely covered by seas.
**Keep the local population under control**
A sea base fore that could hit anywhere on the planet from an unpredictable direction would discourage rebellions.
**Militarise the population**
Carry out police and civilian duties using a military force just to justify military spending and population control.
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Welcome aboard, @Epicgamermoment!
It sounds like you're not necessarily trying to rule the possibility of wet navies out?
It could be that you're *interested* in having a water navy on one (or some) of the planets within in your unified government. This is a pretty legit creative theme: water navies make for some very compelling storytelling and worldbuilding.
The answers so far are all looking to find reasons why or why not, and they have come up with some pretty good ones. But notice that those answers *are all dependent on features of your created world.* There's nothing about the existence of an interstellar government, as such, that either prevents or requires waterborne military capability on the individual worlds.
In general, I think you have several key worldbuilding features that might be considered:
* **The nature of interstellar travel.** You didn't say exactly how the interstellar civilization travels between star systems. The most common idea is to have starships; a less common fictional means of getting around is the "stargate" idea, in which long-distance matter transmission, at FTL speeds, is reliable and capable enough to knit your interstellar government together. Note that these two suggested technologies have very different implications: A gate does not automatically imply the arrival of large armed vessels in orbit, capable of providing overwhelming military presence. (Your gate might be stationary on the surface of a planet; or it might be quite small in aperture, suitable only for passage of individuals, or small cargo carriers.) And even if you are using starships, there are plenty of possible tweaks you can do with the ship technology. Your starships might be quite small, and/or expensive to operate. Your starships might be, for engineering reasons, too fragile to be combatants themselves. Etc.
* **What causes a need for military forces in the first place?** This is vaguely alluded to in your question: "you don’t really worry about countries on your own planet attacking you". Still, this is a big deal. Who *does* fight in your multistellar state? Why? What do they fight about? You specifically seem to doubt that there will be multiple "countries" on a given planet -- but why? How much political authority does the central power have? It could be reasonably weak, and still hold together. And then there's the question of whether a nation-state is the only entity capable of organized violence. @Ash raises this explicitly, and well, in their answer, but @Mary, @Mon, and @FluidCode all address the issue, at least implicitly. After all, would the Fremen in *Dune* be considered a "country"? :-)
* **What's the nature of military equipment?** The key advantages of water travel are that you don't have to build roads or rails, and that it's cheap to move very heavy things (as @Mary says in a comment above, "Economics rules"). So maybe water transport is an excellent option on at least some of the planets. How do they project power in your civilization? Big heavy missiles? Attack aircraft squadrons? Massive ray-gun emplacements, so big that they must be emplaced on solid land or on large seagoing platforms? Or... (going back to *Dune* again) knives and swords?
...Not trying to smother you here! More like, hoping to inspire you. **Worldbuilding is a whole lot of fun.** Speculative exploration of various aspects of the world you're creating can lead you down some very creative paths.
So, the general Worldbuilding answer to your question is, **If you want water navies you can have them.** It's your world to build.
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**The Empire is historically recent.**
Your planet is controlled by one government. It was not always so. 200 years ago your planet was a fractious group of quarrelling countries. Then the offworlders from the Empire showed up and summarily added the planet to the Empire.
Now there is putatively one government. There are still several different cultures and languages. Persons are still suspicious of the people that their great-granddaddies fought against. People still practice the old ways, just in case.
The Imperials are not dopes. It works for the Empire that constituent nations of a world remain suspicious of each other, relying on the threat of imperial intervention to keep peace. Also it is a source of pride to the families that they are still hereditary Sea Knights, now swearing alliegence to the Emperor instead of the old king.
Plus you never know when the Empire will quit sending governors and representatives and it will be back to the old ways. Best to stay ready.
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Non-state actors, read pirates and rebels, may be an issue at sea that warrants military action, necessitating a navy even on generally united worlds. In a multi-stellar civisation an argument can be made for the oceans and seabeds of inhabited worlds being heavily populated and exploited and it is possible that semi-independent entities (corporations and socially/economically/ideologically isolates) existing wholly on or under water may maintain naval style forces for self defense from other, similar, entities.
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Layered defense.
Most sci-fi pretents that an enemy can deal with the space-based assets like an orbital defense platform without the planet doing anything, then once the space-based assets are gone the planet is at the mercy of the ships above "because gravity well".
However many sci-fi has ludicrous power generation. A single kilometer long ship has a reactor of immense power, besides that escaping the gravity well is almost a non-issue. See for example Halo's Pelicans being able to reach space and orbital speeds without any rocket, or Star Trek and Star Wars making hovering a multi-ton ship in atmosphere a neglegible experience. Such technology also makes kinetic bombardment from space a non-issue to defend against. But that reactor is microscopic compared to electrical plants you can (and we do) build on a planet. Any logical planetary attack in such case would need to deal with planetary defenses and simultaneously with the space based assets. That means landing ground forces as well to try and shut down those planetary defenses.
Which is where a navy comes in. On a planet like earth and with the technology available, building military assets on the seafloor is a smart move. Even if kinetic bombardment is possible, the volume of water above the installations works as a shield and means you can focus on pressure-related protections.
A navy can then be used to provide surface and subsurface protection with the ability to move. Such ships can each carry their own power generation, and without the need for space-based living and FTL and other protections they can still provide a lot of firepower. This would be easier than on a land army, and its also harder for assaulting forces to land large multi-ton ships compared to a few mechanized infantry and tank groups.
Edit:
Imagine a large energy facility designed to float at 1km depth beneath the sea surface, with engines to slowly move it about. This facility has multiple tethers of kilometers length that provide power to those floating oil drill facilities. Only instead of oil drilling it houses a giant canon capable of firing beyond orbital targets. The facility and platforms can move in relation to each other and across any sea deep enough. This does:
* any bombardment on the sea facilities will fail unless you are very close, since you cannot predict their positions based on previous scans.
* any long-range bombardment on land-based military and civilian targets will be picked up and defused due to powerful planet-based and space-based listening stations. Lasers and plasma projectiles can be diffused or torn apart by magnetics and kinetic projectiles can get a tiny nudge from an explosion or even ablation and end up missing the planet by millions of kilometers. Assuming the setting does not allow shield generators to be places just off their path and deflect/absorb the projectiles in a succession of shieldwalls they have to pass, or that antigrav tech can interact long enough to stop them or similar solutions.
* any short-ranged bombardments means your system has already worked: your enemy is now close enough to be engaged by both space-based and planetary assets, and the atmosphere might make it hard to still pinpoint your sea assets while you most certainly have enough scanning equipment on the surface and in space to find them.
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While my native country (singapore) has one of the more 'powerful' navies in the region - to a significant extent, its *not* really used in combat with *other* navies.
There's a lot of roles a navy can play - even with a 'dedicated' coast guard
* search and rescue: Larger navy ships can act as a mobile base for air based and underwater searches. For example the search for the [MH370](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Search) involved mostly military vessels at first
* Natural disaster relief: While not quite as impressive as the american supercarriers (which are a small city on the sea), [our LSTs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Endurance_(207)) tend to land supplies more than tanks. The british also have [dedicated logistics ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_Table-class_landing_ship_logistics) that might be useful in this role
* Anti Piracy operations: Just because there's a central, strong government dosen't necessarily mean there's no criminal element. They might have repurposed or smuggled in armaments. There's no need to chase them into space, and orbital bombardment is generally considered excessive so you might need local protection and discouragement via excessive planetside firepower.
* Kaiju! While the "intelligent"/Dominant species of the planet might have government, the local megafauna has a tendancy to sometimes be a bit crochety. While ideally these creatures are discouraged, when you have a 200 ton lizard monster occasionally deciding to walk into a city, and scratch its back on the local landmarks, it might be useful to have a navy capable of using something a little more persuasive than the planet's largest rolled up newspaper.
Likewise, there may be problem kaiju that might unfortunately need putting down . Fortunately this is not something our local navy needs to deal with at the moment but who knows!
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## Sea Navies are there to help monitor for rebel spaceship emergency landings, but also for non-rebel spaceships requiring a [Splashdown landing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashdown)
One thing about other countries on the planet that would likely cause an issue is landmass - if there's enough landspace for interplanetary travel via spaceships, which country houses which landing pads would be a contentious issue - since that could be farmland, or residential building lands, or mountains, or...
Thing is, other planets could be contacting via spaceships, and the landing pads sort of likely need to exist for communication, and supplies, or the transport of people between planets.
Which means you'll have a lot of details around immigration and exports/imports in the country, and you'll want to cut down on rebel smuggling attempts and such. If an unauthorized spaceship attempts entry, they could choose not to even land at your landing ports, and just land in any ocean, or on a deserted island, and stay hidden. Not great for a world government. But since you'll have to check the oceans and seas anyways, that seems like a great place to put your official landing ports for official, authorized travel.
So, what you'll want to do is have your sea navy in charge of air traffic control essentially for interplanetary travel - when you attempt to land, the following happens:
1.) You contact the local sea navy by planetary comms from outside atmosphere asking for an entry point, with maybe some guidance on which continent or city you want to depart at;
2.) The sea navy gives you coordinates to land at sea near the departure point, and send their landing pad out to that coordinate.
3.) You then enter the atmosphere, aiming for a targeted landing at that location.
4.) You hopefully\* land on the landing pad at sea.
5.) You're transported by a ferry accompanied by the local navy ships and end up at your destination.
6.) Your ship is docked such that, for takeoff, you can take a landing pad out to see and launch off of that once you're ready to leave.
\*This keeps the country from having to worry about mishaps in landing mistakes - instead of setting fire to a landing pad on land, and having to worry about their forests as much, if you do cause a fire explosion with a mistaken landing, they can just dunk the landing pad or your ship into the water to reduce the effects. Ideally, this doesn't happen, but if it does, that can be contained safely.
Anyone attempting to land without these steps is probably a rebel, so you encounter them with the navy if they land in the sea - which is likely their easiest target anyways, because there's likely to be a *lot* more water that is safe to land at than land with cities, or farmland, or notorious parks.
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A really simple reason would be that space travel is extremely expensive. So a new colony’s tech and ability to get around is relatively primitive. **On a new colony, more primitive travel by sea becomes absolutely vital**. Vital enough to protect.
Centuries ago the populace arrived after a long sub light journey with limited and basic tech needed to seed a colony. Space travel is extremely expensive and limited to long journeys of ark ships that take decades or longer to complete.
On earth we take land travel for granted with our improved roads and rail systems. We also don’t consider how muc infrastructure we need for air travel. In particular air travel is extremely fuel intensive.
On a more primitive planet, or like Earth not to long ago, water based travel would dominate early. While it requires expertise, it’s expertise that can be taught to colonists readily using extrapolated star charts. Colonists can use the skill to navigate almost immediately upon arrival.
As centuries of development go by, some land and air capabilities develop. Yet the importance of the sea forms the backbone of the colony’s economy and culture.
## but we’re all “unified” why do we need a militarized navy?
Even if organized under a single government, **no group of humans is ever truly “unified”**. Just look at our modern history.
Your planetary politics are far from simple. The ruling class must enforce its will from time to time. An unpopular law might make some happy but others extremely unhappy. The arrival of new offworld automation technology or immigrants might threaten a regional industry, leading to strikes.
If naval travel forms the backbone of the economy, you will absolutely protect the sea lanes with deadly force.
If sea travel is the most accessible form, it will be the cornerstone of how you project power around the planet.
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Another path to take is that the navy could be a legacy force left over from an earlier time when it was necessary.
It made sense then but makes less sense now. Which could be acknowledged\lamp shaded in the story.
For example, they navy might still exist for political reasons because somebody powerful or influential has a stake in it, as a place to retire or transfer troublesome people to to keep them out of the way, or because they obliged to maintain it for treaty reasons or due to a contractual obligation to a private military contractor.
The navy could also be used as an outlet to train cadets before they are send into the much more dangerous environment of space.
Maybe it's just a playground for the sons of wealthy or influential famiiles.
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## Training
Serving on an ocean-ship is very similar to serving on a space-ship. You are isolated with a large number of people in confined space for a long time, you are surrounded by a deadly environment and you need to perform your technical duties to keep the ship running.
However, the ocean is a lot less dangerous than space. Sure, it's not harmless either. People can fall over-board and drown, and a serious accident can sink a ship. But all of that is nothing compared to the dangers of the vacuum of space. Decompression is deadly, and a ship which gets lost might have no hope to ever be found.
So serving on a ship for a couple month is used as a training exercise before personnel are considered ready to serve on board of a space vessel.
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You've got o broaden your horizons. The navy does not exist for the sole purpose of naval combat.
According to the navy's anthem:
>
> Where can you find pleasure
>
> Search the world for treasure
>
> Learn science technology
>
> Where can you begin
>
> To make your dreams all come true
>
> On the land or on the sea?
>
>
> Where can you learn to fly
>
> Play in sports and skin dive
>
> Study oceanography
>
> Sign up for the big band
>
> Or sit in the grandstand
>
> When your team and others meet?
>
>
>
Many people in the real world join the armed forces and they never get to go to war. They always get some nice education and perks, on top of learning proper discipline.
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## Seamonsters
The oceans of one planet in the empire harbor dangerous megafauna. They are big (far bigger than anything on Earth) seem surprisingly intelligent at times and they do not like humans. Which makes them a serious threat to seafaring transport vessels (which are still more economical than flight), underwater mining operations and coastal regions.
So that planet needs a well-armed navy to fight those creatures.
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## Museum ships
On Earth today, one country *alone* has preserved 3 cruisers, 8 battleships, 5 aircraft carriers, and countless other auxiliary vessels, including a *nuclear* submarine. And we barely have 1 space station, and robotics is in its infancy.
Right now they sit in dockside, with contracts prohibiting their operation, and their material condition is too poor to permit sea operation.
## Maintenance being the rub
Maintenance is hard in the early 21st century. Outer hull sheeting on a ship is basically ablative, will rust through and needs to be replaced from time to time. The museums, using charity money, must *out-bid* commercial and naval interests for a scarce commodity: dry-dock time.
Because it's hard to weld underwater. **For humans**.
But as a society moves toward interstallar travel, materials science at this level *just gets ridiculous*. Now hull repair is done by robots who are happy to work underwater, so the ships intentionally let to "silt up" are re-floated so the robots can work. Volunteer contributions only need to buy steel, electricity and robot repair... or simply deploy "replicators.
The upshot is, every museum ship is in "like new" material condition.
## There would be no reason *not to*
To a very limited extent, some naval museum ships *do* operate. But navies do not like it when a museum ship is re-sold and winds up in the hands of an adversary navy, as *did happen* with a Soviet aircraft carrier. So navies have strict rules [on making nothing operational](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=138rRKzeniA) except lights and ventilation.
In a single world government, these rules become irrelevant relics of bygone times.
So there would be no restriction on operation *except* the volunteer bandwidth to do so. An interstellar society is likely to have a great deal of affluence and leisure time. So that won't be a problem.
And indeed, there will be reasons for doing so. Natural disasters still happen (especially if the society screwed up their environment on the way to the stars). An aircraft carrier makes fantastic refugee accommodations for about 10,000 people. And so aside from museum and re-enactment duties, the museum ships are kept busy doing social good.
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A modern navy could still be hyper effective for (last-ditch, emergency, trap yourself inside a kessler-syndrome-doom for 10 years minimum\*) planetary defense. Think massive buoyant space flak cannons. Fired down into the ocean initially(or pulled down by motors on each corner) as the entire mechanism gains speed returning to the surface, an air-sensitive trigger at 1/3 barrel length (closer to top) triggers the actual firing of the cannon so the forces can compound and launch up to 2 tons of small piece copper wire, tiny ball bearings, etc directly into low orbit, preventing *any* object from landing unscathed.
\*or maybe they have effective clean up that only takes a month in a post-conflict environment?
[Answer]
I love this question. People have it all the time. I think the naval (as in Naval naval) aspects of sci-fi universes is tragically overlooked. To ask this question, we ask 3 others; why does a scifi universe have infantry? or air units? or a space military?
To quickly bypass these questions you did not ask, the infantry exists to control and exert control, the air units can serve many purposes not limited to inexpensively transporting resources and personnell across the planet and providing air support against encroaching spacecraft, and the space military is mainly to intercept these different elements before they can ever reach your precious worlds. Also, orbital bombardment.
So, how does a sea navy fit into this? I find it kind of simple; look at todays battleships and acknowledge the purpose *they* serve. A modern battleship is essentially a mobile army base and defensive platform. It can shoot down aircraft, intercept ICBM's, transport great numbers of troops and supplies, and even launch aircraft of its own among many other things. In an FTL sci-fi world, I could only see these abilities being enhanced and the scope of possibility for your navies expanded.
Some major limitations of the usefulness of modern navies is that they are slow, incredibly expensive, require very large crews, and require a lot of maintenance. This could be very easily solved with FTL-level technologies. Think ships powered by fusion reactors and spaceship engines for propulsion, with AI mainframes commanding the ship and only a small crew of engineers and battalions of infantry waiting below deck to be deployed at the site of the enemy invasion line. Missile submarines, powered by advanced technologies, barraging large spacecraft with missiles from the depths of the sea. Submarine destroyers becoming a necessity for defense of cities anywhere near a coast in case the enemy drops one into their waters, and aircraft carriers maintaining their unmatched ability to deploy large numbers of small and low-range aircraft to swarm the invading enemy at its heart. To summarize: The ability to counter nearly everything, translated into especially slow and large targets such as spacecraft and maintaining dominance of the skies against smaller faster craft and atmosphere-restricted aircrafts.
Naturally, the limits of this concept are only the bounds of your imagination. But, I hope these ideas help ^^; Good luck!!
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[Question]
[
What are some plausible reasons why an advanced, futuristic society would still have a sizable agricultural/rural component, and a significant rural population? This hypothetical civilization is significantly more technologically advanced than modern wealthy 21st century societies, and can presumably grow sufficient food via vertical farming, can grow artificial meat, etc. So why might there still be farming communities, hunting of wild animals, and a considerable rural, agrarian subculture (e.g., has regions that are culturally reminiscent of the American wild west or 19th century southern Italy) outside of the urban population centers?
One reason I thought of was mining; even an advanced society would need to mine natural resources, so a rural subculture could arise around the discovery and mining of natural resources in frontier regions. But interested in others. I'd prefer explanations not resort to some sort of religious Ludditism or Amish-esque opposition to modern technology. Thanks.
[Answer]
# The Bucolic Ideal -- AKA they like it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kDQqd.jpg)
Your aliens have advanced technology. They COULD do vertical farming and lab grown meat. They COULD live in busy big cities surrounded by loud, smelly strangers. But who in their right mind would want that?
The species is psychologically different from humans. They do not trust food that magically appears in the shop from an unknown source. They are psychologically set up to enjoy growing their own food. They hate big noisy smelly cities. They enjoy being outdoors surrounded by greenery and animals. They are naturally suspicious of strangers and abhor large crowds. They prefer to live spread out from each other in small family groups.
These people are not in principle opposed to technology. For example they still have factory farms to feed people who are in need. But these people in need seek to eventually get off welfare and get their own land to farm with their family.
For a real world example, humans tend not to be in principle opposed to artificial insemination of women, if that's what it takes for her to have a baby. But they typically try the natural route first. We are not in principle opposed to feeding people [grey nutrition paste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut) if necessary. But it's not the long-term goal.
I suggest the deeper cause is the species evolved from a less social species than humans' ancestors. Something larger and more solitary. Gorillas instead of monkeys.
The problem then becomes how did such an unsocial species develop civilization and advanced technology in the first place? I leave that as an exercise for the interested reader.
[Answer]
# Vertical farming isn't very efficient.
You need artificial lighting, a lot of technology to maintain the massive stacks, a lot of genetic engineering to keep your plants actually growing if they're not the standard ones that work well, need to not have glitches- it's an erratic process.
You can do it, but it's vastly cheaper to run a normal farm, especially with all the advances in genetic engineering and fertilizers.
# Populations are low and stable, and energy isn't unlimited.
They don't have so many people that you need the vertical efficiency of farms because so many people have uploaded into virtual minds. Energy is also limited, with fusion and nuclear power needing enormous investments in resources to build.
As such, it remains vastly cheaper to just run a normal farm, with normal GM crops and normal robots to manage it.
# People like it
As well as the economic maths, people just like it. People who really like urban life and modern high tech cities have a tendency to upload their minds. People left in the real world tend to prefer rural environments.
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**Farms can be too small and too big**
smaller farms are less resource efficient, larger farms fall prey to wealth concentration and higher environmental impact. both should be balanced. local produce has a lower impact than large scale vegetable farms for instance.
**suburbs are horrible (environmentally, economically, ect) and not everyone wants to live in a city.**
I personally like living a rural area, I can have my own woodshop and forge without disturbing my neighbors. people often want to spread out, and if they can afford to they will.
**We raise animals for more than just meat**
A huge variety of products are made from animals including many medical products that cannot be produced any other way. Vat wool is unlikely ot ever be a thing, sheep are just too efficient, timber is another good example. Also livestock can often be raised on land unsuitable for agriculture, vat meat needs agricultural land to supply raw material, so livestock will still make up a lot of animal production.
**Artisanal or variety products are in high demand.**
small scale farms can produce thing uneconomical on a large scale, camel milk for instance is low but not zero demand so small farms is all you have. heirloom crops are another example. then you have breeders, different farms breed for different things, controlled breeding is easier on smaller farms. Rare livestock breeds, genetic diversity, and better recycling all favor smaller farms. then you have pig farming which becomes more destructive the larger the individual farm is. you can't have large scale pig farming with low environmental impact unless you spread it out to many small farms.
**Pleasure.**
Lots of people have hobby farms, farming is enjoyable to many, so with more economic equality we should see more small farms not less.
**Vertical farming is not a replacement for normal farming.**
It is a way to turn unproductive land like cities into farm land. Dirt, rain, and sunlight is still far far more efficient use of resources.
**rural can also mean land management.**
managing bison herds or standing forest would also be considered rural. rural does not automatically equal growing corn and cattle.
Also ecologically balanced farming needs closer management than large monofarming which again means more farmers.
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**1. Horizontal farming and grazing cattle are cheap.**
There's a school of thought that increasing technology leads to decreasing cost. That's true! But it's a generalization that leads to error. An improved tractor leads to more efficient farming (increasing the amount of food per-acre) — but the tractor consumes diesel fuel leading to pollution and while it allows for more robust farming, any modern farmer will tell you that the ruthless nature of economics is that it doesn't necessarily translate to an increase in wealth. Ignoring corporate farming, family farming is almost mandated to use the latest tech just to pay their bills due to the expectation of decreasing cost of food per mouth to feed.
But there's a limit to that. For example, some farms are part of a co-op and the co-op owns the combine used for harvest. It's trucked from farm to farm, because no one farm can spend that much money no matter how much more efficient the solution is.
Which is a long way to say that vertical farming (assuming we're trying to eke every ounce of geographic efficiency) requires construction, vertical water distribution, better management of sunlight (or provision of artificial light) and a lot of other *expensive things.* Why continue farming like your great-great-great-grandparents did? Because it's cheaper and there's nothing compelling you to invest in the latest tech.
**2. Nothing else is demanding use of the land**
Let's ignore environmental activism as we see it today. I think that effort is trying to figure out how to grow up just like the rest of humanity and so it's not an ideal comparison for what I'm about to say.
But if we assume (and believe me, I think this is a nearly unbelievable assumption) an ideal government run by calm, rational, conscientious people, then there will be an effort to preserve large swaths of geography for uses other than agriculture. Some will be parks of various varieties. Others nature preserves designed to protect natural ecosystems. Still others will be "open air" space between large, efficient, highly automated cities. In other words, in this wonderful utopian world there would be commonly-accepted pressure to preserve tons of open space.
Except that it's rare for people who read stories to relate to civilizations like that. We want those kinds of solutions, but we don't believe they can exist because they're nothing at all like the world we live in today or any aspect of our history. We've had brief blips that worked temporarily (e.g., [The Farm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee))), but deep down inside, we all know that we evolved in a competitive environment that will always be underscored by greed, ambition, and a host of other useful but occasionally detrimental behaviors.1
So why do people continue with traditional farming in your world? Because they can. Because there will be the homeless who squat on an acre to survive and families who can't afford the expensive solutions and governments who calculate national productivity in terms of acres in production and a host of other all-too-common social challenges that have always plagued us.
...Because technological development hasn't reduced land use yet and isn't expected to into the future.
**3. Population control isn't as easy as you think**
Oh, so many people on this Earth complain about the growing population and wonder what can be done about it. It shouldn't need to be said that the biological drive to produce offspring is whomping strong. We've tried everything from religious terror to national laws to guidance counseling to abortion — not necessarily under the banner of "population control," but that's the end result.2
But what has all these years of medical innovation, improved public health, bounteous food, and failed programs taught us? That the population will grow. It'll have its ups and downs, but it will always trend upwards. War can reduce population. Disease... affluence tends to reduce the desire for large families, too. But in the end, the number goes up.
And that means you need every scrap of arable land in production. Horizontal land still being farmed simply hasn't had the vertical farming structures installed yet. It'll happen. Think Asimov's planet Trantor, where every square inch of land (and a big chunk of ocean) has been covered over with buildings. It's just a matter of time, right? So until the government can get around to the correct subsidy to convert the Smith's farm to high-tech high-density agriculture, the cows still graze and the wheat's still planted "the old-fashioned way."
**4. Forcing people to adopt technology doesn't always work**
From a certain point of view, you haven't told us what "time" we're talking about. Are we early in the adoption of advanced agriculture? Somewhere in the middle? Late in the adoption phase where pretty much every acre that can be converted has been?
My workhorse vehicle is a 1992 Ford F-150. It's had the snot beaten out of it. I've dropped a tree on it (a painful story about classical physics). The door handles have been replaced with rebar because they kept breaking. My point? That 30-year-old vehicle still runs great even though it's nowhere near as fuel efficient or pollution-reducing as modern vehicles — so why spend the money to upgrade?
Back in 2013 the U.S. government decided to help the nation adopt LED technology by outlawing the manufacture and sale of 60-watt, 75-watt and 100-watt A19 incandescent light bulbs. Suddenly senior citizens on fixed incomes were forced to pay \$25 for a light bulb that once cost \$0.50.3 The argument that it would last for 20 years falls flat when you're talking to an 80-year-old person.
The second round of efforts to force the nation to use more efficient lighting occurred this year (2023). Ten years passed before step #2 for many reasons, but one of them is that it took time for the nation to grow accustomed to what was perceived as one whale of a bad idea.
My point with #4 is this: while the cost of LED lighting has gone down, it's still a long way away from $0.50-per-bulb and likely will never attain that value. A (hopefully unforeseen) consequence of forcing the adoption of new technology has been inflation. We might be saving in energy costs in the long run, but we're paying a higher price for the bulbs. In 2013 LED bulbs were advertised as lasting 25+ years. Today the average is 10-13 years. The economy is trying to make them as consumable (i.e. "throw away") as the old incandescent bulbs.
Consequences like that stop people from simply buying electric cars or putting solar panels and wind turbines on or near their homes and businesses. It stops people from buying the latest-and-greatest cell phones and computers (most people don't...).
And it'll stop farmers from simply paying the cost of installing expensive farm equipment. You'll have traditional farming because some people simply don't like change. Why pay for all the fancy doodads when what you're doing pays the bills just fine?
**5. Is every nation on your world technologically and economically equal?**
Finally, it's unlikely that your entire planet is homogeneous. Some countries or areas will be wealthier than others. Wealthy countries/areas can provide subsidies to help convert farms to the advanced techniques. Poorer countries/areas can't. It's not always possible for the wealthy areas to pay for the poor areas.4 Using Earth today as an example, there will be sizable chunks of land farmed using traditional techniques simply because those farms are in an area that can't afford the upgrade.
*You'd be surprised how many worldbuilding questions depend on economics....*
---
1 *People who think it's a good idea to rid humanity of, e.g., greed haven't through through the implications of that. Those strong characteristics that can lead to very real tragedy are the root characteristics that also lead to innovation, problem-solving, safety, and a lot of other beneficial consequences. It's nice to look back from our modern perch and proclaim that we could have done it another way — but the nasty truth is, we didn't and couldn't. Without fundamentally changing what it is to be human, our goal is to figure out how to train ourselves to not give in to the darker side of these characteristics. People don't relate to utopias because we've not shown a lot of progress in this regard.*
2 *I'm really not trying to start an argument here. Specifically citing abortion, the issue is quite a bit more complex than simply life vs. women's rights and I believe the issue has been politicized by a lot of people and organizations — including those seeking population control.*
3 *I'm simplifying for brevity and it's not completely fair. Halogen-based A19 bulbs were, at that time, still permissible so the price jump was really from \$0.50 to \$4.95. But I was there when those first people had to have the government's decision explained to them. The reactions reflected the \$0.50 to \$25 condition.*
4 *If you don't believe this, look at how your nation, state, or province deals with "education equalization." This is your regional government's effort to take taxes in the wealthy portions of the region and use them to standardize public education throughout the region, including in the poorer areas. It's a desirable idea to ensure that everyone has access to the same quality education! It's also whomping difficult. It's probably true that 99% of the world's wealth is held by 1% of the world's population. What people don't get is that taking all that wealth from the 1% and spreading it out among the 99% doesn't significantly lift the 99%. And the challenges faced by "education equalization" goes a long way to prove it. Soapbox mode off.*
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Cities are expensive both in energy and economically. They exist because of excess population and because the surrounding agricultural population is supporting the city. What cities provide to agriculture are markets, ability to store food between harvests, a place to send extra people once they grow old enough, and new ideas.
Modern cities are incredibly expensive in terms of energy, water, food and dealing with waste. They need a sizable population in rural areas collecting all that, getting it transported into the city, and getting the waste out of the city. The city also needs unpopulated areas in the water collecting area to have clean water. See the Hetch Hetchy valley in California which supplies water to San Franscico or the Edwards Aquifer in Austin TX. They may also need to depopulate the land above a significant aquifer so that the farmers don't pump out all the water that the city might need. (See the issues with the Ogallala Aquifer where famers are pumping it dry.)
Waste is a huge problem for cities. See the Monte Testaceo in Rome which is a pile of broken amphora - essentially a big garbage dump of empty oil jars. Sewage is expensive but essential for public health. A city needs open space to use sunlight and plants to process wastewater. It needs a place to put broken pottery and other containers. A modern city creates a huge amount of waste, and it needs to be made non-toxic, recycle what can be recycled, and processed into something more useful. That is best done outside of the city. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Kolkata> as much of the water is contaminated.
In the past, cities were prime locations for pandemics. People would flee the city during a pandemic and go out into the countryside. Being away from others is a great way to avoid getting sick. No matter how advanced a civilization is, there will always be new microbes that infect them.
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# AI took all other jobs
There isn't anything else left to do for humans. AI's do all the software development, accounting, policing, lawmaking, building... You name it. Even porn is now all virtual people created dynamically, so not even that is available to humans.
If you stay in the city, you will probably live in a pod hotel. You barely fit in your pod and you share a latrine with a thousand people. Also the food is made of roach meat and is horrible. That's because The AI's are very efficient in resource allocation - meaning that 99.9999999999% of the resources go to the 100 or so people who own the AI's, and everybody else is forced to live on basic universal income and in spartan conditions. The only reason billionaires haven't got rid of everyone else is because they have a thing going on about what brands of pod hotel and roach meat have the most followers.
If you live in the fields you can hunt, raise, gather and grow your own food, which is better than roach meat. You have acres of wilderness as your own private restroom, and you can even build a decent toilet if you know how. And you can make your own straw mattress and wooden hut. All in all a more confortable existence than licking the boots of a corporste master for a pod.
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## Transportation is cheap
And people like living in low density areas. In fact, the demand (in terms of availability) of rural living could easily outstrip the supply. Even today, city dwellers with means often have "cottages" or 2nd homes in the country.
## Crafted Wilderness
While a sufficiently advanced society (near or above K1) doesn't have need for huge monoculture fields mass producing cheap calories, there will still be plenty of effort involved in turning the "countryside" into something enjoyable for humans.
People will raise animals for the fun of it, and will craft "hand-made" food from animals. Possibly it will be illegal to kill higher animals (mammals and birds) for food, while humane gathering of animal products (eggs, milk, honey, cotton) is permitted.
You could imagine breeding meat cattle to have their meat cloned and sold - "1st generation clone meat!" might be the equivalent of "organic" today. But even if you aren't eating cattle, "cowbow" mystique would keep some hobby farms running.
Groomed wilderness is common in some countries today. A mixture of carefully chosen and culled wild animals (anything that eats a human is killed, so they learn to not do that - and yes, that is what we do today), camp sites or cabins with low footprints, workers who resupply and fix damage, low-energy travel methods (hiking, canoeing, skiing, etc) to visit the wilderness camps is a common recreational activity in North America.
Even hiking trails -- paths you can go along with effort put to minimize damage to the environment, with reinforced "road beds" and requests to stay on the path -- are part of this. 10000 humans walking along a hiking trail do far less damage than 10000 humans wandering around willy-nilly.
## Self Sustain hobbiests
People with a plot of land the rough equivalent of a garden in a city that grows food, but these also grow wheat and corn and the like. With automation, the work required isn't that high (for the human), making it a wealthy person's fancy. They'll have solar panels to recharge their drones and a maker station to do any repairs and "live off the grid" in an insanely high tech parody of life before the economic singularity.
## Religious Practices
Today, there are a number of sects that avoid using technology above a certain point for their own comfort. Odds are such sects will continue to exist, and they'll feel the need to actually farm and the like. Their products may sell for a premium, giving them the income needed to justify holding the land in private hands.
## Biodiversity
Instead of farming monoculture, we might have farms whose job it is to produce a wide variety of genotypes of crops. Farmers would be genetic workers whose purpose is to sample said genetics and study the produced phenotypes. Farming would be an early step in the funnel towards new biotech, with much of actual human consumption handled in clean and efficient vertical farms near the point of consumption.
## Planets are Slums
Gravity is a drag. The kinetic energy cost of lifting goods from a planet, and the limited ability to return goods, makes economic trade with a planet inefficient. With cheap and plentiful orbital habitats and an entire solar system to disassemble for resources, planets are backwaters. The only people remaining on them are either insanely conservative or economically non-productive.
Reach orbit, and your standard of living skyrockets.
The planet is being hollowed out, and backwater parts of a backwater are left to do whatever they want. So long as you aren't playing with uranium, blocking transportation (in, out or over) or the like, rural areas are left to their own devices, with little government and technological support.
Those that don't want to go to space or live in the (relatively) less poor cities have cobbled together an economy in the rural stretches of the world. They are closer to subsidence farmers, misusing scavenged technology from the richer parts of society to keep their houses running and themselves in food. Viewed as barbarians, hicks and savages by the rest of society, they have formed their own systems of government that look a bit like a cyberpunk wild west.
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The question is how advanced. Land allocation is typically to the rich because they can afford to buy it. Rich people have lots of free time and have money to spare, key factors in doing what others might be considered frivolous.
Even in Star Trek, many comments have been made about home cooked food tasting better than what comes from a replicator. Captain Picard even owns a vineyard to manage in his free time, although it was passed down from many generations.
The obvious answer here is taste, people want taste and they will be willing to pay, trade, or etc for it.
Replicators make a good effort to reproduce food, but maybe its only a 99% match and that extra 1% is noticeable. This is because the last 1% is often the hardest to achieve and likely uses the most energy.
Also, a multi-planet civilization could have a whole planet bought by a group of rich people who want to farm. Either for fun, profit, or both.
Rich people would definitely pay extra for gourmet food even at great expense to show off there wealth.
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Why not? What else are they going to do?
Broadacre City was actually seriously proposed for human beings. You take advantage of your tech to let you move swiftly, and every family lives on its own farm and raises a good chunk of its own food. This enables them to live in harmony with nature and remember where their food comes from and let their children run wild, and if the children want friends it's easy enough for them to travel between farms (high tech!).
As such, it is not only a healthy living experience, it gives them something to do and adds meaning to their lives. They teach their children gravely about years of old where people had to engage in less fulfilling jobs.
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# "Highly advanced" does not mean perfect, omniscient, omnipotent
Disclaimer: this depends very much on a non-mainstream (controversial) personal view. Adapt or discard as you see fit.
I am extrapolating from our current 21st century society and scientific knowledge. I argue that currently:
1. We do not know everything there is to know regarding healthful nutrition. ("Can't know what you don't know.") Our quantitative and qualitative knowledge regarding necessary nutrients is decades-old in many cases; no new vitamins have been discovered for ages. Who knows what "co-factors" are helpful or harmful? We do know that most factory supplements are often badly utilized, and some supplements should not go together (e.g. fructose chelates zinc, iron etc.). Our nutrition guidelines often still center around something like "X calories per kg body mass per day" while modern processed foods often contain far less nutrients when compared to some raw, fresh vegetable produce or animal-origin food of exactly the same calorific content.
2. A living, healthy organism (microbe, fungus, plant, animal etc.) is a complex biochemical "factory" where a plethora of biochemical and biophysical processes work together to produce the organism, containing all the necessary "ingredients for life". As higher (more complex) lifeforms consume lower (simpler) lifeforms, they absorb the necessary nutrients to build their own (healthy) organisms. If they are not healthy (as we often see in modern industrialized society) a good guess is that they don't get all the nutrients they need for some or other reason (unavailable, unacceptable quality, hindrance in uptake, etc.) (Other guesses e.g. exercise are certainly valid to some degree.)
3. It seems there is often not enough incentive (financial or otherwise) to research further. The "low-hanging fruit" have all been picked and the science is seen as "good enough" by the current society. And where there are obvious failures - why, the medical establishment makes good money out of treating the symptoms (instead of curing or even preventing them). One prominent exception might be the focus that our gut microbiome has received in recent years - which incidentally is decimated with many of our processed foods and other chemicals.
4. The food industry (the forerunner of the complete food supply of a hypothetical future society) churns out "good enough" processed foodstuffs, makes money, provides jobs, and keeps the people functioning for some decades. No need to optimize for health or avoid eventual adverse effects, that would just (no pun intended) eat into profits.
5. Analogous to this, agriculture also often thinks that providing a plant with some salts (hydroponics) and/or artificial nitrogen (fertilizers) is sufficient to grow healthy plants season after season, while people now start to realize that plant grow in symbiosis with a lot of micro-organism life inside the soil. Plants are still slightly more complex lifeforms than the microbes, which in turn are more complex than the minerals...
## What they actually may be thinking
So with this rant-ish motivation behind us, I can imagine that a future advanced society may think along one of the following lines re. rearing food in an old-fashioned way:
* Cautious view: We have run enough double-blind trials on our population (ethics to be left as an exercise) to conclude that our manufactured food is sub-optimal compared to traditional farmed food. We have no idea why but the statistics are clear. So out of an abundance of caution and concern for our people we delegate the task of food production to the experts. (This would also optimistically suggest society has got rid of the "bread and circuses" mentality that is all too often encountered today - companies and governments in future actually care about peoples' welfare on an individual and collective level.)
* Futurist view: We actually are advanced enough to have cracked all the secrets of nutrition and can even be sure that we know everything there is to know - but the cost to include all those features in the final product is just too prohibitive compared to farming (which, incidentally has become even cheaper due to economies of scale as demand has increased due to the publication of the research, maybe even some nostalgia).
* Pessimist view: After the Great Lifestyle Pandemic of the early 21st century, the survivors did not trust the Big Food Corporations any more plant your own food became the fashion - starting from some potted cabbages and tomato plants on balconies, to eventually a drive where having a farm, bartering produce, or selling it to city folks became prestigious. To the point that all those corps went out of business and all that food-processing knowledge was lost.
*PS:* It might not be abundantly clear from the above that today's farming is a wide term and encompasses both bad practices (raping the earth for what is to be made out of it then leaving a toxic barren wasteland behind) and good practices (e.g. nurturing the subsoil life and increasing the soil's fertility and carbon capturing capacity year after year). For the above points to be valid, I would like farming as referred to here to tend towards the "good" definition. Which I think is reasonable, as climate change and carbon sequestration may in future tend to drive agriculture back to a more harmonious/holistic approach.
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Same reason we still have farming and even hunter gatherer communities today. They haven't all been forcibly removed and made to live in the cities yet. Or they're not politically controlled by the city people.
The other potential is people returning to the land. That happens these days as well where sucessful people get out of the concrete jungle and buy themselves a farm. It's documented as far back as Roman times when retiring to grow cabbages was a 'thing'.
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**They discovered that long exposure modern technology and culture is psychologically harmful to them.**
Warning: minor comment of self-harm
Their development was similar to humans in that people concentrated in cities and fewer and fewer people in the agricultural community until it all automated. However with the technological and scientific development they came to understand their place in the universe and developed a strong nihilistic undercurrent in their cultures. This lead to fewer births and a higher rates of suicide.
The aliens collectively decided that they didn't want to change their psychology to be more resistant to this problem as they felt that would be killing their species. Instead they decided to experiment with villages modeled on their historic past, among other things, and found it helped with the problems their species was suffering. Given the population decline that happened, it turned out that they could engage in preventative measures where most people would live in a village and cycle in to the technological cities regularly. Given their advanced medical and teaching technologies they could still retain experts even with this cyclic approach to life. Modern technology is still used behind the scenes in villages, e.g. modern medicine is administered, automated supply chains are set up to provide back up in case of a bad harvest and provide variation in people's diets. Travel between villages can be achieved by underground systems and an internet is accessible but carefully watched for anyone accessing it in a village to preserve the health benefits of these retreats. This has lead to a psychologically healthy race and they retain this system to keep themselves healthy and help give themselves purpose to counter the nihilism that developed due to their technological experience. While most people cycle between the city and village, there are some that live only in cities or only in villages due to their particular psychological make-up.
PS: as a side note, technological ascendancy tending to lead to nihilism is one proposed solution to the Fermi paradox
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This question assumes that vertical farming is inevitably more efficient than extensive agriculture. That's obviously not currently true, and for major commodities is likely never *going* to be true.
We currently grow about 780 million metric tons of grain on Earth, all of it outdoors, on more than 500 million hectares of land. The infrastructure required to do that indoors would be monumental.
500 million hectares is 5 million km2, which is roughly 50% more than the entire area of the earth currently occupied by cities. You wouldn't need the same area for vertical farming of course, since in theory it is more space-efficient. But even if it were 10x more compact, that's still 500,000 km2 of buildings to maintain.
I expect we'll see *more* vertical farming in the future, but it's unlikely it will ever be the only form, or even the dominant form, of agriculture.
<https://www.statista.com/topics/1668/wheat/#topicOverview>
<https://www.newgeography.com/content/001689-how-much-world-covered-cities>
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**How’s it different from humans today?**
Many people chose to live in the countryside, far away from cities. Even if it means long commutes which emit a ton of emissions, cost a lot and waste a lot of resources.
We produce far more food than we actually need. Most people in developed countries are overweight and we waste a ton of food to feed animals which is very inefficient.
The simple answer is that people like to live in the countryside and they like food (and especially meat, and real meat at that).
We could probably optimize our land usage and agriculture by an order of magnitude if we wanted to.
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As I think experience is finally starting to play out, even if it's not popular. Manufactured and/or engineered and/or modified food is not healthy. Bottom line is that life needs to eat life. Ok sure there are some bacteria that live off of matter, but the higher the life form, the more complex the life they need to eat. There is a reason why we don't eat algae and rocks. We as a higher life form need a more complex source of nutrition than manufacturing can ever provide. Even the difference between eating an apple and eating apple sauce is immense. Or eating real meat compared to this new dangfangled plant meat. They are nothing alike, even if they seem it.
I don't think advanced life can ever give up agriculture, the more biologically advanced the species, the more biologically advanced the food needs to be in order to provide everything the body needs.
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Because they can. They were smart enough to limit their population. They can all enjoy growing their own food or buying from organic farms. Other types of produce are only for those who are less fortunate. It is not much different in our society either. For instance, we seek to buy open ranch eggs, chickens, village cheese over mass produced stuff. Though since the demand is larger than supply those options are often more expensive and certainly will not be enough for everyone even if it was cheap enough.
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You can do some research on India.
India stands as a contrast in our modern world. For a whole variety of reasons, India still has a disproportionate share (70%) of their workforce in agriculture. And there is heavy resistance when the government tries to liberalize the markets, which would induce less people to work in agriculture. Its a complex topic but maybe India's reasons would help you in your story.
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Decentralized and organic civilization. Imagine that the computers are organic. You grow them. Imagine that almost all necessities are organic and sustainable, with a minimum of heavy metals and other toxins. Imagine (as did Larry Niven) sunflowers that were like solar power plants. You also grow building materials that are stronger than wood and less flammable. You even can grow furniture that comes out near its final shape, so you don't need complex carpentry skills. Then for communication, there are vines that can carry signals and grow for thousands of miles. If almost all technology was organic, then everyone would be a farmer.
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## The farmers are exiled from the cities
The farmers have, for some reason, been thrown out of the cities and are not allowed to do any trading with city folk except when explicitly permitted. Hence, the farmers only have access to whatever tech they can make, steal, or buy off the black market.
Why? Well, here's a few quite plot-impacting possibilities (excluding the religious/Amish possibilities):
1. They are opposed to the government in some way, and as such, are thrown out.
2. They are all criminals and thus not allowed to live with the city folk; however, the civilization is perhaps opposed to imprisonment and death penalties? Or maybe the prisons are over-crowded? Or maybe some crimes are just punished with exile.
3. They have a disease that the cities cannot tolerate.
4. They have defective genes in the eyes of the cities' governments, but genocide is going too far for the governments, so they are just exiled and expected to either die off or evolve. Why not just gene modification? Because maybe they (the cities' and/or the farmers) are against it, or maybe they still haven't mastered it in a way that doesn't cause... ahem... unforeseen consequences.
There are countless possibilities!
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Even with the option to simply grow food artificially, I am doubtful that these methods will be as efficient as conventional agriculture any time soon (others already talked about vertical farming). A lot of people also prefer natural products over "lab-grown" ones. That leads me to the following options to address your question:
## Harsh environmental conditions
Your planet might be extremely ill-suited for growing food, requiring extensive effort for plants to grow & livestock to survive. Mongolia for example still has a large rural population due to the low amount of fertile areas, making herding hardy livestock & a nomadic lifestyle the only way to use the land unable to grow anything but grass (although globalism is making Mongolia outsource much of its food production from other countries in our world).
The harder it is to produce food, the more people need to do it & the less cities can be fed, leading to a largely rural population.
Reasons for that can be anywhere from low CO2 amounts to extreme climates or a toxic environment.
## Low population density & global specialization
If you only need a specific nation to be largely rural or there is interstellar trade in your universe, you might want to consider specialization as an option.
Due to globalism in the modern world, different nations fulfill different economic needs for the global market, tied to what these countries do best, based around environmental & societal factors. If your society has a lot of fertile land without a large population, food production is a very good option as an export product, relying on other societies with a different economic focus for some goods in exchange.
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## environmental protection
It's a bit similar to biodiversity already mentioned in another answer, however I'd go beyond it.
Long term intensive agriculture and abuse of nature has destroyed the balance of the ecosystem.
The activity called extensive agriculture is actually supporting the environment finding its balance again.
The main activities are actually not production but increasing biodiversity, getting rid of invasive species, re-introducing endemic species, controlling populations ...
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## A species/society that prefers to kill things themselves
Consider a species that is primarily or entirely carnivorous, to the point that they prefer their meat to not only be freshly killed, but they like to kill it themselves. Of course, they don't have any ethical qualms about this - no vegetarians here. But they do get great pleasure from the killing and preparing of the food as well as just eating it, so restaurants or prepared foods from a market are not going to cut it. They also prefer active prey, not just cattle corralled in stockyards.
So no matter how advanced the tech, they're still going to base their communities around ready access free-ranging prey animals, and they'll need to devote some energy to maintaining these green spaces (after all, they don't necessarily want to spend all day hunting down animals in actual wilderness). So, no cities like we imagine.
## A society prevented from utilizing electricity/electronics
Consider a world that is under the effects of something like a permanent electromagnetic pulse, natural (?) or perhaps artificially created by a conquering species (opposed to genocide) that wanted to keep them from ever advancing sufficiently to leave the planet.
Their mechanical tech would never progress beyond the steam (or diesel) engine phase, but their biological tech could progress quite far, to the point where most of what we accomplish through sophisticated machines they would accomplish via genetically engineered lifeforms that were purpose-built & controlled. "Manufacturing centers" may take the form of sophisticated "farms" that produced specialized bio-machines, each farm geared around the production/husbandry of a particular organism.
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[Question]
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Starting off, these domesticated herbivores, much like cows, exist on a terrestrial world 15-20% larger than Earth. With a higher gravity of 11.2 G, Earth-like atmosphere, and if it existed in our solar system, would be positioned behind Earth like Mars but 1.5 AU from the Sun rather than Mars 2.0 AU. Lastly, 38% of the surface is landmass. I figure I provide this extra information if it helps at all.
These "dairy cattle" in my idea, partially for "economic balance" reasons relative to nothing in particular, produce 4 liters of oil in a 1-2 week timespan versus our cattle that produce 4 liters in a single day.
In one major part of this world, these oil-cattle are native and incredibly valuable specimens for the early industrialization of this mountainous continent. They're often the casus belli between large tribal kingdoms and city-states inhabiting these regions and the rising bourgeoisie are as much as oil-cattle barons as they're the new nobility.
My problem is, how do you prevent the ignition of their oil product? Human raiding since time immemorial would probably make them extinct if torches, farmstead fires, forest fires, black powder firearms would render them crispy.
Knowing nothing about oil even after reading numerous things, I came up with several possibilities, I hope?
* Petroleum Pasteurization? Farmsteads have minor refineries that render the oil usable for consumption perhaps. Even though these oil-cattle would need to nurse their calf, I guess their stomachs process oil just fine too.
* Instead of oil byproduct, these oil-cattle resemble Rimworlds Boomalopes, with large blubber sacs around their body, that can be fleeced like sheep wool periodically and then processed like Whaling in pots. I really like this idea, but regenerating blubber seems so hard to explain naturally even though this is science fiction.
* Their oil contains the nominal amount of hydrocarbons, but also large percentages of protein and fat that render the oil much harder to ignite between being in its body mass ready for lactation, and being pumped out.
Please help me, thanks.
[Answer]
## Cow oil has a high flash point.
Ever tried burning vegetable oil? It burns steadily in a lamp with the right kind of wick, but put a match to a cup of oil and nothing happens. The oil is not volatile enough to provide enough vapour to burn without help.
All you need is to make sure your cow oil isn't very volatile at normal temperatures - make it more like sunflower oil than petroleum.
The oil will still be useful for burning: it will burn with a wick, or on an already-hot fire, or with an atomiser (such as a diesel fuel injector). Bandits might go to the trouble of setting fire to your oil store, but they are more likely to ignore it and torch the hay barn instead. If a wildfire gets a cow's udder hot enough to ignite the oil, she's already dead.
[Answer]
**The Oil Must Be Refined**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dyq4d.png)
Olive oil, coconut oil, and whale oil are all flammable. But you cannot simply put a flame to an olive, a coconut or a whale, and expect it to burn.
Okay maybe you can set a dry coconut husk on fire, but that's not what I mean. I mean the flesh. This stuff:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sG1Hg.png)
Olives, coconuts and whales have to be processed before they work as fuel. Usually they are heated so the oil becomes liquid and separates from the other water based compounds and floats to the top. Then it is collected.
Your cow oil is not pure oil. It is an emulsion of oil in water. It does not burn the same way mayonnaise does not burn. But if you heat the mayonnaise in a vat the oil will rise to the surface.
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Natural milk already contain fats, that's how butter is made. As far as I know no mammals has catched fire because of lactation.
First of all it's an emulsion with water, and second but not less important, no nipple releases sparks or flames which can trigger the combustion: even plain butter, left to the air, will simply turn rancid and not catch fire. Meaning the oxydation will proceed at a slow enough rate to not release flame.
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## You are worried about nothing.
cows are not inherently flammable and making a little more oil will not change that. Mammals are already covered in oils, skin and hair are soaked in oils, but cows are not known for catching on fire not even when humans press red hot iron against their oil soaked skin and fur. The few animals that are flammable have long fur which drastically increases surface area. its the same principle as wood, a try starting a log on fire vs a pile of wood shavings. Or to think of it another way cows are already filled with methane, which can actually cause barns to explode but we don't worry about cows catching fire unless the building they are in is on fire. Skin just is not that flammable, even when you remove the water, there is a reason by blacksmithing apron is made of leather.
Barrels of stored oil might be a fire hazard but the cows are fine.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IOVt5.jpg)
[Answer]
# The Cows
First and foremost, unless your oil cows only have sloth-like mobility, they will likely have survived fires (natural and synthetic) by simply running away.
To further jump on the "probably not as big a deal as you think" train, fuel-oils (like gasoline and diesel) are atomized, mixed with an oxidizer, compressed, and then ignited. The liquid itself isn't very combustible; it's when the fuel is vaporized (which greatly increases the surface area of fuel exposed to the oxidizer) that it becomes dangerous. You don't *have to* compress the fuel before burning it, but the energy released from burning a compressed fuel is more easily harnessed to do useful work (just some additional background). Gasoline's flashpoint (essentially the temperature at which it vaporizes) is [>-23C](https://ex-machinery.com/Blog/flash-point-of-gasoline/#:%7E:text=Gasoline%20and%20diesel%20put%20to%20the%20test%20to%20explain%20%27flashpoint%27,-The%20video%20shows&text=As%20the%20flash%20point%20of,burning%20match%20in%20the%20liquid.), which is why it burns readily when ignited pretty much anywhere on Earth's surface. Diesel doesn't burn nearly as easily; it's flashpoint is [>55C](https://ex-machinery.com/Blog/flash-point-of-gasoline/#:%7E:text=Gasoline%20and%20diesel%20put%20to%20the%20test%20to%20explain%20%27flashpoint%27,-The%20video%20shows&text=As%20the%20flash%20point%20of,burning%20match%20in%20the%20liquid.), which means it has to be heated up before it will ignite.
Even if a cow was full to bursting with oil (4L), that's actually not very much fuel, and wouldn't burn for very long. According to [this](https://meridian.allenpress.com/iosc/article/2017/1/985/198066/Thermal-Properties-and-Burning-Efficiencies-of), refined fuel oil (which is similar to diesel in consistency but has a higher flashpoint of >90C) has a density of a little less than 1 kg/l, and if spread out over a 10 m diameter circle, the entire 4L would burn up in about 1 second (in your atmosphere, this would be even faster; see Other Thoughts below). Spreading all the cow's oil over a 10 m diameter circle and lighting it up is a little ridiculous, so let's more reasonably assume a 0.5 m diameter circle (someone slashes a cow's udder and the oil spills out on the ground underneath it, then they light it on fire). Even after correcting for the reduced surface area of the burn (the burn rate is proportional to the surface area of the fuel burning), the fire will still only last about 7 minutes (on Earth) without additional fuel. If you've ever lit a camp fire with dry twigs and brush, then tried to throw a log on it, you'll know it doesn't go well--the twigs burn hot and fast, but the log doesn't catch. Without amassing quite the pool of fuel and other combustibles, you'll end up with the same thing from your oil cows. Plus, they probably won't take kindly to having their udders slashed.
It is also important to remember that in order for the oil to burn, it has to be exposed to the oxidizing agent (which is typically oxygen in the atmosphere). Unless your cows absorb oxygen into their oil glands at a prodigious rate, even if the temperature of the cow rises to the oil's flash point, it won't combust. An oil cow caught in a fire would have the water in it's body boil (at 100C) before the oil caught fire. This is essentially the same reason the propane or LP in the rubber hose that goes to the grill doesn't all ignite and cause the tank to explode--since there's no oxygen to react with except at the burner (where the gas meets the atmosphere), it doesn't burn (yes, the positive pressure of the tank compared to the atmosphere is also a part of that equation; it's not a perfect metaphor).
From a logistical standpoint, your oil cows aren't any different from any other livestock throughout the centuries. Sounds like they're a valuable resource, and since they're domesticated, there's vested interest in ensuring that at least a breeding pair survive, which means oil cow farmers will do what they need to in order to protect their herd. Plus, a dead oil cow is only worth the meat (assuming it's edible), byproducts (bone, ivory, etc.), and whatever tiny fraction of that 4L of oil you can squeeze out of its glands. Presumably, they are significantly more valuable alive, and unless the cultures of your planet have a prevailing "scorched earth" policy in all their conflicts, they'll probably see an oil cow herd as part of the spoils of war. Plus, if you're a bandit or raider, why kill what you can conquer and use? Raiding cultures were not generally motivated by a strong desire to kill the people they were raiding; they wanted to take their stuff, wait for the oppressed people to make new stuff, and then come back and take more stuff.
From a completely different perspective, even if your cows produce oil which requires no refining, they themselves do not have to be particularly combustible. If you're really concerned about it, your oil cows might have evolved a particularly flame-resistant skin. Maybe they sweat profusely as a defense mechanism, which makes it really hard for them to be set alight without devoting a lot of time to holding the flame against them. From personal experience, it's no easy task keeping a half-ton bovine immobilized--even when you're not causing them pain and they aren't panicking. An entire panicked herd can pretty easily demolish most fences, and it would take a particularly dedicated attacker to chase down the herd just to kill them.
# Oil Storage
Every time mankind has developed a particularly dangerous material (in a contemporary context), they have also developed some way in which to store it reasonably securely (reasonable also being in a contemporary context). In times past, combustibles were stored in clay pots--not particularly safe, but better than out in the open (think Greek fire). This same idea can be applied to the oil from your oil cows.
I'm assuming since you mention a mountainous region, the warring states you mention aren't nomadic. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume, then, that the oil from the cows is stored in caverns in clay, wood, or stone vessels. An "oil cave" would be a dangerous place to light a fire, but by necessity, the locations would not be advertised to foreigners or competitors, and if a fire did break out, it would be contained to that cave. Frankly, outside the advances in the material used to create the vessels, this is still basically what we do today with combustibles--stick it in the ground somewhere out of sight and out of reach.
# Other Thoughts
At 11.2G, if your atmosphere is the same thickness as Earth's (i.e., the column of gases from sea level to space is the same height), your atmosphere is significantly denser at sea level (or whatever baseline your planet has that is equivalent to sea level) than Earth's atmosphere. If the atmospheric gas ratio is approximately the same (78% N2, 21% O2, ~1% Ar), that would mean the density of O2 molecules would be much higher than here on Earth (proportionally higher, but not directly proportional due to gases being compressible fluids [I think]). This would probably mean that oils burn significantly faster in your atmosphere, since the number of oxygen atoms available within the area of combustion is significantly higher than on Earth--basically, free compression.
Since your oil burns significantly faster, the fire may not be able to spread as far. This might explain why your naturally flammable cows aren't extinct--when one catches fire, it burns so hot and fast that the fire consumes all the fuel too fast to spread. No fuel, no fire.
A thinner atmosphere would produce a more similar gas density to Earth's, but would also have other side effects unrelated to your oil question. Meteorites could be far more common (assuming space junk is as prevalent in your universe as it is here). The sky wouldn't be the same blue. Ionizing radiation may interact differently, though a different magnetosphere could easily balance that.
Do with that what you will!
[Answer]
Knowing nothing about oil you should read about [cracking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)).
Note in *The Road Warrior* (for it's level of realism), there's an oil derrick, a tanker truck, and a giant tower thing (cracking tower). At varying levels of the tower, different types of hydrocarbons come out. At the bottom (or the top, IDK) you get *fuel oil* in which you can extinguish matches. At the top (or w/e) you get *gasoline*, the vapors of which can spontaneously combust. Somewhere in between you get diesel which will also extinguish matches.
So if you want it to go straight into an engine but have low flammability, make them excrete diesel.
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[Question]
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The Union (it was the only name that would translate for so many species) has found a really nice super-weapon/life-form: intelligent grey goo. It's a massive swarm of drones each about 8 feet by 4 feet that do what grey goo does best, break down other things and make more of itself. Every drone in this swarm can communicate with each other instantaneously due to... science... and share one mind. This mind is intelligent, and it does what we want it too, in that, we say, seize control of planet x, and it can and will figure out how to do it and do it. So,
# Why don't we use it against strong targets?
We use it to mop up the last vestiges of defeated enemies, but never use it in the main fighting. To clarify, the universe is a nasty place, with lots of powerful enemies.
Specifications:
Weapons in this universe are very powerful, but have to break through the energy shields that anything important has protecting it. This means a part of a ship will seem totally undamaged until its shield goes down, when it is almost instantly destroyed. The drones have access to the best shields and weapons we can give them.
There is no upper bound on the drones, but there is a lower one. Each drone has a weak computer that works with the others to form an intelligence, but if there are less than a hundred, it rapidly loses efficiency. However, there are **Trillions** of drones, and they can double every two minutes given sufficient supply. As such, the swarm usually has no care for it's individuals.
We trust this swarm, we aren't worried about it going rogue.
[Answer]
**Because we don't know about its past and the ordering system is not as straightforward as it seems.**
Before anything, I'd like to say that these drones seem to function a lot like ants. They clearly function more like a superorganism, in the sense that they act more like the cells of an individual organism than as a group of individual entities, especially since the swarm is usually not worried about its members specifically, but rather a about the collective. In how they seem to attack, they seem a bit like [army ants](https://www.pests.org/army-ants/), in the sense that they work as a large group to take down things much bigger and more powerful (some army ants species are no joke, when they march, it's common to see other creatures, especially other invertebrates, running away).
As for why they'd be called "Grey goo", it probably means they can function as something that at least looks like a fluid or mass, especially if you don't look attentively,. This would tell me that they probably have the ability to come together and form basic structures using their own bodies, much like [fire ants](https://www.quantamagazine.org/ants-build-complex-structures-with-a-few-simple-rules-20140409/) use their own bodies to form towers, bridges and rafts (yes, fire ants can build rafts with their own bodies to survive floods).
With that little commentary done, why wouldn't the union use them all the time if they seem so good at destroying and consuming enemy weapons and troops alike? Well there seem to be two good reasons for not doing so:
1: *Ordering them is a hassle*. You gave an example of a possible order:
>
> we say, seize control of planet x, and it can and will figure out how to do it and do it.
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>
>
Sounds straightforward, right? Except it totally isn't, because since you can't really control the swarm's every action without issuing proper orders, you can't be sure that the swarm will seek a solution that matches the union's interests.
In a speculative scenario: the swarm determines that the most efficient way to seize control of planet x is to neutralize its well developed military forces in an all out attack on several locations, which requires the swarm to grow in size in order to accomplish the task, and so it increases its numbers. Where did it get the resources? Well planet Y over there had a bunch of resources so it destroyed a good chunk of its cities and population. Planet x's military has now been subdued and the planet is under control (there were also some rebellions preventing complete subjugation at first, but the swarm quickly figured out that tearing their members apart publicly and using the planet's own weapons to nuke areas with high number of rebels was the most effective way to end the pesky interference). But hey, now the swarm commands the planet, which is a simple task for it now since it's increased its numbers fivefold. Hope you have a place to accommodate the new drones, since ordering the swarm to destroy them would be wasteful.
With this brutal example, you can hopefully see the problems that come with leaving a hive-mind style swarm choose its approaches. The task was indeed achieved, but several people died and a third party was involved without having anything to do with it. The bigger the task the more you need to detail to the swarm what it must and mustn't do so that it doesn't only follow the orders it was given, but also that it's actions are in line with the Union's rules and interests. The bigger the task, the harder it is to predict potential problems that will hinder the swarm's objective, and the more likely that it will at some point face a problem that requires it to violate potential guidelines given before its mission. If all it has to do is small cleanup missions and dealing with leftover threats, it's a lot harder for things to take an unexpected turn, and easier to predict potential issues and instruct the swarm how to deal with them accordingly.
2- *why are you trusting it?* sure, the swarm composed of trillions of murderous drones ready to increase their numbers shows no sign of going rogue. Why would you completely trust them though? You didn't build them, you found them,and the majority of their abilities seem centered around one main purpose: to grow. Yes, it will obey any order you issue, but can you be sure it never had any intentions of its own at any point? Can you affirm that it will always interpret its orders according to the Uinion's wishes? Or that said orders can't be misinterpreted in any damaging way? Is there a way to ensure no rogue *agent* in the union can give the swarm orders that can result in the swarm taking actions that could harm the union itself? Or that could cause it to go back to doing what it did before the union got a hold of it, whatever it was? This once again begs the question on whether the system of ordering the swarm and trusting its choices is truly a reliable form of controlling this superweapon.
So **tl;dr**: why wouldn't the Union use it to deal with big threats? Because the union has little to no real means of reliably controlling the swarm's every decision on how to properly accomplish its orders, especially regarding big tasks with a large number of variables on what can happen; and because, no matter how you look at it, the swarm seems to have the primary purpose of expanding in size and power, meaning that the chances that it once had its own objectives can't be completely ruled out until everything about its past is known by the Union.
[Answer]
## Preservation:
Grey goo in any of it's forms does what it does - destroys everything it comes in contact with. It makes more grey goo. Now grey goo is nice, but we all know what happened to king Midas when he wanted everything to be gold - the things he really valued were destroyed.
Grey goo as a WMD is only useful to destroy everything you point it at. But the Union doesn't want a universe full of grey goo. They want power plants, Dyson swarms, research facilities, and tech trees supporting factories that churn out the stuff the Union REALLY wants. Conquering the universe isn't a goal, it's a means to an end.
The Union might very well use these swarms against any parts of an enemy that are dispensable. What's another outmoded asteroid mine being used as a rebel base, after all? But if you're going to wipe out a civilization, you are going to wipe out the things you were hoping to conquer. You want to use more precision tools.
Then there's the concern over fairness. No, I don't think the Union is NICE. If the Union turns their grey goo weapon against a civilization capable of producing one themselves (i.e. one worth conquering) then the enemy will unleash a matching weapon against all the soft targets in the Union - like those previously conquered factories that are now supporting the Union juggernaut in its quest for wealth and power. The same math that allows the Union grey goo to do what it does allows the enemy grey goo to dissolve the Union (pun intended).
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## Adaptation
This swarm **was** used for that purpose, but strong targets found ways to disrupt communications between drones, preventing them from recognising each other. Each drone had to fall back to a basic pattern: Find material, build replica. So they wasted their time devouring each other.
Disruptors require testing and development. Keeping the swarm doing clean-up lets the Union ensure that nobody with the chance to test Mk-I disruptors survives to develop Mk-II disruptors that could suborn drones. Extra points if the Union can destroy/capture disruption tech on worlds they control.
The ability to fully seize a planet within two hours (1:40 to get 2 drones/sqm on the surface of Earth, starting from a single drone and doubling every 2min) is a massive tactical advantage. The swarm is an industrial backbone, and they can't risk losing it. So entire planets of drones beam a copy of the collective mind off, then cannibalise each other rather than risk capture. The last drone brings a nuke inside its shields.
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# The gravity of the situation presents danger.
NO seriously, you have *trillions*, capable of further doubling every couple minutes, and they are each the size of a rhinoceros, and mass about 3.5 tonnes?
Just how much gravity does a 3.5 trillion ton swarm present?
Or how about one that has replicated itself for just one hour, and now masses 52 times as much as the Earth's Moon?
[Answer]
>
> We trust this swarm, we aren't worried about it going rogue.
>
>
>
Maybe you should be.
>
> The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
>
>
>
-HAL 9000 on itself
**Value drift**
The Grey goo is intelligent, adaptive, and constantly learning. However, when it is attacking a large target, it is doing all of this unsupervised. Furthermore, once it has destroyed a large force, it will have a large force of roughly the same size. If you take over a planet with the grey goo you have destroyed all resistance, but now you have a different problem, turning off your grey goo.
**This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.**
*-HAL 9000*
After completing a large mission without someone supervising its learning, the grey goo may have come to some conclusions that make it no longer loyal to you. It attacks neighbors you have treaties with since it knows it can win and increase the number of conquered planets. It ignores your generals since it is smarter than them anyways. It modifies itself to do farming work and builds a planet with the same economic output as what you would get from conquering with it, but now it can't fight. Since you didn't monitor it, you might not know these changes have occurred until too late.
**Training, testing, and validation sets.**
It is safe to use it on small scales where you can monitor changes after the conflict, check for value drift, and then reset or keep the changes. You might actually want to do this constantly to increase the effectiveness of the weapon. However, doing this would likely require the shutdown of at least one robot to fully explore its net in a dormant state. Also, if a rebellion occurs, it is better for this to occur when they are the size of a city block, and not the size of a planet. By destroying the army after it is done you ensure you can never get steamrolled by your own weapon.
[Answer]
**Escalation and the Rules of War**
Certain powerful alien species like to consider themselves universal police and step in when inferior species start to mess around with truly dangerous stuff like grey-goo, vacuum decay, or time travel. While limited use of these technologies is fine, they don't like to see it used as an opening salvo to a war, instead preferring that war be waged "honorably" for religious or social reasons.
They claim that if every war started out with one side deploying a superweapon--say gray-goo--the other side would be mandated to respond with their own superweapon thus escalating the conflict to the point where (although they don't like to admit it) the highly advanced police-aliens would be somewhat threatened.
As such, these dangerous technologies are allowed to be used as a utility or a tool to accomplish mundane tasks once the enemy is defeated and there's no chance of self-reinforcing escalation cycles.
[Answer]
**Tonne-per-Tonne, Ships are Stronger.**
In your universe, combat power increases exponentially with size. This is likely do to efficiencies in power or shield generation at scale.
Imagine 100 U of resources. When used for a single ship, it makes 100 U of destructive power, but when used with 100 ships, it makes 10 U of destructive power. The difference is so overwhelming, a large ship can fight swarms of goo in relatively inefficient ways, which leave them inert and unable to reassemble (e.g. atomizing, gravity wells, EMPs) and still win.
Fielding a navy entirely of Grey Goo is wasteful especially if FTL is dependent on weight, so you want to maximize effectiveness-per-tonne.
So why field Grey Goo at all?
**Goo Gets Stronger, the Longer the Fight**
Goo has one major tactical advantage as the fight prolongs: wreckage. A ruined ship (on either side) can be converted into goo, weaponizing an otherwise useless hunk of metal. As the battle prolongs, the tonnage of ships will decrease and the tonnage of goo will increase, until a tipping point is reached and the goo is more powerful than all remaining enemy ships. Then it is unleashed on the enemy, mopping up their remaining forces, without damaging capital ships.
[Answer]
**Nukes can stop them.**
Targeted nuclear strikes can destroy them before they can mass replicate, and any experienced enemy has either nukes or something similar. Using grey goo tends to be ineffective and ruins biospheres.
As such, it isn't used until all nuclear powers have been defeated.
Once the grey goo has reached enough mass it can produce large shields to protect itself, but it's vulnerable until it reaches a critical mass.
**The initial grey goo can't be used from space**
While generic grey goo is cheap to produce, grey goo is not tough enough to easily handle being fired from orbit. It's a lot cheaper if there's already an outpost so that the grey goo can reproduce itself explosively from there, with access to whatever rare materials and ores it needs to grow quickly.
[Answer]
## Grey Goo Needs Matter
Strong opponents will construct shield generators capable of protecting virtually all mass within their area of influence. In a universe full of super-weapons, it would be folly ***not to***. A stray shot - perhaps fired decades or centuries ago - is liable to destroy all kinds of valuable things if they aren't shielded: ships, Dyson Swarms, and planets are all vulnerable in this universe.
## A Dead Ship is Matter
But after you've pummeled your enemy to the point of defeat, there will be lots of un-shielded mass. Battles will generate debris fields, and leave moons and shipyards unprotected. The Grey Goo can go to town with the mass you have generated, and overwhelm whatever defenses are left.
It's a natural "mop up" force in the universe you describe.
[Answer]
You might trust the swarm when it is mopping up a defeated enemy, but an enemy still able to resist has a variety of weapons or tricks that can deal with it.
Example:
The swarm can communicate instantly. This is a weakness if you can send signals too as if you are part of the swarm. Maybe you captured drones and manipulated them or you simply use the fact that it's not really possible to determine who or what is signalling. Since other drones will have to verify each other's signals all the time and you cannot allocate all memory to verifying every member of he swarm you are forced to let only a portion verify other drones. You introduce drones that are "verified" by other drones you own. Now you can do things to the swarm like attempting to alter it's parameters, feed false information or even say "hey there seem to be some imposters between us and I think it's this section of drones", after which an internal war breaks out.
Another example:
The swarm requires energy to function. Normally they get the energy out of the enemies they devour, but if those same enemies resist then suddenly the power requirements to devour and convert them go sky-high. If it takes a thousand drones worth of materials and energy just to defeat and convert one enemy it becomes an inefficient task.
[Answer]
# You cannot let your secret weapon fall into enemy hands
(This answer works generically for super-weapons of any type, not just Grey Goo.)
The Union has this devastatingly powerful military technology and their enemies do not. This weapon has several key advantages over the super-weapons of other factions, such that the other factions would desire to have the Grey Goo, *if they knew it existed*.
Deploying the Grey Goo at the beginning of a fight against a powerful enemy carries numerous risks. Firstly, by not yet having control over the area, the enemy is able to freely send transmissions to other bases, spilling your secret. Secondly, the Union is not guaranteed to win this engagement. If they lose, the Grey Goo is likely to be captured and reverse engineered. This would spell the end of the Union's strategic advantage.
However, by waiting for the enemy's defences to be broken and using the Grey Goo only for the final push, the Union ensures two things. Firstly, they have sufficient area control to block transmissions from being sent out (using whatever Sci-Fi transmission blocking tech works for your setting). Secondly, they are confident in their eventual victory, so there is virtually no risk of the Grey Goo being captured.
Why deploy the Grey Goo at all? Because mopping up those last vestiges of the enemy in their bunkers is costly and dangerous to do by other means, due to a tendency to make last stands and hide in fortifications and lay desperate traps, but Grey Goo works very well in these scenarios.
There may come a time in the future when the Union's backs are against the wall and they need to pull out all the stops to win a battle or a war. Only then will the Union openly deploy the Grey Goo and hope that it wins them the war fast enough that this enemy will not be able to reverse engineer it. However, by doing this the next enemy will know about Grey Goo and will become even more dangerous, so the Union will only do this if they are desperate.
This theme of being reserved in the use of advanced weapons is common in real life. [Proximity fuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze#Deployment) in World War II "were only used in situations where they could not be captured by the Germans", in this case over water (credit to [Mazura](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/799/mazura) for identifying this in a comment on the question). The nuclear bomb was developed in utmost secrecy in the Manhattan Project and was only deployed at the very end of the war when the Americans were confident that it would push the Japanese to surrender.
This theme appears in science fiction as well. E.E. Doc Smith's *Lensman* series contains galactic superpowers with weapons of similar scale to what you describe (plus or minus a few orders of magnitude, depending on whether you are at the start or end of the series). On numerous occasions a faction develops a potent new military technology, but is then extremely careful about when they deploy it because they know that the enemy faction will attempt to replicate and exceed it. They only deploy their new superweapons when they either can guarantee that no enemy witnesses will survive or send any transmissions, or that they desperately need to overcome the enemy right now in order to gain a long-term strategic advantage.
However, there is a BIG CAVEAT to this strategy of secrecy: It won't work forever. It is inevitable that, at some point, the enemy factions will learn about the Grey Goo. This might be due to them finally witnessing it in a deployment. Or it might be due to spies stealing the technology. If the timescale is measured in years you should be fine. If the timescale is measured in millennia you'll have plausibility issues. Because of this, the Union should be actively researching a bigger and better super-weapon for when their Grey Goo stops being novel.
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**Larger masses of grey-goo become susceptible to takeover of control**
Imagine the grey goo being some kind of susceptible to telepathic control or hacking once a certain mass is reached. If your enemies are capable in that area, you might have your super weapons wrestled from your hands and turned against you.
So better just use it to wipe the floor with the inferior ranks of the enemy and leave an impression after the decision has been reached already.
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[Question]
[
My search did not turn up anything on this site, which kind of surprised me. So here we go:
* Late Iron Age (think roman) backdrop
* There are augmented humans, really good fighters. They would be able to fight up to [NOT REALLY MY POINT, A LARGE NUMBER] "normal" combatants at the same time and win, given they have enough fuel. Basically a biological tank.
* 500 is actually a huge number of fighters for the armies of the factions within my project.
* Fuel: They need some rather common (low-yield) or rare (high-yield) substances to fuel their abilities. If you take their fuel away, they could just get it by force from another place, since most are naturally occurring substances.
**From the perspective of a guild, which creates these fighters at a really high upfront cost and high education costs, how can you ensure loyalty/obedience to your guild?**
You lend them to people who pay you. They go on missions (exterminations, protection etc.) .
**Please don't:**
- Mind Control.
- Make them dumb. To fight effectively they actually have to be smart (akin to modern elite soldiers)
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[I removed a bunch of statements intended to "rank" those soldiers power-wise]
There has been some confusion wherever these fighters are wizards, from the future or whatever.
My Point is, it does not matter much. They are humans with the power to kill armies, but normal humans in all other aspects. The interesting part is how to control somebody who is presumably stronger than you and not dumb.
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Historically, militaristic castes - not even supersoldiers - ended up taking control of societies or organizations that created them. This shouldn't be surprising as they become essentially the same as any other skilled worker, your organization's viability and profitability relies upon them and they can substantially damage your reputation without anything like explicit rebellion simply by underperforming or being uncooperative. Examples include samurai and janissaries, and fear of professional soldiers led to China to rely heavily on levies; at its most extreme, in the Song dynasty barely having much of a military at all.
So the question essentially would be - how do you prevent skilled employees from becoming dominant? You want to prevent them from unionizing in any way, essentially, from exerting in cooperation.
1) First solution is to have your guild leadership be entirely or at least significantly composed of the same type of supersoldiers. Then you can just ritualize dispute resolution through honor systems, e.g. dueling to handle scores and disagreements - violent methods are useful here as it can form a common front of understanding that's already a core competency required in their profession. By emphasizing individual or cliquish bonds, this prevents the "super soldiers" from seeing the "leadership" of the guild as an other, and therefore devolves into typical cliques at most.
2) An religious or ideological solution has been suggested by others, but it needs to also have a status component that isn't focused on violence, since the supersoldiers know that they are highly superior in that context. If the leadership knows esoterica and as seen as holding divine mysteries, which the supersoldiers are mostly ignorant of or which only a few have granted access to, then this means that they will find reason to respect physically more normal humans for their spiritual vastness. Having "initiated" inner circle supersoldiers be particularly gifted or powerful further creates that sense of awe or respect.
3)Intense competition - if being a supersoldier isn't that uncommon and there are a lot of them, then their challenge is finding patrons and staying employed. Violence won't be a solution if brigandry will be met by their own kind; therefore they will stay loyal to the guild who will take on the more onerous task of marketing, contracting and reputation management and they can focus on what they are most familiar with: bashing heads.
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Trying to enforce loyalty and obedience is generally a bit of a non-starter, but there various ways you might get them to toe the line.
Firstly, make sure the training is shrouded in secrecy and spread all sorts of ominous, yet plausible (and probably entirely false) rumours about what goes on. Do you training in highly secure, hard-to-get to regions... go for the whole "warrior monk" stereotype. Run the thing like a [mystery cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_mysteries).
Don't let your trainees and regular folk mingle. Make sure to remind all your trainees how much vastly more powerful they are than the masses. Make sure regular humans are treated with contempt. At the same time, spread rumours about how your trainees are terrifying monsters... not to the extent that people are scared enough to break out the torches and pitchforks and burn down your nice mountain retreat, but, y'know, claim that they probably eat babies or something.
Tell the trainees that the fuel they consume must be blessed or otherwise processed via sacred rite in order to work. Don't let on that it can be trivially replaced. Tell them dire stories of what happens when they consume unblessed fuel. If you were feeling optimistic, make an example of a failing or traitorous (heretical, perhaps) trainee with a dose of some unpleasant poison. Spread rumours in the outside world of the dire threat posed by the unblessed fuel to discourage other people from stockpiling it, and take steps to secure or destoy it as practical.
Should a trainee attempt to break ranks, well. They're [institutionalised now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutionalisation), and surviving outside the walls of the monastery amongst people they've only ever known as greedy weaklings who will in turn treat the trainee as a murderous baby eating demon is going to be challenging. They have no support networks. No money. Maybe no possessions. Their best initial hope is going to be miserable banditry, and stories of demon-bandits will make it back to the monastery at which point groups of your former peers, well fed, well equipped and working as a team, will come out and end your petty reign of terror.
Should another power shelter you... another church or kingdom or whatever, then it will be open season on those people. Cheap mercenary work. All the enemies of the demon-harboiring kingdom will be able to get cut-price supersoldiers. And what good will it do to those who shelter you? You can't teach them the mysteries... you're a grunt, not a teacher, and even if a teacher *did* somehow defect (fighting against the only family they've ever known, perhaps, against everything they hold true) what good is one ageing supersoldier? They'll never set up a good enough school quickly enough to protect them from their former peers.
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## Go the [assassin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Assassins#Legends_and_folklore) route.
Get them hooked on something, then control the supply to make sure they obey
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**Citizens first, soldiers second.**
Your supersoldiers are ordinary citizens. In return for military duty they are given good state-owned farmlands and the profits they reap from using them. Their super abilities are useful in nonmilitary contexts too. These soldiers have families and they children will inherit their lands. The citizen supersoldiers have a big stake in the polity remaining as it is. This worked for the Byzantines for a very long time - the [theme system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(Byzantine_district)).
**Division of power.**
Your supersoldiers are divided into legions. Legions will be structured along similar lines although a given legion might have particular strengths making it more suited for a given task than the other legions. When there is a need to deploy the supersoldiers, it is all soldiers from the same legion that deploy.
If the supersoldiers in a given legion rebel, the other legions can set them straight. Even if two legions collude to rebel, there are several legions total and the loyalists will be set against the rebels.
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<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/616458.Ranks_of_Bronze>
Aliens literally abduct a Roman Legion right before they all die due to losing a battle. The aliens then force them to fight for the next 2000 years in low-tech wars across the galaxy. Great book series. I highly recommend giving it a read.
Control mechanism #1: is that you are more powerful and/or technologically advanced than those you are controlling. If your guild is creating these soldiers, then the creators are keeping the best for themselves, or they have other tools, and are in line with each other ideologically, whether that be under a specific leader, supporting a specific cause, etc.
Control mechanism #2: The guild has various groups that can be used to keep individual groups in check. Look at universal soldier for this. One solider goes rogue, and multiple other super soldiers are there to (try) to keep the rogue in check. Everyone is getting paid or generally doesn't want to rock the boat. They all know the risk of bucking the system, and most don't, which includes enforcing orders to kill rogues even though maybe they would rather not.
Control mechanism #3: The guild can ultimately just go after your family, torture you to death, or a number of other extremely undesirable situations that would keep everyone else in line. Of course the entire organization needs to be set up in a way where this is a normal course of business for them.
Control mechanism 4: Have a substance the super soldiers require, and not getting it kills them and/or is extremely unpleasant for them.
Control mechanism 5: Shock collars, bomb implants, and anything else that means rebellion = instant pain and death.
Control mechanism 6: They don't need to be controlled. They love what they do and why they do it. Maybe the love killing, maybe they love defending freedom, or maybe all of the above. The number that do rebel are low enough in number so as to not matter or be easily taken down.
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You kind of already have most of your answers within the premise. Though I have some arguments against the amount of power you are talking about.
* Supply lines/Logistics. So, with enough fuel, your guys can do anything. Well, even if these aren't rare substances, they are things that have to come with. Sabotage the supply lines, burn stuff, taint the supply...I can think of lots of different things you can do with this. They aren't just naturally powerhouses. They NEED something. Even if it is something common, it will quickly become valued, simply because it's super-soldier fuel. You say that they can just "go get more" but that's on the premise that they don't RUN OUT before they can. And if I know people, they will exploit the ever-loving crap out of that. One single person can be smart, but it just takes one ordinary general who is smarter...I can tell you this, most of the more famous military successes in centuries past became famous for one reason: logistics. It's not glamorous, but I would seriously look into it. Regular troops, like your specials, need fuel/food. It was the generals that figured out how to most efficiently supply that during their time, and limit the ability of the other side that had to supply their troops that won. And they lost when they could not do this (see Napoleon).
* They aren't super without some substance. Make it addictive or special and you are halfway there to control. Even if it isn't, you can make it quasi-religious. See how the Founders handled their soldiers and the White in *Star Trek DS9*. I would recommend modifying what they are fueled with and how.
* You already have a guild/society structure in mind. This means rules. This means the enforcement of those rules by the people in the society, including those soldiers. People at the top and on down will have a vested interest in enforcing those rules. See *John Wick 2 & 3*. These killing machines have a structured society. It just means that other killing machines will be sent to kill you when you step out of line.
Therefore, when they follow the rules they get rights and privileges. When they do not, those are taken away, up to an escalation that includes death.
* Not that this answers your question directly, but...500 people? Why that number specifically? Given that most armies aren't more than a few thousand, just one or two of these guys would be more than significant--and that stops it from being interesting or challenging. Given that organized efforts of humans have brought down larger and stronger prey in our history, I really don't see how that can be true, unless this is a kung fu movie and they decide to stupidly fight him 1-3 at a time? We can be very, very resourceful as a group, so...please don't discount that. Enough humans with the right tools and strategy can definitely defeat one superpowered moderately smart single human. Unless you're talking Homelander (from *The Boys*) levels of power here (like Superman).
I said the above doesn't directly answer your question because it does in an indirect way. Ordinary, everyday humans, when they work cooperatively, are a force to be reckoned with. These guys shouldn't be untouchable. Narratively, I would want them to be powered enough to be arrogant, but, with the concerted effort of regular people--defeatable. Might not be easy, but it should be more possible than you've made it.
* Kryptonite. Your problem is a problem already faced and solved by the creators of Superman. See, the comic book writers had a problem. They'd written a totally invulnerable, superstrong hero. So they created something to make him vulnerable. Pretty soon, the stuff was EVERYWHERE. Everyone had it. Contrast Batman with Superman. Batman's awesome, he has great gear, but he's not invulnerable, he's not so powered that we never believe that he's in peril. It's easier to create stakes then.
Point is--your guys can still make a significant difference without being overpowered. Anyway, everyone's more scared of Batman.
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but to control a powerful human you just need a more powerful one. That, or to have enough power in general, either raw, economical, or political.
In terms of raw power, you just have to set up an organizational structure where you have enough powerful and loyal enforcers to keep the workers in control, or the leader is so powerful no one can think to rebel against him.
Economic power is something that also cannot be underestimated; an army can destroy a city by itself, but who will provide the food? A bunch of superhuman folk would probably not deign to go out and farm for themselves, so having a big guild to solve the problem of logistics would be a big help to them.
A thanks to Li Yun for discussing economic power/logistics in the comments below, as he/she pointed out that economic power alone cannot keep a group of people under control, because the super-humans can just migrate to another group. Still, economic power is very important because the superhumans would want to procure the best equipment and best treatment. The economic power of a guild would allow them to provide those incentives, and the best guilds would be able to offer incentives and equipment that lesser guilds simply cannot compare with.
TL;DR, competition and being the best at something, whether it's raw power, or economy, will naturally allow the structure of guilds to stay in place. Loyalty due to power is not as 'stable' as faith or mind control, but it is naturally occurring and the simplest cause for stability. It will also be easily acceptable for any readers, because it draws a parallel with our own society.
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This is iron age time. Any super soldiers you create will mean that you are viewed either as a wizard/witch or a holy priest offering godly boons. Since the wizard/witch thing is burned most of the time the priesthood is the best option.
As priesthood offering godly powers to people you already have a lot of power over the one's you enhance. They have to be pious believers in your god. But this isnt enough, perhaps a rebellion did occur that was stopped by other supersoldiers or by the ruling soldiers not being able to make more, or maybe they just build precautions. No matter what they decide to not tell the supersoldiers what exactly their fuel is, and ritualize the fuel to such an extend that it is taken after priests have prepared it. You arent offering fuel, but special food enhanced with godly powers from the priesthood.
There is still something that can go wrong, these are smart super-soldiers so there is going to be at least one that's going to be asking some questions. Answer those questions as follows: the fuel you take is lethal for normal humans, only someone as godly as you can take it, in fact its the purity and lethality of the substance that makes it such a good fuel for these super-soldiers (this is whar you tell them, not what is true). This makes sense for the super-soldier who already does things no ordinary human does every day and prevents the super-soldier from forcing a priest to create it under threat of life and subsequently to let the priest ingest it to test its effects. Then you let slip some formula's and ingredients of dangerous substances supposedly used in the creation of the fuel. These have nothing to do with the actual fuel as you want any runaway super-soldier trying to make his own fuel to kill him/herself in the process.
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**Faith**! Or **indoctrination** or **brain-washing** whichever you prefer.
Make them not just an elite, but "chosen by the gods themselves", or so they are indoctrined from the earliest days of childhood alongside their martial training and never to question this dogma. Thus, fighting faithfully according to this code which should include obedience to their superiors within their guild and absolute loyalty with the worst pains of hell awaiting them in the afterlife, if they ever were to go against your principles.
While training the children/youngsters after removing them from their birth families in order to become this elite, make sure to instill in them the belief that their special fighting gifts have been granted to them by the gods, but can also be taken away when turning aginst said deities. While they are still young, create scenarios where you let them fail purposefully as a punishment for ever breaking their code and instill in them the notion that breaking the code will take away their powers. This can be via feeding drugs to wrong-doers without them noticing which will deminish their physical prowess and mental capabilities and showing their failure publicly as to turn all others of breaking their code and ever turning against their god-given place.
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since your super soldier is an augmented soldier and the guild create it, i guess the guild can monopolize on their maintenance, they are the only person know how to fix and have the spare parts, so.... either way they have no choice but to obey.
also give them good payment (if they still want/need money) to make sure they dont think themself as slave or have some higher status than slave or commoner.
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The guild leaders have something that the super-soldiers need but can't produce themselves.
This could be...
1) The super-soldiers are all addicted to a very rare drug that only the guild leaders can produce.
Taking the drug produces an effect so pleasurable that they can't live without it, and therefore willingly obey the guild leaders.
The drug is produced by a kind of magic that the soldiers don't have.
2) The super-soldiers are all infected by an incurable disease. They need a dose every so-often or they will become very sick or die. Only the guilds can produce a medicine.
3) Though the soldiers are powerful, they need some sort of special equipment to be at maximum strength. The equipment wears out and needs to be replaced regularly. Only the guilds have a means of producing the equipment.
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One approach to take from real-world history would be to do as the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate did, hold their families. If we presume that every soldier has a family, then have the guilds control their access to their families. For example, have a soldier go out on a mission or many missions for six months, and then spend three months with the guild training, learning, etc., but also spending time with their family. The family live a comfortable life with the guild, but can't leave (this also allows soldiers' children to be raised in a controlled environment). The soldiers then know that if they disobey their guild, then the guild will harm/kill/etc. their families. However, if they stay loyal, then their families will continue to lead comfortable lives and they will be allowed to see them.
This idea can even be extended into time limitations. For example, if a soldier is minorly disobedient, then the time next spend with his family can be reduced or the like. This allows temporary punishment to continue ensuring loyalty. However, this would have to be coupled with longer visits for acts of extreme loyalty so as to also provide an incentive to the soldiers, otherwise they'll just become bitter toward the guild, and thus less productive overall.
This solution isn't perfect, but could certainly be one way of controlling them to a point. If you combine this with some of the other ideas suggested here, you could certainly have a viable way of controlling these soldiers.
Hope this helps!
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Go the **[Janissaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries)** route that the Ottoman Turkish empire used.
Very short version:
* Kidnap children so they have no familial loyalty to anyone in your empire. (Or augment children; or maybe the process makes this moot.)
* Maintain strict discipline.
* Instill a code of honor. (Look at thinks like bushido or chivalry for ideas.) A sense of patriotism - or, better, devotion directly to the king/emperor/whatever - would be a bonus.
* Like many Special Forces groups today, teach them they are the best-of-the-best, and superior to "normal" people.
* Pay them very, very well.
Because of the first one, they have no external loyalty. Because of the second and third, they are easier to control. Because of the fourth and fifth one, they are harder to bribe: they already have a "better" life than the "mere" mundanes of the realm.
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Adopting them as babies and raising them to be unconditionally loyal should be the norm. It's not mind control, but more like long term brain washing. It's similar to the story of how a baby elephant was tied using a chain that it couldn't break, no matter what, untill it simply stopped trying, and even a simple rope would now suffice despite it having grown up. If a person is raised to listen to orders from a young age, their brain literally gets hardwired by the time they become adults and it's very difficult to break through such a mental chain.
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In WWII, the doctrine for tanks included different roles -- Anti-infantry tanks, tank-destroyers, the British had cruiser tanks (intended for flanking). Perhaps your soldiers have similar roles, and order is enforced by only allowing the most loyal, proven members to train in the anti-supersoldier schools?
Further, in real life martial arts, wrestling was one of the more effective styles in early mixed martial arts, as many fights end up on the ground. However, attempting to wrestle multiple people at once leaves the wrestler in a very vulnerable position, as pinning one opponent will leave them open to strikes from the other. Perhaps the anti-supersoldier school is similarly weak against groups, rendering this caste useless without the normal supersoldiers to lord over. This provides them with a strong incentive to stay loyal to the guild, and is also a potential source of dramatic tension.
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If your forces see themselves as mercenaries then the corruptibility of human nature will lead them astray, and some may become uncontrollable.
From history and fiction, there are several examples you can draw inspiration from for how to create a disciplined and loyal cadre of soldiers.
In no particular order of importance, you need to establish the proper culture, a sense of interdependence, and esprit de corps.
Culture: The social structure your soldiers must establish the need to see loyalty and discipline as a point of honor, and a condition of membership within their 'tribe'. That honorable and respectable soldiers are committed to the goals of their officers. And, the officers, in turn, see the goals of those that are leasing their services as of tantamount importance. Examples from history are Samurai or Janissaires serving with absolute fielty to their liege lord. From fiction, the Sardukar from Frank Herbert's Dune novels is one example, of many.
Sense of Interdependence: You soldiers need to know that they need on another to be victorious on the field of battle. This is over and above disciplined. They need to know that they are fighting as much to keep themselves alive to keep their teammates alive too. I think this is important because its harder for groups of people to turn their back on their traditions compared to one person. The group keeps everyone focused on the values of the group. I always thought this was a trait of the Fremen in Herbert's Dune novels.
Esprit de Corp: This instills a sense of separateness from the rest of humanity and is a source of resilience and strength in times of adversity. The value of the second part is self-evident. The first part might seem counter to logic. My reasoning is if these super-soldiers see themselves as alien to the world around them, then it will be harder for them to be seduced by relationship and opportunities that lie outside the group. And, it will make them feel odd to regular people too. This further distances them from relationships that might compete with their loyalty to the overall tribe, which keeps them loyal to their tribe.
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You can't control them by religion. Religions are like memes (if you ignore the esoteric part of summoning spirits/astrology/alchemy/geomancy) and memes evolve with time, selecting the variations most useful, most fulfilling to it's followers. In your case that means that eventually your super soldiers will modify it and soon they will have a prophet justifying them taking over your kingdom.
You can't control them with money/land/women because if they are supersoldiers they can TAKE the money and gold and the women.
You can't drug them: you don't want supersoldiers with withdrawal symptoms because the supply network broke down because of enemy horsemen raiders pillaging the carts.
So they will eventually take over the leadership of your kingdom, like the Mamluks of Egypt.
What they can't do is rule your (now theirs) empire without bureaucrats. The bureucrats will carry their edicts and bring them information. So the bureaucracy will be their eyes and hands once they take over. So if you control what they see (the inflow of data) and what they do (the outflow of data, to carry the edicts) you control them.
This control can't be done by a single individual because if the supermen get pissed off they can simply kill the annoying bureaucrat. But they can't kill ALL bureaucrats. So, factions of bureaucrats can control them after they take over. You will get the ocasional harsh superman that will purge a lot of bureaucrats, but the bureaucratic class, the mandarins, will always be there...
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**Don't put all your eggs in one basket**
The key to any rebellion is to turn enough of an organization's forces against itself. If you can only turn a small fraction to be disloyal, then the rebels will be killed by the loyalists. So, instead of having a single central location where you train and barrick all of your superhumans, you seperate them in small cadres located across the whole country side. Each group is taught that betrayal is the gravest crime a person can commit, and it is their first and most important duty to end a betrayer's life.
In this manner, if a single soldier steps out of line, he knows his cadre is sworn to kill him, because that is what he is sworn to do. He also knows that even if he can convince his whole cadre to join him in a rebellion (they are his friends after all) that there are 20 other cadres out there who he does not know who WILL hunt them down if he tries.
This fear of death for disloyalty means that many of the super soldiers will play the part of being loyal as best as they can, even if they feel in their hearts it's not quite right. Their friends who see this loyalty to the guild will then be reinforced in their belief that they will be killed for disloyalty; so, they too play the part.
By keeping cadres separate and isolated, you also control information because there is no counterpoint to your words. If you only have 20 cadres but you tell everyone you have 60, then even if a large number betrays you, they will be on the run instead of turning to fight you believing that it's only a matter of time before you muster the full strength of the guild to put them down.
As long as you keep each soldier believing that you will always have enough loyalist to win, rebellion will feel just as daunting as if they were normal soldiers in a normal army.
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[Question]
[
I thought the answer would be simple and maybe it is, but it's just rattling my brain.
If there was a planet 100 times the circumference of Earth, assuming everything is similar to Earth, 1 day (1 rotation) is 24 hours (therefore the planet will be spinning faster than Earth?) so I was wondering:
Would there still be 24 time zones, one for each hour? As the planet is just a sphere and the sun would just simply hit the areas it can see regardless of the larger size. So I'm assuming there would only 24 zones.
But trying to imagine someone getting up in China the same time someone gets up on the west coast of America is getting to me, but since the planet must be spinning faster to compensate, it should make sense?
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You don't need to consider another planet, Earth is sufficient for this question.
The real problem is in thinking of time zones as a natural phenomenon. They aren't.
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Take where I am right now. I'm located somewhat west of the center of my timezeone, so my clock is 20 minutes faster than a sun-based clock. And then there is daylight saving time, which adds another hour. Does it bother me (and others) that our clocks are "wrong" by an hour and twenty minutes? Not at all. Most people aren't even aware of the concept.
Take China as a larger example. By the sun, one end of the country is 4 hours different from the other end. But unlike other countries, China has only 1 official time zone, not 5. When some people get up and have breakfast their clocks will say 6:00, while for other people it will say 10:00. But in both cases, the sun has just risen. For some people "noon" is at 10:00, for others it is at 14:00. The official clock time doesn't match the sun's clock, but people get used to it.
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And as for making a planet larger, it makes no difference. We can already see that situation here on Earth.
At the equator, 1-hour time zones are about 1000 miles across, but farther north, the lengths of the latitudes get smaller.
Iceland's time zone is only 440 miles across.
Even farther north, at Alert, Nunavut, Canada, the timezone is only 135 miles across.
Stand near the North Pole (or South Pole), and walk around it. You'll have to change your watch by an hour after each step.
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Obviously time zones can become confusing and inconvenient when they are too small, but in such situations (remember, the zones are an entirely artificial human invention) it's common to designate the whole area as a single time zone (typically UTC) even though it spans many, or even all, actual time zones.
But in the OP situation, everything is larger, not smaller, so, except near the poles, time zones would be even less of a problem than they are on Earth.
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I sense some confusion in your ideas, let's try to set things straight.
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> a planet 100 times the size of earth, assuming everything is similar to earth, 1 day (1 rotation) is 24 hours (therefore the planet will be spinning faster than earth?)
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Setting aside the plausibility of such a planet, Earth does a complete rotation around itself in 24 hours. This planet does a complete rotation around itself in 24 hours. The rotational velocity is the same for both.
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> Would there still be 24 time zones, one for each hour?
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In principle yes, but it can also be that, due to the larger linear distances between the zone extremes, half hour time zones can be used. Don't forget time zones are just a convention, in the past each city had its own time.
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> But trying to imagine someone getting up in China the same time someone gets up on the west coast of America is getting to me,
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This is blatantly false: if you look at the official [time zones on Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets),
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3ejDX.jpg)
You see that while China is +8 UTC, America west coast is -8 UTC. This means 16 hours difference.
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If the planet rotates at the same rate as Earth, it'll have the same difference in sunrise, sunset, noon and midnight times for a given number of degrees of longitude, so will have the same "number of time zones" as Earth. These zones will naturally be *much* wider than those on Earth, but they'll work just the same way -- including needing a "date line" so you don't lose a day if you circumnavigate to the west (as Magellan's crew did).
However: The contiguous United States has four time zones for a width of around 3000 miles. If the United States were, instead, 300,000 miles wide, there might well be three *hundred* time zones. Why?
Time zones originally came from railroads. Before the 1860s, each town would set its clocks based on (usually) local noon, because it's easy to measure. But with railroads and telegraphs, it was necessary to know what time the train would arrive and depart -- which meant it was necessary, as well, to know what time it was in Tempe when you were leaving Kansas City. Having only four zones for the whole nation meant you could know that Tempe, Sheridan, and Butte had their clocks set the same -- and telegraphy made this actually practical, by allowing near-instantaneous transmission of time synchronizing signals.
But trains can only travel a few hundred miles in a day (at least with early steam technology), so there's no need to have time zones as coarse as 75,000 miles across -- there might well be "minute" zones, and they'd still be wider than the "hour" zones we have on Earth.
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Another way to approach the problem:
>
> "Suppose humans were 1/10th their current size. Would that require any change to time zones?"
>
>
>
No, not really.
As others have said here, time zones aren't a natural phenomenon, so there's no reason to make a change unless we wanted one.
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"Timezone" are all "subjective"! It was first created by [Scottish-born Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone) in 1876. It's all for us-human-being's convenience!
The very fact that the timezone lines on Earth are all crooked at many places prove it!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Zkd7.jpg)
The main part of Greenland lay across 4 timezones! But they don't like the idea and make the whole chunk of land under 1 timezone!
And if you across the sea from the Northwest coast to Quttinirpaaq National Park, you had "jumped" across "**TWO**" timezones!
And certain countries have "Daylight Saving Time"! Which means in the same timezone, the time is different in Summer and Winter time!
That further proved that "time and timezone" are all for "**OUR**" convenience!
So to come back to your question, you could have "**as many timezones as you want**"!
You can even divide the globe into "15-minute-timezones" if you so wish!
And that might be a better idea since your planet is SO~ big!
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It depends what you want out of your timezones. If we consider an idealized Earth time-zone, it is 1 hour 'wide', meaning that at each edge of the zone, sundials will disagree by a difference of 1 hour.
If then we consider what it means for the sundials to differ by that amount, we can realize that it means they are resting at different angles (since the Earth's surface is roughly spherical). The exact angle just so happens to be 1/24th of the way around the Earth, or 360 \* 1/24 = 15 degrees. So, our ideal time zone is 15 degrees wide.
Now, let us change the size of the planet. Since a circle of any size still encompasses 360 degrees, a 1-hour time zone would still cover 15 degrees.
So, in conclusion, the width of the time zones are determined more by the time difference than anything else, and as other answers have suggested, the time difference is a purely social/political/economical decision.
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There is no reason to have 12 (24) hours per day other than "because".
In ancient Babylonia, people used a sexagesimal (base-6, not base-10) counting system. For... whatever reason. Which means that everything, length, weight, *and time* was measured and accounted for in multiples of 6.
So for example, you would have *us*, which was 60 ells, and *nus* and *sar*, which were multiples of that (*sar* would be 1800 ells). Very queer, but I guess if you count base-6 then it feels quite normal.
It so happens that 10 is not a multiple of 6, but 12 is. Hence the day (the complete day, including night!) had 12 *danna*. This, somehow, nobody knows how, remained until some 2,000-3,000 years later, the Italians started counting not at midnight, but when the sun rises, and they thought that a two-hour period was too coarse over the (half) day, so they split the *danna* in two, giving 24 hours on what's called the "big clock".
Some hundred years later, people found it easier, and cheaper, to use the "little clock" where you no longer have 24 hours, but 12 + 12 hours instead, reusing the same dial on the exceedingly difficult to manufacture and extremely expensive single mechanical clock they could (maybe, possibly, if lucky) afford.
So, it all boils down to what you count in, and what you are comfortable with. Your planet is twice or twenty times or a hundred times the size? Can still count 12 hours, or 120 hours. Or, while you are at it, why not precisely 1,000 hours which would work much better with SI units.
I'd consider "What about gravity?" a much more challenging question if your planet is that big. A hundred times the circumference means it has ten thousand times the gravity (give or take some, might be somewhat more or less, depending on density, the general figure remains though). Does it rotate so fast that centrifugal force at least partly compensates for stuff weighting 10,000 times as much? That'd be fun watching stars in the sky :-)
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[Question]
[
Under what circumstances could a civilization that was roughly 100 years in advance of present day American society have a strong cultural awareness of "monsters" that included myths and legends, and various taboo about areas that the creatures were said to inhabit, or things that you should avoid doing in order not to attract them, but have little or no scientific data on the creatures themselves?
I'm envisioning a situation where a creature of some form exists, and parents warn their children about it in the form of fairytales, or act as if it is a cautionary take used to warn children about everyday dangers. Yet the society is fully aware that the creatures are real, and there is no official denial of their existence. Attacks by them are reported on the news in the same way that a bear attack might be treated in our world, and people do things like admonishing their neighbors for breaking certain taboo in the same way that someone in our world might tell a neighbor to secure their garbage cans to stop animals getting in.
But for reasons yet to be determined the creatures are treated as if it were folklore. Research on them is conducted by Sharman\Wiseman like figures, they are discussed on conspiracy websites. Little or no scientific research has ever been done on them.
I want to avoid ideas with religious or spiritual overtones.
The community in which this occurs is a colony that was set up several generations ago, it is left open whether they migrated from another region or another planet.
This is primarily to explain why an advanced civilisation might be geographically isolated and living in small communities surround by dense woodlands.
The creatures are rare and elusive, and while they are dangerous they don't represent an existential threat to the people's existence. They are like ... bears in Alaska, if bears were treated like bigfoot by local people.
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## They just don't show up that often.
It's not even that weird. Giant Squid and Colossal Squid are two different species which we've seen, have videos of, even have cadavers of. And we know next to nothing about them that isn't speculation.
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**It is against the law to use government funds to study these monsters.**
<https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-gun-violence-research-money/>
>
> For all the obsession that Americans have with guns, the country has
> awful little scientific data to show for it. In 1996, Congress passed
> a law with a provision known as the Dickey Amendment that effectively
> prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using
> its life-saving budget to study gun violence. As a result, for decades
> the US has not thrown its full resources at the problem the way it has
> with, say, tobacco or car crashes.
>
>
>
People in the US definitely know about gun violence and especially mass murders with guns. They are in the news every month, at least. There are "shooter" drills at schools. Workplaces have advice about what to do if a shooter shows up; on one of these at my workplace is an icon of people fighting a shooter with a cell phone, a stapler and a trash can.
But despite the deaths, in the US there are laws against using government funds to study gun violence. There is consequently very little scientific understanding of what is happening and why.
So it is with your monsters. They kill people. Everyone knows it. There is word of mouth advice and ad hoc procedures to try to steer clear of the monsters. But there is no scientific study because it is against the law. They do not want to understand their monsters just as in the US we do not want to understand ours.
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It is impossible to even write the term "gun violence" without immediate negative reaction by some parties. This is why there is the law. But it is possible to use science fiction to comment on the real world in ways that concrete thinkers will not perceive to be relevant to their interests. I am afraid I am outing you and your very clever scifi commentary concept. Good luck!
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## They're considered potentially sentient... by a few cranks.
Your people are *colonists*, not *invaders*. They are peaceful people who are *definitely not* stealing and terraforming the homeworld of another species, even one with primitive technology.
In order to *preserve* their clean conscience, and avoid any untoward bureaucratic issues with their settlements, it is best not to harass any local wildlife that shows occasional signs of inspiration such as ambushing tourist busses or playing with valves on pipelines. These are just noble beasts, occasionally playful or curious, which one should be careful to stay clear of. There is a *plan* to study them when sufficient resources are available, but first the natural ecosystem should be preserved outside the settlements. They'll get back to you about the timeline.
Those who investigate such beasts on their own should be viewed as loose cannons, harassers of the natural ecosystem, accused of cruelty in their interactions with wildlife, risking desensitizing the wildlife to contact with civilization and therefore putting others at risk, in pursuit of a fringe theory based on rank speculation.
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**Science and real-world logic is your friend here**
Science and skepticism go hand in hand. Also, even in our modern world, superstition is very much a thing, and old superstitions can become cultural practices over time. *Especially* when breaking tradition and entering the forbidden woods around the village results in people either never coming back or coming back traumatized and telling crazy stories.
Think about it this way; IRL people believed in all sorts of monsters, but as time went on, most of us became skeptical and outright disbelieving of monsters. If cryptids do exist, natural skepticism, difficulty in finding any monster evidence, the relative rarity of monster encounters, and so on make it so most of us don't believe in them. I can't speak for everyone, but I know for a fact most of us Westerners like certain proof before we believe in things like pixies and goatmen!
**And from this we can conclude:**
* Just like in real life, wildlife will be rarely seen in civilization. There's just not a lot of animals in the city, because most animals avoid people and don't like being in our altered environments, and those that don't have that problem are pretty dang good at escaping notice. **In other words, monsters will be in areas people don't spend much time in or be extremely evasive.**
**- People are adverse to danger.** There's not exactly a lot of people who are willing to get into a wild animal's space, let alone take a job involving a substantial risk of death, so if we take a page from the *Monster Hunter* game series and assume that these monsters are dangerous and relatively widespread outside settled areas, and that they attack anyone dumb enough to enter their territory (see below), **not many people will come back from jobs requiring one to enter monster territory, and those that do will likely sound crazy and have little to no evidence that they're telling the truth.**
I mean, come on, what kind of person is going to have the presence of mind to collect a biological sample and bring it back to civilization, let alone the means? No, far more likely survivors ran for it with their lives intact but not much else-which will be expensive to pay off, as I'm sure corporations will demand recompense for lost and destroyed equipment.
And plus, who would be stupid enough to study something that kills everyone that goes near it?
* Natural selection will also play a role. If the monsters that avoid towns, cities, really just groups of people survive better than the ones that don't, modern monsters will instinctively avoid human civilization. Additionally, if being hostile to those humans who do enter their territory aids in survival, chances are it'll become a near-universal if not totally universal monster trait. And that will *totally* happen, because if people can survive a monster encounter, they'll realize the monsters are beatable and kill them off, but if no one seems to come back alive or sane from such-and-such area.....
**TL;DR: people are adaptive, but they are also smart enough to pick up on patterns. If bad things seem to happen to one's health or sanity when one enters the wilderness, and attempts to expand go wrong, they'll stay where they are because it's *safe.* And for the monster's part, if bad things happen to monsters that enter civilization and get noticed by humans, they'll adapt to avoid humans. In conclusion, the conflict between species will likely cause both sides to avoid the other!**
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## Heisenbugs
In software development, a [Heisenbug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug) is a bug or glitch that refuses to happen when you're looking for it.
It's a pun-name based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics where observation of a particle changes its behaviour.
Your monsters are somewhat similar. When attempts are made to study them, they simply don't appear, or operate differently.
* The demon-bear is just another bear when observed by someone attempting to study it.
* The red-eyed dire-wolves are just wolves until you're on-foot and alone in the dark woods.
* Bigfoot only appears to the credulous.
No deliberate attempt to study the beasts will ever turn up anything but normal and well-understood animals, but still the villages are plagued by the borderline supernatural (or actually supernatural) monsters.
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### Frame challenge: This cannot happen under any circumstances
The OP says
>
> while they are dangerous they don't represent an existential threat to the people's existence
>
>
>
Whether it'll kill the entire species is irrelevant. If it injures enough people to cause significant distress - and "enough" is one person! - it will ***always*** be investigated.
History shows that it doesn't matter how many cultural or religious taboos are in place when it comes to this. The extreme example is medicine, where the causes are often obscure, the effects are hard to analyse, and every society has some kind of body-contact taboos. Still, every society also has some long-standing practise of medicine, regardless of effectiveness.
In a primitive society, it is entirely possible that people would simply avoid the area with a taboo. Even taboos are data though - they would reflect knowledge of the creature's territory, abilities or hunting patterns. That knowledge may be flawed (Gerald Durrell described demonstrating to the people of Bafut that a snake they thought was particularly deadly was actually harmless) but it still reflects the people's best information available.
But the existence of a more technologically advanced society than our own ***requires*** the scientific process to be in place. This is simply a prerequisite for technology. At that point, taboos are replaced by conscious factual discussion, by definition of how this process works.
Granted that there may be risks in studying the creature, those risks are information in themselves which feeds into how you can do that studying. Pathogens such as Ebola are a useful example of this - we know just how dangerous they are, and the information about risk has been used to develop safer ways to study them. Or in environments which humans can't realistically reach/survive, such as the deep ocean or space, we've developed remote-operated and autonomous vehicles.
Subcultures of this advanced society may still have taboos, sure, in the same way as most fundamentalist religious subcultures have taboos against discussion of human reproductive biology. This does not mean that the entire society lacks that information, only that these subcultures consciously hide information as a means of controlling "their" people. And again, because a technologically-advanced society requires the scientific process, these must be subcultures. If they were in control then the society could not become technologically advanced, as amply demonstrated by Europe in the Dark Ages.
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The answer to your question depends greatly on the context surrounding the civilization therein.
On the one hand, it would be really easy for there to be detailed cultural mythos and superstitions surrounding said creatures. Just look at how people treat bears today: we make them the subject of our folktales (*Goldilocks and the Three Bears*), tell stories with them, yet in most cases also have a pretty healthy fear/respect for them and will do just about anything to avoid having them cross our path (bells, bear spray, etc.). Or look at how people in the Kamchatka Peninsula treat Siberian Tigers. The people there have all sorts of superstitions about tigers, such as if someone tries to poach a tiger's kill it will remember you, track you home, and make your life miserable, but how *true* these are is sometimes unclear. On the one hand, it would be very likely for the locals to have all sorts of superstitions about the local wildlife, especially if they rarely see them and don't know much about them.
However, at the same time it is super unlikely that no one would be studying these creatures in a scientifically rigorous manner, assuming your society is similar to present-day society in technology. To get to a modern or "100 years beyond ours" level of technology, a society needs to have an outlook that favors investigation and the scientific method, because otherwise...well they wouldn't be able to maintain their technology or at best descend into cargo cultism. But what this means is there is no way they would leave the creatures alone.
Let me put it this way, as someone who has firsthand experience with biology, biologists, and a general interest in masquerade tropes. The reason scientists generally don't believe in Bigfoot and other cryptids isn't because of any agenda or desire to believe something doesn't exist, it's because there isn't any reliable evidence. The minute anyone found a reasonably decent specimen suggesting that there was some undescribed hominid present in the woods of North America, scientists would descend on the Pacific Northwest en masse, smelling glory and easy grant money. And virtually any fictional monster would leave traces that most scientists would instantly recognize as something unusual, and therefore worth studying. Even if some pooh-poohed the idea, others would pursue it, and it only takes a few to make a breakthrough that forces the floodgates open.
What this means is, presuming your creature existed, is it would be near impossible to get scientists to *not* study them given the general publish-or-perish atmosphere. Which means scientists would most likely not exist in your setting.
Even if, say, your creatures were super hard to find, or could not be kept in captivity, or spontaneously decomposed upon death, there would still be people who study them. There are animals today that people have seen less than a few dozen times that people study (e.g., megamouth sharks, certain species of squirrels and opossums). Other species do not do well in captivity (e.g., great white sharks, most whales), so people stick cameras on their back. Even if they spontaneously decompose, well, sharks and soft-bodied cephalopods do that in the fossil record, and there are people who make their entire career studying fossil shark teeth.
Also note that even IRL wildlife has some mysticism and superstition about it, even in the last 100-200 years when people were studying it via the scientific method. At the turn of the 20th century amateur naturalists still spoke of "elephant graveyards" in Africa and India as if they were a real thing, though they sort of talked about it like it was more legend than truth (check out old articles from *Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society* for a few examples). Until 1975 almost no one knew where monarchs went during the winter, despite seeing huge swarms of them depart to the south every year.\* We still don't know how great white sharks or whale sharks mate or give birth (other than they give live birth), despite these being some of the largest creatures in the ocean.
## **TL;DR:** You're probably going to have to get rid of all scientists, as well as remove any sort of attitude favoring the scientific method among your populace. Curiosity about the natural world does not mesh with the idea of a species that is well-known in folklore but no one is interested in studying. I have no idea how you would maintain a society with a tech base 100 years beyond ours with that, though.
\* - local inhabitants of the mountains of Mexico knew about them, but most Mexican biologists seemingly didn't, because it wasn't well known at the time.
[Answer]
## The monsters are the result of a failed experiment
It is hard to imagine a reason why a civilization 100 years more advanced than ours would not be able to explore everything on their planet. If some places were too dangerous for people, remotely steered or AI-controlled robots could be sent to investigate. And if religious taboos are out of the question, what remains is a political incentive to prevent research on the monsters.
The monsters used to be people, but were turned into something else due to an experimental medical treatment gone catastrophically wrong. Maybe a treatment targeted at the nervous system to cure mental illness caused the patients to run into the woods to stalk and ambush anyone who happens to pass by. Or the military tried to create super soldiers, but got psychopathic killers. Perhaps the participants or patients were even recruited to the experiment unethically based on false claims. If people knew how the monsters came to be, heads would fall in the government. So the authorities control the media, ban all mentions of the monsters except in context of myths and impose severe punishments on those who try to find out any facts about them.
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They fight back.
Electronics go on the fritz. Photographs blur. People vanish, and the bodies are never found.
Many scientists are completely convinced that this is entirely natural, and that proper protections could be devised to deal. Testing is a problem however. It has been completely established that Faraday cages don't work unless so solid that you can't use them observe. Some people claim the solid ones work only because the cryptids don't care.
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# The monsters are infectious to most.
The monsters have an extremely virulent disease in them which transforms humans to more of their kind. This disease has been able to bypass every filter thrown at it, and the only real sure defense is staying away from it, or burning it with fire.
These creatures retain the memories of those they infect, and try to persuade people on social media to come to them because they like the free food, claiming that they are shamans who will awaken people. People know of their existence, and know how to ward them off and avoid them mostly, but have very little information on them. There's a cultural taboo about discussing them too openly, because people who do discuss them might be them.
# Attempts to study them have gone extremely badly because the monsters are technically sophisticated.
Drones, automated cameras, clockwork cameras, everything has been tried. The monsters have some knowledge of technology and are pretty good at hacking such devices and using them as infection vectors. The best guess among scientific minds is that they're some sort of very solitary alien civilization that doesn't work together well to build cities or overrun settlements but which has developed advanced technology.
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**Any scientific investigation comes at the cost of innocent blood.**
When we first found the creatures, we set out to study them with the same rigor that we would any beast. But, for every scientist, probe, or helicopter that we sent out, a dozen people in the villages died from subsequent attacks. Nothing seemed to slip past the monsters' attention, and every trespass into their domain provoked violent retribution. We couldn't stop them, either, or predict them. It might have been hours or days after each academic foray, but innocent civilians would pay the cost every single time, without fail. Worse still, the penalty rose with each infraction, until entire city blocks were laid waste over one biologist who grew too curious - or so the old tales say. Whether the monsters are highly intelligent super-beings or instinctively territorial brutes, we still don't know, but the one fact we managed to learn from all our scientific investigation was that the cost was just far, far too high. Investigation of these creatures - the epitome of selfish, scientific hubris - is now the greatest of our taboos.
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# Reservations:
The law predates science, and the law is clear.
Besides common social stories (vampires and light, werewolves and silver, etc.) your people came to accept the existence of "supernatural" creatures before science predominated. There could have been science, but it wasn't widely accepted as the basis of interpreting reality.
**Then the isolation was established.**
Your society early on designated certain forests, deserts, and plains as forbidden due to the creatures that lived there. The old traditions concerning the creatures are well known and understood, but the law is firm and a strict isolation is maintained between the natural and supernatural. Large fences and other defenses separate the areas, and the only scientific inquiry that goes on is via telescopic cameras and heat sensors. Enough evidence exists to reinforce the belief in the monsters, but not enough to provide a comprehensive scientific basis for them.
Anyone trying to enter the forbidden areas was subject to execution, assuming the *things* didn't get them first. It is widely accepted that a sort of covenant exists, and as long as their territory isn't violated, human territory is protected. Even the bodies of such creatures that occasionally turn up dead in rivers or stuck in barbed wire are dumped on the other side of the fence.
The law predates the science, and the law is clear.
# Alternate: Isolationism/anti-colonialism
Your people view themselves as progressive, and the creatures exist in the equivalent of the new world. Because your people don't want to disrupt or destroy the real or imagined society of the monsters, they maintain a discreet distance and don't interfere with them. Diligent defenses seem to work very well. The practices around the creatures are observed as a way to respect the traditions of the native humans who were tragically wiped out by diseases in the first wave of colonization. Fear of repeating these mistakes and destroying the monsters is keeping scientific inquiry to a minimum and that is mostly passive sensors and satellite images. Areas with any evidence of the creatures is made strictly off-limits. People, though, are idiots and sometimes go where they shouldn't, so videos circulate on the internet and rumors of illegal monster fighting and rumors of monsters abducting humans for sex/food/mind control abound.
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**They only come out when *the right* humans are around...**
Let's say they can sense humans and are very secretive. Perhaps they can also read human minds and so, if a human approaches with scientific equipment, they tend to avoid *that particular human*, for fear of being inspected. They remain in their deep burrows, or perhaps, do not materialize from dead matter around those pesky, nosy humans. They only peak the vulnerable ones.
**...and tend to chew those humans' heads right off**
The few people that survive the encounter produce the only evidence of their existence. Perhaps some of them even managed to snap a few pictures, and eventually the mountain of evidence cannot be refuted. This is hardly enough input for scientific inquiry, and... well, scientists dislike the idea of having their heads chewed off just as much as regular folks.
This is, in fact, a reiteration of how things worked for most human history, after all. Just remember that in an Amazonian tribe, the people who warned children about jaguars were mostly precisely those people who never met a jaguar, or else there wouldn't be enough jaguar encounter survivors who could tell the tale to new generations of intrepid explorers.
In fact, the Amazonians hearing those tales did not *believe* ghosts existed, they *knew for a fact* ghosts existed, in precisely the same sense they *knew for a fact* that jaguars existed. Those facts were not generally challenged, regardless of whether they were actually true. People just took the 'scary stuff they told me about that I'm afraid to even investigate for myself' at face value, because disregarding those accounts would be careless, and it was better to err on the side of caution.
In fact, your scenario makes it even *easier* to arrive at the expected result, since it is much easier to get actual, tangible evidence of the monsters' existence using modern technology, while still not giving science enough to go on.
But I digress; it is enough to (1) leave shreds of evidence of the monsters' existence, enough to be irrefutable, but scarce enough to let rumors evolve into myth, and (2) make studying them both cumbersome *and* a mortal danger, and how a person with a chewed-off head looks like will remain the only scientific fact most people may ever want to know about those creatures. You just need to apply modern standards to #2, and most scientists will prefer the much less risky business of studying ladybugs' mating habits.
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## The Monsters Can Pass as People
The monsters are integrated into society as people. They have co-evolved with the main population for such a long time such that they are fully documented as ordinary people going back as far as records do, maybe mostly on the margins, or mostly in areas near woods or whatever areas they frequent in the myths, but still people.
There's various options there for what the lifecycle is or how much time they spend as people vs monster. Whether it's changeable quickly at will or in response to stimulus (werewolf, etc.), or is more a like a phase they grow through or into. I vaguely remember reading a story where a scientist was trying to get past human neoteny and evolve into a human "dominant male", like other primates do. The punchline being that there is no human "dominant male" phase of growth and he triggered instead a re/pro-gression to an ape-like dominant male. The monster could be a generally missing phase of growth like that.
With only "people" involved, either through quick reversion of form, or as a societal support to cover up the reality of incidents involving monster phase individuals, it's easy to dismiss any folk stories that "everyone knows" as boogey man superstition or alien abduction style nonsense, and treat any real attacks as either a matter for ordinary criminal investigation, or a reason to call in animal control, never seeing that man/beast is a false dichotomy and there's a third "monster" option that explains the attacks.
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**Evil Moses**
When the people first arrived at this place, whoever ruled them stopped here because of the woods. They would likely have been thinking of ways to keep power, especially when they would no longer be needed after whatever migration had taken place. They came up with the idea of monsters, and decided to use tales of them to keep the populace in check.
However, this civilization is rather advanced, and would never fall for such a thing. To get around this, the government does not say anything about them in public. likely with little more than "That's ridiculous". Instead, they set up fake conspiracy sites where they talk about these monsters, and with their proficiency and skill, convince a large portion of the masses.
However fake 'sightings' were not good enough, so the government decided to make some 'real' ones, with actual people seeing them. They might have started out with people in costumes, and then some form of animatronics. Next its only modifying the genome of several animals,which is already done today, in a civilization 100 years advanced it will be much more commonplace, but potentially more secret, or not. This gives the monsters a reality for the people, and you may say they really are real after the ruling party(or parties) of this small state begin tampering with the genome as it suits their purpose.
The society likely stays smaller in size for the same reason--the government does not want the people to become stronger, so limits their numbers. The use of monsters fits into this, and the lack of comment on them allows the government to avert suspicion. So do the conspiracy sites, because the government refuses to take them down, which would not make sense for a government who was responsible the monsters to do from the citizen's POV.
I will also note that the small size of the Government would be necessary for their to be actual monsters, as too large of a government would have bureaucratic troubles keeping such a thing hidden, as well as starting it in the first place. Otherwise such a scheme would only ever include the fake part, if it existed at all.
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If you want a sci-fi, conspiracy theme...
The setting is a colony on a different planet, humans have encountered aliens before and it has always gone badly, leading to a deeply xenophobic population.
The government knows for a fact that the 'monsters' exist. They are in fact an alien civilisation that also shares the planet. Their cities are underground so you won't see them from flyovers and they are generally reclusive, but they are violent and hostile towards humans.
The leadership of both colonies have come to an uneasy truce, but the deal involved keeping to their own areas of the planet. The human leadership know that their citizens are deeply xenophobic and would try to mount an attack on the aliens if they knew they existed which could escalate into a much bigger confrontation, so their plan is to keep the populace ignorant and discourage any official investigations into the disappearance of the occasional hunter that crosses into alien territory and gets killed so they actively encourage any rumours of mystical monsters that will kill anyone that strays too far into the wilderness
[Answer]
**The monsters ‘aren't real’.**
Or rather, they are, but not in the sense science considers as real.
These monsters exclusively atrack at night. They are shadow-creatures, and exist in the dream-world of the collective unconscious. Science dismisses them as nightmares... and yet there is a strange regularity to how they exhibit. People who've never met report the exact same dream sequences, where they were chased by the same creature — across cultures, the creatures are the same. Shamans question why the European dragon looks *exactly* the same as the Asian one, and claim it is because the creatures exist independently of our brains; psychologists, instead, think these dreams are just the brain reutilising old myths.
Science will totally ignore these creatures because there is nothing for science to grasp. At the same time, you can make the creatures have whatever effect on people that you want (light trauma all the way through to heart failure, etc.). Perhaps these creatures are ethereal, and live as a haze in some specific locations (forests, graveyards, . . .); people who live near them, or visit some of these areas, are beset the first time they go to sleep.
If you really want them to be physical creatures, make them unremarkable bugs who enter people's dreams through a bite.
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* **Science is slow** Understanding the creatures might require a revolutionary scientific breakthrough or a key insight that no one in the small colony would ever think to consider. On the scale of the discovery of DNA or Calculus.
* **Science is expensive** Although technologically advanced, perhaps people in the colony are culturally trained to be inventors, engineers, etc., but none are trained to do basic research in a scientifically rigorous way. Simply because of constraints of the population its needs. Possibly, the necessary tools would be so difficult to manufacture that the colony's economy cannot support it, so although the theory is understood, it is economically out of reach. (Analogy to particle accelerators, or space stations).
* They may decay rapidly in captivity, or be impossible to take alive.
* They may be extremely sensitive to electrical fields and any available observational technology, and going into the forest without a device or with low batteries may even be a cultural taboo because it's well known that carrying a full battery keeps you safe.
* **Emotionally unmotivated** They may only appear under very specific conditions and be viewed as a non-problem under most cases, with the victims often being reasonably blamed. Either way, the problem is not worth researching. For example, perhaps they only appear when a sick/injured person charges into the forest alone without any technology with them. The common cultural response to such persons is that they were insane, stupid, or asking for it, and deserved what they got. In the same vein, in order to study the creatures, society would need to choose sick/injured persons to sacrifice. There are other ideas for why society may not feel bad for the victims or would feel bad for studying the creatures. Maybe being eaten by these creatures is pursued as a euphoric way to end life and people believe it's an enjoyable form of euthanasia. Maybe information about the creatures is a memetic horror or otherwise mentally impairs the mind, and society has agreed to protect scientists by banning study.
[Answer]
## The Monsters Have Powers We Project on Them
When your civilization first started getting credible reports of the monsters, they launched a full-force investigation about them, and rapidly learned new powers and abilities that the monsters had and published them in the scientific documentation... in fact, they gained these powers as quickly as we researched them. Something about the creatures taps into the knowledge and belief of those around them. Scientists, wanting to learn more, received more, and as the monsters gained new abilities, they became more widely known, and therefore more powerful. It's been decades of tracking down and burning papers, purging databanks, but we have the monsters back down to the level where they're no worse than your woodland predators. If you encounter a dragon, it's just a scaly lizard that can give you a pretty bad bite, but no one really believes the myth that they used to breathe fire... I mean look at them, they look more like Komodo Dragons, right? A bit punier than those ones, actually.
Conspiracy sites hint at something more, but not enough people really believe it, so the worst the government has to deal with is the occasional case of reminding people that Bigfoot won't actually kidnap young women and use them as breeding stock, that your daughter probably ran off with her boyfriend from Canada. That ghosts are just quirks of human brains and have nothing to do with the burial ground that used to be where the apartment complex is. And if anyone gets a little too organized or people start meeting up, you run a standard discreditation scheme on them, or arrange for the guy organizing it to be found in an unfortunate autoerotic asphyxiation accident, My-Size Chippy the Chupacabra doll sprawled out on the floor below him.
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I'm going with elements for several suggestions. Essentially it's a "vulcan ministry of science says that it's impossible" answer.
Decades ago the central bureaucracy declared them to be simply dumb animals based on erroneous early reports that got a lot of the details wrong, and for political reasons nobody wants to question this.
The local people noticed that the creatures are much more intelligent than they are supposed to be a mythology sprung up that paints the real life intelligent creatures as being separate entities from the officially recorded dumb animals.
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The monsters are intelligent, stealthy, capable of living without **apparent** technology, small in number and have abilities that many would exploit if they could.
The result is that they have reached an agreement with the government to help keep them out of sight. A few select people in the government know what's going on--if a serious effort were made to subjugate them an awful lot of people would die and the only way to avoid some bad actors making such an attempt is to keep people from realizing their power.
Thus there is no official funding for research and the government looks the other way when bad things happen to amateur sleuths who manage to get too close (most of them are simply avoided or their equipment messed with to make them look like crackpots.)
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[Question]
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Most hand-to-hand weapons are already streamlined for the obvious reason of minimizing air resistance. But would the same design work for underwater warfare?
My story has a character who is exceptionally skilled in fighting in an underwater environment; he has extensively trained underwater and has the ability to control large bodies of water. He is incredibly tall and muscled. He is strong enough to swing swords and other melee weapons despite the water resistance and his signature strategy when fighting is to create a room-sized body of water around his enemies so he has the advantage due to his training. However I am not sure what the design for his personal weapon should be that could be effective in both on land and underwater combat. Would a typical sword work? or would you need a weapon specifically suited to cut through water rather than air.
I also am not sure what material would be best as it would need to be rust proof.
I have an idea which I will put as an answer and feel free to give your thoughts on that design.
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> He is strong enough to swing swords and other melee weapons despite the water resistance
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Swinging stuff underwater is a massive waste of energy, and even if you're hella strong you'll find that you move more slowly than in air, and hit with less force. Defending against an underwater sword-swinger is probably straightforward, especially if you have any kind of armor on.
Thrust, or grab and crush, don't swing. You'll be faster and much more deadly.
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> Would a typical sword work? or would you need a weapon specifically suited to cut through water rather than air.
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A stabbing sword would work, more or less, but given the difficulty in closing distances and the convenience of being able to strike across an air-water boundary, spears and hooks seem like the way to go.
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There are some lovely modern nitrogen-rich stainless steels that would be great, but in a setting where people are reasonably expected to use swords they seem a bit anachronistic. Regular steels (or even bronze) would be fine, just so long as you work hard to keep them clean and dry between swims, maybe keep them coated in oil or wax between uses and accept the fact that they are going to get corroded sooner or later and not be too precious about them.
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> his signature strategy when fighting is to create a room-sized body of water around his enemies so he has the advantage due to his training
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If someone created a room-sized body of water around me, it wouldn't really matter what they attacked me with, on account of the fact I'd be busy either trying to swim away, or panicking and drowning, and possibly both.
A nice sturdy knife and willingness to engage in a bit of wrestling would seem to be an ideal way to dispatch panicking targets, and even ones who kept their cool are unlikely to be suitably equipped and trained to fight back effectively. If your target is carrying a nice spear and is known to enjoy swimming and free-diving, maybe its best to just shoot him with a bow and save the water-magic for an easier victim.
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The force needed to handle a [**push dagger**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_dagger) would rely completely on your hero's arm strength, and would itself barely be influenced by the drag of the water.
It also allows for two-handed fighting styles, and possibly to defend oneself easily against other melee weapons.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eN4Ru.png)
Throw in stainless steel for the blade, and an ivory or another non-corrosive material for the handle, and you're all set for your amphibious altercations.
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> My story has a character who is exceptionally skilled in fighting in an underwater environment;
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It's a shark.
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> he has extensively trained underwater and has the ability to control large bodies of water.
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It's a Magical Shark.
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It's a Magical Great White Shark.
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Yes, even a Magical Great White Shark (MGWS) has dagger-like teeth. They are perfect for shredding any body to mouth-sized bits when underwater.
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> However I am not sure what the design for his personal weapon should be that could be effective in both on land and underwater combat.
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Dagger-like teeth obviously, because the character is a Magical Great White Shark. That possibly turns into (appears as?) a human just because that makes it much easier to get so close to the one prey that is available in overabundance: Humans.
How do they fight? Well, they charge in on their target with their superior strength and shape while being submerged. Then they open the hatch without lowering their water-resistance too much because excess water is piped out of the gills. Suddenly, the jaws moving at something like 56 km/h bite close around a limb of their targets and lock shut, trapping it. With the huge mass and the superior fins to allow such, the MGWS then thrashes with whatever limb they grabbed in the mouth, shredding it to the bones and likely ripping it out of the socket, and leaving a quickly bleeding out wounded body behind.
Though, if MGWS is large enough, they just chomp on the target twice to kill it, then swallow it whole.
[Answer]
#### TL;DR
He just water-bends his way through fights.
#### Long answer
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For the above-water fighting part, I'm not sure I understand why this character needs a traditional weapon for combat. If he can instantly create a room-sized body of water, then traditional weapons for close-quarters combat would seem redundant to me.
Depending on the level of control that the character has on the summoned water, then he would have no need for a fighting weapon for fights that start above-water.
#### Summoned water is controllable.
For example, if they can create the room-sized volume of water in a **rapidly lengthening column**, then in the open air the enemy gets launched high up into the air and the fall back to the ground does the rest. Or if they're in an enclosed space, the enemy will be crushed into the ceiling.
#### Summoned water is not controllable
If they have no control over the form of the water once it's created, and it immediately follows real physics, then they have (at least) two options:
1. They summon the water **inside the enemy's lungs** and they drown;
2. They summon a volume of water - say 1 m3 (equal to 1000 kg or 1 ton) - a few metres above the enemy and **when it falls on them it crushes them**, as demonstrated by [Richard Hammond](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93nBQQyHDhc&ab_channel=BBC) and a 1-ton car.
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**Bronze javelin.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8i9tBm.jpg)
<http://frazettamuseum.com/product/LITHO-Atlantis.html>
The old school. Your buff Atlantean throws a javelin. He throws it inside the water. He throws it outside of the water. He throws it from inside the water to outside the water. He... ok, you get it. Much throwing.
And he looks good throwing it which is part of the appeal. And it is bronze so it is rust proof, and also his favorite javelin is 5000 years old.
Usually one throw is enough. But if he has to fight two enemies the small one gets the javelin and then he wrestles the big one. The even older school.
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I think no matter how strong your guy is, you are better off with a thin round weapon than a broad flat one. A sword is less maneuverable in water, it must be swung edge on, and will be strongly guided by its initial trajectory -- the faster it is swung the more constrained it is. Unlike in air it cannot be rotated or easily swung in an arc; in water a flat blade will strongly resist rotation or a change of direction away from the initial plane it is swung in.
A very narrow sharp blade would be more maneuverable; say the width of a pinky.
I would prefer something like a crossbow for underwater use, with round pointed arrows, or spears. Pikes. Stabbers, not slicers. For grappling, just narrow knives, long daggers, would suffice.
I also don't understand how surrounding a person with a "room sized body of water" when underwater is a thing. Aren't they already surrounded by water?
If you meant on **land**, then where does this water come from? Magic?
If you are already embracing some sort of water magic, then just make the weapons regular melee weapons and say that he magically moves water out of their path so he can manipulate them as if they are in air.
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This already works heavily against him. As you correctly pointed out, the fighting under water is mainly about drag. The larger the surface area of whatever moving under the water, larger the amount of water that needs to be displaced. If for example your fist has a surface area of 1 dm^2 and you wish to punch 1m ahead of you, you will need to displace 10 dm^3 of water or about 10kg of mass.
If we take the results from this [paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16183766/), the hand of a Olympic level boxer moves on average at about 10mps, if the distance covered during the punch is about a meter we are talking about acceleration of about a 200ms^-2 displacing 10kg of water, this will in effect be a counter force of about 2000N which is quite a way towards the 3400N Olympic level punchers can actually dish out.
In order to limit this drag as much as possible, I would suggest a stabbing weapon of some sort, with a cone leading up to the point to reduce the drag as much as possible.
I would suggest a rapier, with a sleeve which would further decrease the drag.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/biWC5.png)
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For slashing and stabbing, you're likely to get more fluid resistance from your arm and body than most weapons designed for these purposes. And the more muscles you build to push harder through the drag, the bigger your muscles and the more drag you feel. There may be a point where there's an advantage, but it would require lots of training. Granted, you said your character has a lot of experience and training, but you can reduce your training if you use a weapon and fighting style designed for underwater close-quarters combat.
This will be designed to reduce the drag on every movement as well as the weapons.
## Movements
Your body movements will be small to reduce drag and, as a bonus, make it hard for your opponent to know how to react to it as your [telegraphing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphing_(sports)) will be significantly reduced. There's variety of ways to do this, but to get a small movement to create a large movement and a large force, you're looking at twisting and rotating your joints, rather than swinging your arm. Sword/fencing and staff fighting have a lot of these movements. Flick your wrist and you slash your sword tip quickly across a couple of feet. Twist your wrist 180 degrees with your hand in dead center and your bo staff essentially covers all 360 degrees of motion to block all kinds of attacks. Grab your staff with both hands extended at shoulder height and you can use one as a pivot point while thrusting one hand out quickly to add power, but a shorter stroke that has little air/fluid resistance.
There's probably dozens or hundreds of examples of minimal movements in a wide variety of martial arts and other fighting styles that allow for minimal effort and maximum movement.
## Weapons
The next focus is having a weapon that works with this. A bo staff or sword are pretty good starting points, but you're limited to a small, round weapon to reduce the drag. Any kind of flat weapon will deflect your swing if it's not exactly pointing towards your target. That may be useful at times, to dodge a block, but will require expert training to be able to use the weapon effectively, let alone in "dodging in unexpected ways". It's not impossible, just impractical.
So what you need is something that's symmetrical to a large extent. Any drag force on one "side" of the weapon needs a nearly exact drag force on the other "side" so it moves predictably. A long thin rod with sharp thorns, barbs, or something similar would work. A "sword" that has a cross section more like a +6 pointed star and sharp on all edges could also work, but may be difficult to sharpen. It would also still have to be a small diameter to avoid excessive drag.
Any hilt or hand guard would need to be spherical or a mesh, or it'll create too much drag due to [cavitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation). A sphere will still cause this, but likely at a lower rate due to the shape allowing the water to form behind it easier than most other shapes. This might be a minor plot point in research of weapons, to find the "perfect" shape of this guard, whether an elongated sphere into more of an [ellipsoid](https://www.britannica.com/science/ellipsoid) or a partial sphere/ellipsoid is better.
And whatever else your weapon has, it needs a sharp tip. Thrusting, jabbing, and slicing with the tip will be major focuses of your fighting style. You might not be able to get close enough to hack at your opponent with the "meat" of the weapon, but a long gash with the tip of a sword or a 1-2" deep puncture can be significantly painful and limit your opponents movements.
## Targets
Your aim may not be to dig into the muscles or organs of your opponent, but rather smaller targets, like tendons, ligaments, or arteries close to the skin. If you cut the things that connect muscles to the bone, the muscle becomes ineffective even if it's otherwise uninjured. Cutting an artery will likely cause them to bleed out.
You are basically looking to score on the most vital and longest/hardest to heal parts of the body. This requires accuracy and severe training. Most martial arts and fighting styles focus on this anyway, so that's not far fetched. It's just that your character will want to be exceptionally good at it. This is far more important than having large muscles to be able to swing a broadsword through water. You don't need to decapitate or dismember a person to beat them, that's just overkill, especially in an environment where movement is difficult.
If you opponent can't stand or swim to keep their head above water, or they can't tread water in deep water to maintain their position relative to their opponent due to cutting the Achilles tendon, they can't fight. If they can't hold their weapon because the tendons in their wrist is cut, and they are bleeding out, they can't fight. You don't need a massive sword or a titanic swing to do this kind of damage.
Stab someone in the lung or throat and they'll be breathing water instead of air. An epee, foil, narrow rapier, or similar style sword is nearly perfect for this, minus the large hilts/guards they tend to have.
[Answer]
## Long weapons are bad
A lot of answers agree on spears or longer swords in this setting, but in reality, they are perhaps the worst choice you could go with. The longer your weapon, the greater mechanical disadvantage it suffers when trying to maneuver it. A long weapon is like a giant lever. Your hands move just a little bit to make the head of the weapon travel a much longer distance. This means that the effects of drag acting on the distal end of a long weapon are multiplied by your mechanical disadvantage. In the air, this mechanical disadvantage is negligible meaning you can turn your weapon faster this way, in the water, this effect is enough to make long weapons turn noticably slower. Especially more proximal heavy weapons like spears and swords which lack the distal inertia to power through the resistance. This all means means longer swords and spears will be especially easy to block or just plain out maneuver.
Also, because you are floating, how strong you are does not entirely matter unless you get into a grapple. As you maneuver a long weapon, every action has an opposite and equal reaction meaning that it's not just your spear turning, but so are you. The power from any melee attack can be summed up as coming from three basic sources:
1. The speed to which you can accelerate your weapon.
2. Your weapon's inertia. Note, it is inertia and not mass which matters since a distal heavy weapon generally has more inertia for its mass because of its mass distribution.
3. Your ability push your attack through your opponent once contact is made.
In water, you can not accelerate to the same speeds as you can on land. While some answers cite spear fishing to justify a spear, this activity is done from out of the water, and used to hit fish that are only a few cm below the surface. If a fisher man were to try to throw a spear under water the resistance against his arms would make getting enough speed to pierce even a fish more or less impossible. This is why divers in the water often use harpoon guns or boom sticks in lue of actual spears to protect against sharks. If a traditional spear were an effective weapon under water, they would not choose these single use spears over a reusable one.
Aa for inertia, a distal heavy weapon will better punch through the drag of the water, but distal heavy weapons also takes significantly more energy to get moving in the first place; so, they generally become impractical at lengths greater than about 1/2 that of a comparable proximal heavy weapon. In this setting, you can not so much make a distal heavy weapon longer than a proximal heavy one, but you don't need to shorten it by nearly as much to make it useable.
Lastly, in water you can not plant your feet to drive your attacks through your opponent using your body weight. With no ground to plant into, once you make contact, most of your additional force will be lost pushing the two fighters apart instead of punching through.
Because of how these 3 factors work together in water, even the lightest of armor would become adequate to stop any spear or sword attack and most wounds made to exposed flesh would be superficial at best. However, these effects on common land weapons are the exact disadvantages your hydromancer is looking to exploit. So what he needs is weapon that overcomes or minimizes these disadvantages.
## Shorter weapons are better
The biggest disadvantage of a shorter weapons on land is that you have to get past an enemy's longer weapon, but since the water makes this relatively easy, the advantages that shorter weapons have start to come into play.
In the water, you don't have anything to brace yourself against to generate a powerful thrust or cut, so you need to grapple an opponent to immobilize 2 opponents relative to one another enough to deliver a particularly deadly strike. Since this puts you in very close quarters, a short thrusting dagger is good because you don't have to worry about your enemy becoming so close that you can't aim your weapon's tip into them.
Another tactic to consider is the use of a short sword that specializes in draw cuts like a scimitar. While a hewing cut is meant to be done at a distance and relies on the speed and inertia of the sword to cut through, a draw cut can be done in very close proximity and at slower speeds since it relies on the action of slicing across a target to "saw" through them. So even a slightly longer blade that would be hard to point into an opponent can still be effective in a grapple if used this way.
Lastly, a distal heavy blade produces more momentum than it produces water resistance; so, when you do swing, something like a hand-axe will better overcome the water resistance.
## The best weapon is the kopis
The kopis was an ancient Greek/Etruscan short sword. Like a dagger, it's blade is short enough to thrust with during a grapple (not to be confused with the longer machaira). Like a scimitar, it also has a curved blade making it great for draw-cuts, and like a hand-axe, it is distal heavy meaning it can be swung relatively well in water. On land, this an exceptionally versatile sword, and unlike many other weapons, it remains versatile even when you are in the water.
As for materials, since you are not spending a lot of time in the water, steel is probably still the best since it takes prolonged exposure to water for it to really rust. If you are looking for a specific historically accurate alloy that a kopis may have been made out of, I would suggest Spartan steel. The Spartans discovered manganese steel alloys ~2000 years before it was rediscovered during the industrial revolution. When added to steel in the right proportions, manganese makes steel harder without making it more brittle. Since Spartan steel also had carbon contents up to 0.25%, a high quality Spartan blade would have been considered on the low end of medium carbon steel... not quite as good as most medieval steels in this respect, but still good enough to hold its edge and form very well when you factor in the manganese. The Greek historian Plutarch also wrote about how the Spartans would intentionally quench thier coins in vinegar to rob the iron of the temper suggesting that the Spartans as a culture knew a lot about tempering which is another big factor in steel quality. Tempering makes steel able to be bent and spring back into its original shape. Between these factors, Spartan steel is actually more similar to modern steel than almost anything you will find in the ancient, medieval, or even renaissance periods.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tF477.png)
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Just a small addition on how to find "spears" or "javelins" that do not rust, take a **[narwhal tusk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal)**.
In that case, the best fighting style underwater would probably differ a lot from land based fights. As pointed out by [Dvorkam](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/223938/25822), swinging your arms around fast underwater make a lot more drag than in the air.
The best strategy probably is to be as narwhal-like as possible, attaching the tusk to himself, and then swimming as fast as possible into his opponents to stab them.
He would have advantages compared to a narwhal, though. The tusks can be carved, for the appropriate weight and length, and also inspire itself from historical spear designs to avoid getting stuck in an opponent. He can also carry several, have them easily detached to himself in case it gets stuck, ...
[Answer]
Evolution has already answered this question for you:
### Ramming
Usually a bigger fish thing, they simply swim really fast and use their momentum to do damage. Bonus if you have a sword nose.
### Biting
This has an advantage of not needing to build up momentum. Tear a chunk out of the enemy, with no concern for underwater movement speeds.
If you don't want your hero to have a giant shark mouth, then give him a mouth-like weapon to hold in his hands. Something like old-fashioned bear traps that he holds. Then he can just thrust forward and directly place the bitey weapon on the enemy, no aquatic swinging needed.
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I would lend my vote to stabbing weapons.
Swinging a sword would be complicated by lateral forces due to attack angle through the water.
If he can control water, then making a 1" stream go up someone's nose at sufficient speed would almost certainly be fatal.
A weapon that may be used against him could be a hypersonic torpedo!
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I guess the first question is: where does the water come from, and how much control does your character have over it?
One cubic meter of water weighs a tonne. So in a room large enough to fight in (e.g. 3m tall, 10m wide, 15m long), you'd somehow need to find 450 tonnes of water - or approx 450,000 litres/120,000 US gallons.
That's not just something you can pull out of the moisture content of the air. And if it's being teleported in from somewhere, how goes that work? How long would it take to fill the room?
You'd need a window the size of the room's floor to fill the room with any speed, and pressure to match.
And where does all this water go when it's done?
And (if actually fighting in a room), won't the room collapse immediately due to the weight?
I guess it all comes down to how much hand-waving and magic you want to apply to your story.
TBH, if someone can magically create water and/or water-bend it (to use Avatar terminology), then why not be more clever?
Humans are 60% water - Avatar even touches on this with blood-bending. Why not just stop the enemy's heart from beating?
Why not just teleport water into the enemy's lungs?
Why not just open a portal into the Marina trench - at 16,000 PSI, that gives you four times as much pressure as with a pressure washer. Which might not be enough to cut through steel (water cutters are generally over 50k PSI), but I suspect it'll push back any opponents while stripping their flesh to the bone.
Why not just materialise a small sphere around the enemy's head?
And so on.
Big superpowered fight-fests are fun. But you're generally best off fighting clever, rather than harder. And if you do that, then you don't need hand-to-hand combat, or any other weapons.
[Answer]
2 spears that can be held in one hand and Connect with steel wire.
Basically can stab, throw, swing the connecting rod, and strangle with thin wire.
Throw spears at the same time and use wire to trap enemies in water.
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[Question]
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In a post-apocalyptic world, monster-like creatures have taken over most of the planet, and twenty years later, only a few clusters of humanity still remain with somewhat functioning governments, and with "towns," as in places with apartments/buildings that have barely functioning water and electricity and other necessities that people live in, that are scattered across what's left of America. These “towns” also have a pseudo-military force that both protects the citizens from the creatures, and also tries to reclaim the lost territory to these monsters, as they are not invincible, and do have a weakness.
Light. As in, any form of visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum, and also certain forms of UV light, specifically the kind produced by high electrical discharges. Now, this might seem like a weakness that should cripple these monsters, because hey, the sun should be making short work of them, but it doesn’t. Because the day these monsters started appearing was the day near-total darkness covered the world and blocked all forms of light coming from the sun, making a world that is near-pitch black. And yes, this should cause the extinction of all life, but for this question, assume that the darkness is magic and that any of the issues caused by the sun being blocked out by clouds of darkness aren’t an issue because the plants, people and planet in general adapted due to, again, magic.
So, these creatures don’t like light. Seemingly, the greater the intensity, the more it actually hurts them. Bits of their skin seems to turn into little black motes that fade into the air, seemingly burning them and causing varying degrees of pain depending on the light in question. The survivors of this world have made a list of how each type of light hurts them. Here is this list in question:
1. Fire
Fire seems to irritate the creatures greatly. A large campfire would make one these creatures growl and hesitate for a moment, but they would, eventually, move on, and it would cause them no real damage. A forest fire, on the other hand, would cause the creatures harm and make the creatures back off.
2. Flashlights
Flashlights seem to do some damage, burning skin on the area on which the light was shone and causing the “black mote” effect as mentioned previously, but this is more likely to anger them and cause them to attack whoever shone the light, rather than scaring them off.
3. Spotlights
Spotlights do greater damage to the creatures than flashlights, and would be enough to convince a single creature to back off if there were say, three of them being pointed in their general direction, but if the creatures were in a large group, than they would be convinced they could destroy the lights before they could do serious damage to them and attack the people shining said lights on them.
4. Flashbangs
Flashbangs seem to greatly upset the creatures even more so than spotlights. Not only will it burn them, but it will also heavily disorient the creatures for several seconds. Enough exposure to the flashbangs explosions will eventually kill the creatures if they don’t get out of the blast radius. If an adequate amount of flashbangs are used, say a few dozen, than if the group isn’t large enough, say less than fifty, they will retreat. However, they are likely to return with reinforcements to try again, say anywhere between half-an-hour to an hour.
5. Lightning
Lightning, and electrical discharges on a similar scale, seem to hurt the creatures the most. Any time lightning strikes near these creatures, even if it strikes a place hundreds of feet away, it will cause great burns to the creatures and kill them if they are close enough. The creatures in question will also tend to avoid any areas where lightning or similar electrical discharges have gone off for a few hours, as for some reason, if they enter that area within the stated time, it burns their skin. The only exception is if the creatures know there are humans in that area, as they will go back there once they gather enough forces, even if the area itself is still harmful to them.
Regular guns and ammunition do seem to damage them, but in the same way a rock would damage a gorilla. It hurts, definitely, and with enough of it could even kill them, but it’s just as likely to piss off the hulking mass of muscles as it is to kill them (Note: Not all the creatures are like this, they come in various shapes and sizes, this is just one example, but they do all share the same level of durability).
Given all of this information, and assuming that the survivors have an adequate supply of ammunition and weapons on hand that will last them a while so long as they are used reasonably, what tactics could the remnants of humanity come up with to deal with these creatures? Both in terms of protecting their “towns,” and for killing the creatures in their own territory as the humans try to regain what was once theirs.
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This fits more with the "post-apocalypse" tag than the "magic" one, and assumes years to decades after the fall (your 20 years).
You mention "some forms of UV". A photon (or the monster it hits), doesn't know what generated it, only what wavelength it is. Of course the sheer brightness of lightning may also be significant, but that's relatively easy to achieve in a narrow beam.
So what about the spectrum? [Temporal and radiometric statistics on lightning flashes observed from space with the ISUAL spectrophotometer](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015JD023263) has details of the major wavelengths in lightning. One of particular interest is the UV nitrogen line at 337 nm. I suggest that's something they're vulnerable to. A [*nitrogen laser*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_laser) is one of the easiest lasers to [build](https://www.repairfaq.org/sam/lasercn2.htm), in fact it's possible to make it lase out of both ends with no mirrors, using air as the gain medium. You need some electronics parts (ideally the transformer from a neon sign) and skills. They're pulsed, but can be fast enough that you wouldn't notice, and the peak power can be 100 kW (for a few ns). They could be portable (probably a backpack power supply based on recovered car or even laptop batteries).
*Nitrogen arc lamps*, perhaps tripwire activated, could provide perimeter defence/area denial. If we're not that specific about wavelength, banks of UV LEDs could provide serious power with a short range as they're very divergent.
*Xenon strobes* (disco type or high power camera flashes, perhaps in banks) would be pretty potent given what you've said in the question, which seems to permit electircity. Overall, given what you say about spotlights, nightclubs and theatres would be a good resource - a nice change from gun stores.
Sticking with the theatrical theme, [*limelights*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight) were very intense and gas powered (oxy-hydrogen, but you could use a welding torch). They use [quicklime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_oxide) (which might be useful in other ways). That won't have kept as it reacts with atmospheric CO2 but it's fairly easily made
You'd need the usual fences and patrols for places being defended, but chainlink wouldn't block the light so would be useful. Your raiding/eradication parties will try to stay dark; if looking for confrontation (as opposed to scavenging) they'll try to attract the monsters to a defensible location (a few candles should be a giveaway/provocation) before deploying their weapons - a fairly standard trap. Night vision googles will be extremely useful for moving about until the trap is laid. Corralling the monsters by using sufficiently powerful light and fairly rapid movement should get them somewhere they can be destroyed by more conventional means even if not by fire.
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> The creatures in question will also tend to avoid any areas where lightning or similar electrical discharges have gone off for a few hours, as for some reason, if they enter that area within the stated time, it burns their skin.
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**Ozone generators.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NYI2Rm.jpg)
[source](https://www.odorfreemachines.com/autel-1000/?bidkw=&dvc=c&gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1rqfuuXP6QIViobACh0TugXGEAQYASABEgKiGPD_BwE)
The electromagnetic radiation is long gone. What remains so long after is the result of the energetic discharge: free radicals. One of the main ones is ozone. It is produced by lightning dissociating oxygen, which recombines as an oxygen radical.
I can imagine ozone burning a sensitive creature. Ozone is commercially used for exactly that: oxidatively destroying odor causing molecules and also pathogens; ozone has taken over the role of chlorine in sanitizing swimming pools.
Your creatures don't like ozone. It is easy to generate ozone. I would marry an ozone generator to a vortex gun and shoot these creatures with ozone-containing vortices.
Riffing a little more — there is nothing that special about ozone except it oxidizes and electricity makes it from the air. But if your creatures are that sensitive to oxidative damage you might experiment with other oxidants. You could fill a supersoaker gun with hydrogen peroxide or bleach. Try that when you have your wingman ready with the ozone vortex and carbon arc light if it doesn't work.
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**Fricking Lasers!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cqu0N.jpg)
Seems like a no duh. They are very bright and energy efficient. And awesome. You can carry many, in a bandolier. As a light weapon they offer obvious advantages over a flashlight. Best of all you can get a giant array from a rock concert laser light show and blast monsters to sweet rock and roll. Fog machine optional. Dancing non-optional! Dance that night away!
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# War as Usual
The bullets may not hurt them, but the tracer rounds should do some damage. The usage of miniguns come mind.
Oh, since the battle is in darkness, bright flares will be in use.
Bombs still produce some bright light, even if for a few moment.
Once humans figure out their weakness is light, phosphorous weapons become mandatory.
Flame throwers produce light. And once something burns...
Speaking of burning target, Molotov Cocktails might work.
And speaking of putting things on fire...
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> I just love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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# Bio Warfare
Lightning bugs, glow worms, etc. But, more for parameter deterrence than defense.
ok. this section is a joke. Even for the beasts, they would be a joke.
# Light Offense
Spotlight have been mentioned as a way to kill them.
The ultimate light source would be a laser. If a laser [can take down a drone](https://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-ship-destroys-drone-with-laser-weapon-2020-5), it can probably easily kill a platoon or 3 before being destroyed.
# Lightning
Electric fences can generate sparks.
The best portable "lightning generator weapon" would be a Taser. 12 gauge shotgun? [yes, please](https://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-gadgets/article/2009-07/taser-rolls-out-shocking-devices-shotty/)!
For stationary target, a [Van de Graph Generator](https://www.mos.org/live-presentations/lightning) should do quite nicely.
# Fun for the whole family
"4th of July" will last all year round; Same goes for the Chinese New Year. Kids with Roman Candles will get to have some fun as they take part in the genocide of these dark creatures.
Glow Stick are still fun. Especially after you cut them up and pour the liquid on the beasts. I'm sure someone will figure out how to make them into paint balls. [Amazon listing](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B002EX6U4Q).
Need something that last longer? Radioactive based [glow-in-the-dark paint](https://www.cnn.com/style/article/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html) balls.
# Hospitals
For the battle worn soldiers, come to Las Vegas.
# Last Question
Why did they come here? I don't think they have any hope of surviving.
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Fun premise!
Any sort of creative, photonic assault that could be dreamed up .. could no doubt be turned into something all the nastier with a couple of hundred-thousand strategically placed makeup mirrors!
In fact, with a couple of those IR lasers that @Willk probably mentioned, and a bag full of reflectors, I managed to set up a perimeter that the monsters just love walking past. Of course, the [frog-croaky thingy](https://youtu.be/Qcch3bsbJc8) that lets us all know 'someone needs service', now let's us know 'somethings need to be served!' "safeties off. click."
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The first step in protecting the towns is architecture. Human habitations would be built as concentrated as possible, and fortified. (Walls have to be of some use in delaying them so you can bring light to bear.)
Furthermore, the buildings would be built to maximize line of sight. Medieval fortresses were build with round towers to make it harder to use rams on them. You don't want that. Straight lines.
Towers would spread the light as far as possible, though there's a trade-off in how the light disperses with distance. The lights would need to be as close to the edge as possible, to prevent shadows -- unless you specifically set it up to lure the monsters into traps at the wall's edge.
Everything around the fortress would be razed as far as your spotlights can reach. Not so much as a blade of grass to cast a shadow, because small plants turn into large ones, and cast shadows.
Situate your traps and lights to maximize damage. One strategy would be to have an apparently weak spot that is a death trap, but the question arises whether they are intelligent enough that this trick would stop working, and whether it would stop quickly enough that it's not worth the effort.
Also, lightning rods. No point in letting lightning go to waste when it could protect your settlement.
As for the offense against them, I think that may be a separate question, because there are questions vital to the strategy. Do these creatures have lairs? Do they live in lairs as humans do in towns and cities, or does each one have its own? Do they communicate enough that an offense that didn't exterminate every monster it found would be common knowledge? If they do not have lairs, do they wander randomly, or along predictable paths, or even predictable times?
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You may find the following - an old US Army field manual concerning battlefield illumination - useful: <https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/amd-us-archive/FM20-60%2870%29.pdf> .
Given it's from the 1970's it's somewhat dated, but the lower tech level may be beneficial to the survivors of your world - hopefully some or all of it is within reach of their manufacturing capabilities. Included are details on flares, spotlights, battlefield illumination artillery, field improvised illumination, and so on.
Apparently an M485 155-mm illuminating shell puts out ~1,000,000 candlepower and can light up an area ~2km in diameter for 150 seconds - I'm sure something useful could be done with this, especially if airburst at half the usual altitude or so.
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Spotlight traps and flash grenades seem like a good way to go. According to what you said, it'd seem like the light of the lightning does as much damage as the lightning itself. What you might want is a way to arm a trap using spotlights, flash grenades and Faraday cages. If you make a zone with many spotlights and activate them once the beasts are inside, you'd be able to cause decent damage. To prevent them from destroying said spotlights, they could make use of Faraday cages, with the spotlight unharmed inside while powerful currents run on the outside of said cages, damaging the beasts as soon as they tough them and increasing the spotlight lifespan. To further avoid them getting to close from the cages to begin with, the use of flash grenades could help keeping them away (not sure if the flash helps it but yeah.
While this happens, just have your soldiers on a plataform above with some additional spotlights and responsible for both throwing the grenades (remember to close your eyes) and making it rain on them. This ambush strategy should help kill them while having the overall advantage on terrain and conditions.
For references of other strategies against light sensitive monsters (although relatively weaker ones), I suggest taking a look at a zombie game called "[dying light](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Light)" as their safe zones have to deal with zombies with similar weaknesses during the night.
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Ever seen "Dusk Till Dawn"? Quentin Tarantino move? It's a kidnap/roadtrip movie that takes a hard left turn near the end. Anyway, sunlight suddenly becomes really helpful... and when it strikes the spinning
# Mirrored Disco Ball
just about everything in the room catches some rays. And you say light burns them? DISCO INFERNO baby!
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How about repurposing some retail barcode scanners. These scanners are red lasers aimed at a rapidly spinning mirror. Yes, more spinning mirrors, but these would be far more available than disco balls. Every retail outlet would have a couple, and the really big stores will have lots.
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Magic you say? The plants are still alive 20 years later without apparent sunlight... someone will study it. The first spell most wizards learn in all those stories? Some way to create light (or fire which is a valid light source).
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Ooh! "Spark mine". A gizmo rigged up such that when weight is applied to the top, there's a brief arc of electricity. Monsters that step on it get hurt or killed. And they wouldn't work just the one time. Every time something puts more than N pounds of pressure on top, you get a spark.
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Fire geyser! Break the top of an oil derrick and light the resulting oil geyser. They burn for years. Down side: can't live too close (burn), can't live too far (eaten).
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Laser perimeter. Mirrors plus laser equals laser fence, one that would hurt/kill your monsters given enough power.
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Arc light perimeter. Jacob's ladders aren't hard to construct, you just need a high-volt/low-amp power source, which is relatively easy to create mechanically.
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Ground level light tower. Alternatively, a fixed light source with various mirrors rigged up to route the light to where it's needed. You'd almost certainly want to use an arc light given that's what appears to affect them most.
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Gasoline with some styrofoam mixed in is a good homemade napalm. Mix in a little magnesium powder so it burns brighter.
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Star shells, flares, LEDs, lasers, and mirrors.
**Star shells**, launched from a cannon or mortar, will illuminate a large area, enough to make any of these critters pause,
**Flares** are local defense. Shoot it anywhere near the critters.
**LED lights** LED flashlights are VERY power-efficient, obviously.
**Lasers** already mentioned by everybody... lots and lots of photons in one concentrated burst, assuming pulse lasers. Line of sight only, but if regular light hurts, lasers may just kill them if aimed at sensitive spots.
**Mirrors** imagine humans carrying polished steel shields with embedded LEDs for illumination in one hand, and a flare pistol with a flashlight in the other.
I'd suggest that the scientists would conduct some sort of experiment, to determine if the critters are more affected by any particular spectrum of light, i.e. could the critters be driven off or even killed.
Which sort of also begs the question... WHY are these critters attacking anyway?
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Since light does the damage lasers and flares seems like a good option to start with, but they have the drawback of needing power, being bulky and, quite frankly, too delicate to survive a real fight with the spawns of darkness, so you might have some success, but at a lot of risk.
But don't worry, there's a simpler way, inspired by one of the world greatest heroes:
The DOOM guy
And so i present you with...
[***Dragon Breath Shotgun***](https://youtu.be/WwhCygmhbCg?t=15)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ONxa4.png)
A nice, simple and convenient way to blind, burn and have fun with a photofobic target, and when you pair it with things like a semi-automatic shotgun
you get a nice way to defend yourself
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gV8xZ.jpg)
They also have the advantage of being quite common (lot of demand apparently), easy to transport in bulk, and no special training to use, just point and enjoy.
For extra splash damage i would recommend this as your battle suit.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J2rL5.png)
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If humanity is surviving darkness, these creatures cannot do anything to them. Here is what would happen:
Scouts will be traced to their dens, then here comes the light show. This will keep their number in check. The more creatures there are, it will be easier to find their place. I don't believe any creature will be able to survive against a bunker buster hit on top of their den. If they do, use white phosphorous. If that doesn't work use nukes. Also, if enough bullets can kill them, why not go bigger. We are trying rail guns going 2.5km/s (in 2008). In lab, they reached almost 50km/s. With Staballoy rounds, they could penetrate several M1 tanks before stopping. If your creatures somehow stop the bullet from turning them to mush, the impact will probably create enough plasma to emulate lightning strike. Go humans, there is no Geneva convention protecting those poor beasts.
For protection, how well your creatures swim? Human settlements can be built on top of the ocean, powered by whatever magic is keeping plants alive as well as tides if they are big enough. If they do swim, creating plasma arcs in salty air is easier, surround your settlement with arc lights (mini lightning). Use infrared cameras to detect the monsters to activate the lights. Also, seed oceans with light emitting algae. They will accompany your creatures from shore to the settlement, making those trips very taxing. Also also, create a short wall around the perimeter that will allow creatures to scale it, but not directly jump over. Get industrial cutter lasers underneath them. Activate the lasers on pressure. You don't need light sensitive creatures for those lasers to be deadly.
Final nail would probably be a biological weapon against those creatures. If something is living, there is another living organism that will prey on it. Covid-19 reminded us that. And that is a random mutation, wait until humans try building a virus.
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Phosphorus allotropes are bioluminescent, could be used. They also burn or react with water to produce poisonous gases like phosphene and have the ability to cause explosions when mixed with some other chemicals.
So stuff like amulets and blow drier powder guns etc and other imaginary weaponry can be fashioned.
Imagine, luring a big monster in one their human dwellings and dumping a bucket of bioluminescent stuff on it, just like pranks played by children who keep chalked up duster on the upper edge of the door.The monster would die even if it can fly.
These are also present in fish in deep sea so their can be a whole class of humans responsible for mining this stuff to stave off monsters.
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How about a somewhat different approach: Robot "guns". Build something that can discern the monsters (say, a light source coupled with a ranging system. Anything sufficiently dark but present is a monster) and it fires a pulse from a powerful laser at the target. That should do some serious damage to the monster if not kill it outright.
Since these monsters are at least semi-intelligent they will quickly learn to stay outside the range of the guns no matter what. That means they can't cross a line of guns. You will need a lot of guns to push them back but it can be done. Eventually humanity will corner them into the places where a line of guns can't be placed (sufficiently rough terrain), those areas will need other ways to clear them but if you can merely stop them from moving about they should eventually starve.
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Car Batteries, a set of jumper cables (or stick welding leads) and a sheet of metal grounded to the other lead. Car battery welding is an emergency type of welding you can do if you really need to stick some metal together... in an emergency; gotta stress that part.
BUT I could see shock troopers geared out like so:
* Speed glass welding helmet
* Car battery on Back pack
* Steel shield on one arm (Connected to battery terminal)
* Thick protective leather glove and smaller metal cover to form a sort of Arc-claw
This Arc-claw would be connected to the other battery terminal and dragged across the front of the shield would generate bursts of intense light. This could be used to quickly generate bursts of light or holding the metal a short distance away to maintain an arc. For the purposes of car battery welding just about any metal rods will work (because we don't really care about weld quality at this point do we?) Rebar, nails, etc.
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I see nobody has mentioned fireflies/bioluminescence. A quick google search shows raising fireflies is a feasible feat, and raising them in enough numbers to release them as a defense may be doable (they can get extremely close to the monsters)
Kill a monster, and selectively breed fireflies to a) be attracted to the monster's meat (fireflies are carnivorous apparently, who knew) and b) have long/predictable flash patterns. A firefly that can approach silently, land or closely approach the monster, and then suddenly and consistently flash light will do lots of damage, as well as attracting other fireflies to the area (I know they signal for breeding, so you'll have to stretch this a bit).
Moats (would have to be saltwater) filled with the bioluminescent algae that we see videos of makes wading through impossible, so they'll have to go over the moats (presumably where there's fireflies). Fill your moats with bioluminescent jellyfish for added spicy factor.
I've seen talk of bioluminescent trees attempted. In post-apocalypse this may be more difficult, but if you can pull it off, there's another line of defense. When all else fails (under extreme siege), light your wall of trees on fire.
Edit:
take up beekeeping while you're at it. Pissed off bees (most people breed for calmness, but you want the opposite, breed for aggressive bees) carrying bioluminescent pollen/nectar. Maybe eventually (or with some cross breeding) they'll also evolve to be bioluminescent. Not only are you getting stung by a horde of angry bees, but now the stingers glow once they're in? I think that screams "get out of my fort". You'll need bees anyways to pollinate your food sources
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[
Artificial wombs have become a luxury in society, allowing them to forgo the burden of carrying a child for nine months. Originally, this was an expensive process that currently only the wealthy and privileged can afford. However, big corporations such as Amazon, General Motors, etc, have also taken an interest in the technology, in order to use for their own purposes. The prime focus of a corp is to maximize shareholder profits. One way to accomplish this is to reduce the cost of labor. This can be done by corporations investing in this technology in order to grow their own workforce.
These machines are housed in specially built facilities, where they can be monitored around the clock. Embryos are fertilized in vitro and placed in a artificial womb made from cloned samples. These would be grown from a collection of cells to create a cheaply mass produced womb casing that can be made reusable for a set number of times. Facilities would have the capacity and space to create thousands of these machines cheaply. With this method, a company can create its own work force without the need to supply market rate compensation. These children will be grown in these pods and decanted when they have fully developed. They would then be raised by the company and indoctrinated in its culture. These children will be legally owned by the corporation as their "parent", spending their lives working for it in order to pay back the cost that it took to grow them. These workers will be liquidated when they prove to be of no further use.
With companies no longer having to pay a living wage to outside workers, this creates opportunities to save large amounts of money. I would like to prevent this from happening. At first I thought that simple legislation could be put in place that forbid companies from doing this. However, this could only be realistically adopted in first world countries, where the rule of law can be enforced. A company could easily move or simply outsource to a less scrupulous nation, where laws are lax or consistently ignored, and grow a workforce without any legal ramifications. Others could simply bribe legislators under the table and authorities to look the other way.
What limitations must I introduce in order to prevent corporations from doing this?
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There are a number of structural issues that combine to make this not a good idea for your corporations to begin with, regardless of legal or moral concerns.
First, there's the problem of cost. You need to build and maintain facilities to produce and house these artificial wombs, which as you mention require round-the-clock specialist attention. You need to provide all of the nutrients and whatever else it takes them to develop. And then you have thousands of infants - you need to house them, feed them, look after them, educate them until they're economically productive. Your corporations won't see a red cent of productivity for a good 15 years after they start funding this initiative; that's a tough thing for an executive to give the green light. (Sure, there are fields where you could start people earlier, but then there's fields where they'll need even more training and education.) Even then, since they're not being paid, you need to provide homes, food, medical care, amenities, and everything else. You can save *some* money over just hiring people, but that will only delay the point where you break even.
Second, this is an experimental way of bringing up workers, as opposed to the tried-and-relatively-true systems we have in place now. Your executives know that they *can* hire people on the job market when needed. They *don't* know that, after 15 or 20 years of investment (considering the prototyping phase), their growing project will actually yield useful results. Maybe they can be pretty sure, but that's still not certainty, and people tend to be averse to big risks. Not to mention, if somebody just plain doesn't mature into a useful worker by the traditional method, you can always just flunk them in an interview. If your vat-grown workers turn out duds, you're out a lot of time and money.
Third is forward planning. Knowing what your business will need in a year or five years takes a lot of practice and skill. Knowing what you'll need in 15 or 20 years is all but impossible, especially when you take into account acquisitions, mergers, divisions. The last thing you want when you're trying to plot out a business strategy or arrange a merger is to have thousands of maturing workers sitting around. If your corporation decides that it needs to shift its focus, will its workers be useful to its new direction, or a burden?
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Why would they grow them rather than using robots?
Robots are probably cheaper to build, can work 24 hours a day, you don't need to wait years for them to grow up, they don't need to be fed, don't need to sleep, don't get sick, don't get hay fever or pregnant or any of the other day to day things that people get even if they are artificial that will stop them working.
The only limitations that matter are the economic ones, human staff barely work out as it is relative to automation. Actually having to feed and house your staff not just pay them probably costs more for the worst paid workers.
Added to that, you're paying to support them for 12-16 years before they're the least bit useful to you and that's just as basic labour. The cost benefit isn't there.
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> These children will be legally owned by the corporation as it's "parent", spending their lives working for it in order to pay back the cost that it took to grow them.
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This sounds [familiar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude)...
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> At first I thought that simple legislation could be put in place that forbid companies from doing this.
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No need - [it already exists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)...
Any company that started doing this would nigh-instantly be sanctioned by pretty much *every* member of the United Nations. It would be impossible for them to be based in, or do business in, any United Nations member or observer state. That brings the list down to [less than 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_limited_recognition#States_that_are_neither_UN_members_nor_UN_observers):
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> Republic of Kosovo
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> Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic
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> Republic of China
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> Republic of South Ossetia
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> Republic of Abkazia
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> Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
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> Republic of Artsakh
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> Pridnestrovian Moldovian Republic
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> Republic of Somaliland
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Given that several of these countries would *quite like* to be recognised as members of the United Nations (or, at the very least, to make money from United Nations states), they are **also** unlikely to allow the company to exist within, or do business within, their borders.
So, your company now has a large, cheap workforce to produce all the goods, products and services that they *can't sell to anyone*. They either drop the plan, or implode.
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At some point in history, England was the most powerful country in the world and wanted slavery to be outlawed everywhere. Throughout the first half of the 1800's, England put so much pressure on markets that slave traffic was practically banished on the western world.
The country most involved in slave traffic back then was Brazil. England passed the Aberdeen Act in 1845, through which they would stop and search brazilian ships found in the Atlantic. If they were found to be slave traffickers, the crew would be judged in english courts. It was heavily enforced, and five years later Brazil passed a law forbidding slave traffic as well. The oligarchy who controlled economic power in Brazil was furious, but it was either that or going to war with England, a war which Brazil would lose faster than we could say "hey!".
More pressure was applied, and slavery was banned for good here in 1888.
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Of course, England did not put so much pressure to ban slavery out of charity and kindness. The economic model that used slaves also imposed monopolies and was not as productive as the growing industrial model of that time.
Just the same, if companies employ mass-produced, slave clones, then worldwide commerce will tend to suffer in the long run, for different reasons. We see that happening today. For example, [China's industrial model is bordering on slavery](https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-studies/china/), and China concentrates most of the world manufacture of electronics. This places China in constant odds against other countries, with military threats here and there. Due to the economic pressure put mostly by the EU and United States, at times China does something to improve the working conditions of factory workers. Given time, it may be that in a few decades those people may have living standards closer to what we westerns have today.
And in your story, in the far future, it may be that the pressure put on by first world governments has the same effect. Those clones will exist and will be part of the industry for a time - and then international pressure will make it more costly to use the clones than to use free citizens, so the clone market will collapse and the model will cease to exist.
[Answer]
Everyone is overcomplicating things. The answer is:
# Simple corporate human greed
Somewhere along the line, in the 18 years it takes to grow these kids to adulthood, one of the CEOs of the corporation will cut the program because it’s not providing any value to the company in the current quarter and isn’t anticipated to for the foreseeable twelve quarters the CEO is estimated to be leading the company for. They’ll get a bunch of stock for cutting expenses. The end.
[Answer]
This scheme is unlikely to save any money as long as human labor is cheap and plentiful.
Let’s look at two companies. One pays its workers a poverty wage, enough to cover basic necessities but with no excess. With that wage the company’s employees have to buy their own food, housing, clothing, medical treatments, and pay for the needs of the company’s future employees, their children. If they can’t make ends meet, well, you could always give them an advance on their pay or let them live in company-owned dormitories and shop at company-owned stores where they are able to incur further debt. The idea here is that a company is only really paying for the most basic needs of its employees. If they owned the workers they would still have to pay for all of their workers' expenses, but by giving the workers the money and making them try to provide for themselves there are several advantages:
1. They aren’t technically enslaving anyone. This is a perfectly free market exchange.
2. They incentivize their workers to work hard without having to threaten them.
3. They have no obligation to the wellbeing of their workers. They aren’t their “children”. If the factory closes down they just kick them out on their butts.
Compared to this first company a second company trying to grow its own workers has many additional expenses and few advantages. You have to build and maintain high-tech artificial wombs. You need a large staff of nurses, caretakers, and teachers to take care of the newborn children and raise them to adulthood. Taking a newborn baby from birth to productivity is going to cost a lot of time and a lot of money and isn’t going to benefit very much from scaling efficiency. Every child needs constant, personalized attention. They need parental figures or they are not going to become a functioning adult. Once you’ve invested all of this time and money to produce your workforce what have you gained? You still need to pay for your workers' basic needs so your operating costs are likely only marginally if at all lower than paying your workers poverty wages. But you also now have other problems. What motivates your workers? They aren’t being paid. Why should they work hard, or at all? What are you going to do liquidate them? Torture them? Free them? You have few legal ways to motivate them that don’t involve, well, paying them.
[Answer]
Because it would never be cost effective.
The amount of money it would take to raise, train and care for its workforce, even with distopia levels of "care", would by far exceed just paying employees. Add in all the security you will need to isolate and enforce your will on your workforce, and it becomes entirely cost prohibitive.
As a real world comparison, North Korea kinda already does this. Artificial wombs are just replaced with actual wombs. They have a workforce that is very conditioned to obey the government and a police force to enforce it.
However, without support and supplies from other countries (primarily China), the entire system would collapse.
[Answer]
In short, you shouldn't have to worry about this happening.
>
> With this method, a company can create its own work force without
> the need to supply market rate compensation.
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If they don't pay the employees a competitive wage, then they will leave to work somewhere else. The company that grew them would be out the money spent growing them and would get nothing in return.
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> These children will be legally owned by the corporation as their
> "parent", spending their lives working for it in order to pay back
> the cost that it took to grow them.
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This is not true. The only way that someone would owe this sort of debt to a company would be if it was part of a contract that both parties agreed to. Minors aren't generally considered legally competent enough to enter into a contract like this, so the child could walk away and leave you little recourse. That assumes you somehow convinced them to sign the contract in the first place. Even in the best-case scenario, you'd be hard-pressed to recover any costs you spent growing, birthing, and raising them in the time period *before* they signed the contract. Considering that a child is unlikely to have a reading level high enough to reasonably understand a legal contract before age 16-17, that's a lot of unrecoverable costs.
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> With companies no longer having to pay a living wage to outside
> workers, this creates opportunities to save large amounts of money.
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Your workers' living expenses aren't really dependent on whether they were grown in-house or not. A low wage would have the same effect on both classes of workers.
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The only way that this model would enable a company to lower their personnel costs would be if they could effectively keep the workers as slaves. Outlawing all forms of slavery is the simple solution, but likely isn't strictly necessary. Even if slavery was legal, it will almost always be cheaper to buy a slave that's already the right age and has the right skill set than it will be to grow your own and hope they turn out like you need them to.
The only real advantage to growing your own workforce from scratch (assuming eugenics is out of the picture) is that you'll have lots of time to teach them the exact skillset that you think\* they'll need to be an ideal employee. It would almost certainly be more cost-effective to operate a system of tuition-free private schools, where you can incorporate necessary skills into the curriculum without having to financially support the students.
\* Spoiler alert: you're almost certainly going to be wrong on this one.
[Answer]
There's a number of ways to do so.
**Economic inhibitors**
A few independent ideas:
* It's so expensive to build such humans in vats that it's just easier to pay ordinary people. Part of this lies in the fact that these humans start at birth and have to grow up - time is expensive too.
* A legal way to implement this would be to not ban the use of vat-grown humans but to tax companies for not using ordinary humans.
* All vat-grown humans have their own personalities and rebel so often that it just becomes a waste to make any - too expensive to quell revolts.
**Other Ideas**
1. Rogue employee messes with the brainwashing techniques the company uses and plants a 'seed' in every vat-grown human to make them overtly or secretly sabotage the company's operations. If secretly, these humans should be completely trusted - literally forming the bodyguard units of high-profile individuals, until they (together) Order 66 their slavers.
2. Since humans naturally rebel, many clones successfully escape, build false identities, and over time, accumulate outside of these companies. Many end up finding employment in corporate in these companies (to break the company from the inside), while others in more remote locations organize a guerilla effort to free these slaves. This could add some action into the story, as well as the mental impact of sabotaging your peers who didn't necessarily do anything wrong.
[Answer]
I can think of a couple of solutions.
1. The whole process is not worth it because robots are much cheaper to maintain. They don't need rest or food; they can be programmed to always follow orders. Even with artificial wombs, i feel like companies might still prefer robots.
2. There can be vigilante groups who rescue these "slaves". These groups can mostly operate in the third world countries that have not yet outlawed this process. Maybe a sympathetic executive will tip off a vigilante group and they will break in and rescue these "workers".
3. Perhaps ordinary people will protest this development because their jobs are being taken away. Even with bribes, politicians cannot ignore the majority of voters. Especially when they unite to save their paychecks.
[Answer]
In short, you can't. That's right, I said it. If there is a cost effective way of growing "people" for mass labor deployment, then only those in the world with the most power will have any say over it.
But then you have to break that down into how it could be cost effective. Further you would need to run a risk analysis. And not to forget about the politics of it.
I'll leave the cost effectiveness and risk analysis as an exercise to the reader. Companies routinely do these kinds of analysis, the simple trick here is to ignore the moral implications and just get down to crunching some numbers.
The interesting aspect of it, as far as I, and I think most people would be concerned, is "how could they, how dare they"? So, yes, in summation, I think the question is political and moral.
To turn the politics in one's favor, simply lie. Explain that these are not human beings. Elaborate, be creative. They simply aren't, or you can actually make them different. Genetically alter them. Heck, if you're growing them in bags, what added expense is there for mass gene editing. Just work in batches while you're scaling up. If you apply gene editing and some of the specimens die, well no one should care because they weren't human to begin with. You can frame those results as a filtering of the required attributes. The one's that survive gene editing are the one's you needed anyway, those were the goal to begin with, the target you're aiming for.
As for the moral questions. Hide the truth, so help you. Don't let out videos of screaming, convulsing, newly hatched oids, that die after a few minutes. The screamers always get the sympathy. Some video will inevitably leak eventually. Be prepared for that. Use heavy law suits and a lot of posturing to keep those incidents under control. Be prepared to show similar videos of medical testing on animals to sway the public away from the notion this this could ever be considered anything except business as usual. Never use the word "immoral". Always use words like "justified" and "legal" and always refer to "precedents" in various contexts, but never negate your terms as in "unjustified", "illegal" or "unprecedented". And for God's sake, never, *ever* refer to the subjects as "people", you can call them anything but that. In fact don't even refer to people as "people". You can call them "my fellow citizens" or [your nation]ians or what have you.
Explain how your industry helps the citizens by providing goods and services in or from environments that are too harsh or too dangerous for humans and perhaps where robots do not have enough common sense to adequately solve the kinds of problems that these oids are useful for. Let the oids be celebrated on the order of a service animal or even on par with police dogs, but do not let them be pitied and never let your company be vilified for what it is doing. Your company is providing a service to the common good of all *humans*. Plain and simple.
One last bit. Keep in mind that power almost always comes from power and wealth to begin with, going way, way back in time. New power is almost always just a variation on some previous version. It simply shifts from person to person, generation to generation. Only very rarely does someone come to power from nothing. The right hand knows this. And the left hand is telling the citizens that they are the ones benefiting. But the right hand is not telling the left hand that the power differential, between the corporation and the citizens, as a result of this industry decision, is shifting so dramatically that getting the citizens' consent is merely part of the process. No one but the right hand knows this going forward. By the time the citizens come to understand the nature of the thing that they're ( permitting isn't exactly the right word, accepting maybe ), it will be far too late for them to have any chance at re-balancing the playing field. The power lost to the corporation is all in the "permission granted". Corporations, in general, are designed to take advantage of just such a situation, and they will.
[Answer]
I agree with others that the expense and effort of creating a huge infrastructure to continually grow huge numbers of clones for a workforce is unlikely to be practical, but there's a way cloning could be used for this without mass-production.
Why bother creating huge clone farms to mass produce workers, when you can just engineer a small number of starter clones who are pre-dispositioned both genetically and psychologically for fecundity, loyalty, and insularity, then let them reproduce?
These initial clones are raised in a [company town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town), where every citizen is an employee who works for the company, and all resources come from the company. Within a few decades, you'll have a workforce that grows itself, in a community where the company is inherently trusted, and all the wages they are paid come back to the company.
Aside from the cloning part, this is something that companies have actually done in the past, so it's pretty realistic.
Preventing something like this would be more difficult than simply preventing mass growing of clones, because aside from the first generation, technically the employees have free will and are choosing to participate.
The best way to prevent something like this would probably be strong public opinion triggered by some disastrous event, possibly backed by religious fervor.
>
> "The Clonetown experiments conducted by a cartel of manufacturers in the late 21st century were an initial success, leading to improved productivity and reduced costs for cartel members. This success was short-lived, however, coming to an abrupt halt with the Teliaville Massacre of 2104, where an entire clone town was burned to the ground and many of its residents brutally killed by fanatical followers of the Church of the Celibate Savior.
>
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> The incident was apparently triggered by the disappearance of a child from a neighboring community, and the mistaken belief that the child had been kidnapped by the town for breeding purposes. Since then, corporations have gone out of their way to avoid any association with clone labor, and have invested heavily in automation instead. Meanwhile, the former inhabitants of these clone towns continue to suffer unusually high levels of unemployment, mental illness and suicide..."
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[Answer]
There's a lot of good answers already, especially discussing the cost of raising children. Another issue for your companies is where do they get the genetic material? While collecting sperm is easy and non-invasive, collecting viable eggs is a lot more complicated. (Takes a least a month, with daily hormone injections and a surgery at the end of it.) Knowing that their progeny would become slaves, who would provide the samples with which these children would come from?
In most countries, there is some form of government agency that would get involved if children are abused. Most countries have some form of child labor laws as well. In order to be at all cost effective, I don't see how the company could avoid violating these laws. It's really expensive to feed, educate, provide health care, and provide adequate adult supervision to children, especially from birth.
Think about it this way, why aren't companies adopting/kidnapping children to run their factories? It's a horrendous enough crime that people will care, even in less developed countries, and it's not cost effective.
When there eventually becomes some form of government investigation into these poor children, they would likely become wards of the state or be returned to their biological parents. Biological parents have a lot of rights to their children.
If we premise that these companies are working somewhere with minimal government oversight, I still can't imagine it ever being cost effective.
[Answer]
As already mentioned, robots are much more likely (especially in a world, where humans already invented artificial wombs).
But if you need some evil "company owns human" scheme I have another idea:
Companys implement chips to human brains. Those things control the human while he es at work (not like a puppet, but more like "you should do this now". While you have no control over what you actually do, you are managing walking, gripping something and so on). Once you are done, you mostly forget what you were doing.
People would argue, that it's like earning money in the sleep, while others argue, that the people become like zombies working for the companies.
[Answer]
If your story really depends on having this you can just look for existing phenomena around the world about human trafficking in the modern day.
How much more different it is to have them vat grown than it is to have them illegally reside in a country where you can pay off the authorities, take their passports and essentially limit them to work only for you and live only in your factories shanty town. How much of a difference does it really make after all? this also provides you with actual real world examples of how corporations are "getting away with it" while avoiding being connected enough to have the export venues for the factories products be blocked.
The practices are often illegal in the market the factory resides in and also in the market the products are exported to - but it still happens and the workforce is essentially forced "company men" - sometimes willingly(escaping even worse conditions in their home country).
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In my fantasy-medieval-with-magic world, after a great war between the gods that destroys the old gods, a new "one true god" is born. Out of a love for the people, and a desire not to change who those people are, the new god bestows a blessing to all who accept the gift.
The blessing grants the following effects
* Cure disease/poison.
* Fast healing (minor injuries heal in a day, major injuries like broken bones heal in a week)
* Improved empathy (you know exactly how someone else feels as long as they are not trying to hide it)
* Improved learning/strength (if you want knowledge, agility, or strength, your DNA is no longer a handicap. AKA everyone who puts in the same amount of effort and are at the same starting point will achieve the same results)
* Green thumb (Your love for your plants, pets and livestock nourishes them, helping them grow big and healthy)
Everyone instinctively knows about the blessing, and understands how to receive it. They can also freely opt-in or out as often as they like. The people of the world did not participate in the war of the gods, and enough time passed between the end of the war and the rise of the new god for everyone to learn the old gods are dead. They only learn about the new god when the blessing is offed (minutes after that gods birth). All they know about the new god is that they are granting this blessing, and promises not to interfere with this world that is now theirs (aside from the blessing, which is granting a portion of the power of the gods to all people).
Given that receiving the blessing is no effort, and how powerful it is, what justifications could people give to reject this blessing?
[Answer]
# If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Reading through the benefits of the blessing, it struck me that it's pretty similar to spam ads you might find on the internet - Cure all your diseases! Increase your intelligence! Burn fat! Try this one neat trick to have a green thumb! If it hasn't been very long since the new god's birth, and very few people have accepted the blessing, people will rightly be skeptical that these blessings are really what they say on the tin.
Even if the blessings work as advertised, what if there's a hidden cost? Maybe this isn't a god offering these enhancements for free - it could be a demon who's doing all this in exchange for your soul. No one would have evidence either way, so if your people are naturally skeptical, they might just stick with the life they know rather than getting involved with an unknown god/possible demon.
As a real-life example, if somebody I've never met offers me a million dollars out of the blue, I would ignore them rather than accept the gift - it's possible I'm missing out on a million dollars, but I there's a good chance I have saved myself a lot of trouble by avoiding the situation altogether.
[Answer]
**Loyalty**
Or the lack of loyalty to the new god. Old habits die hard. Old faith dies harder. Most people had already devoted themselves to the old gods, and news of them being dead is not enough for the many to abandon their faith. Accepting anything from the new god would be an apostasy. So thank you, but no thanks.
[Answer]
# Mistrust.
>
> "Godly gifts are never without cost", the crones of the village used to say. And they were right. The old Gods tried to tempt us too, with vigour, and skill, and what they claimed was wisdom. But they knew, and in the end we knew too, that there's no such thing as a 'gift' when it comes to the Gods. They always extract their price, whether in vitality or free will. No, this New God can keep their bounty.
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[Answer]
# Social Pressure
Certain people in power might not trust the new god or might not want others getting stronger so they declare the blessing heretical/evil/work of the devil and declare anyone who accepts it is a witch and is not welcome in their group or society or country.
# Self Reliance
Some people might want to have sole power and control over their own lives, don't want anyone to interfere and want to achieve things at with their own abilities
# Apathy
Many people may have no great ambitions, they don't want to stand out, they have no need for any of these blessings. They just want to lead their little quite lives at home, going through their daily routines as they have been doing until now.
# Magical Reasons
The blessing interferes with magic, interferes with other blessings they might have or want to acquire, makes them marked or visible to some enemy, makes them unsuitable for some ritual, etc.
[Answer]
* **Being affraid of being addicted to it.** You might argue that improved empathy might have side effects. If for some reason everybody is sad around you because of something you cannot change (e.g. their parents died) you might get sad, unproductive, even less helpful to those who are sad, because you feel their pain too much. You might even become depressed or suicidal. Of course you then may opt-out. But what if you became addicted to other people's sadness? I don't ever smoke not because I think a cigarette will kill me but because I fear that I may become an addict, and a lot of cigarettes might kill me.
* **Being old and having enough of it, thinking that you are not the one who should do it.** I can justify this with a story. My grandparents lived most of their adult lives in communism where they had to vote but they didn't have choice. Now we live in a democracy which is loved by almost everybody. My grandmother believes democracy and voting are great, but she wouldn't vote, because she has bad feelings about it, and thinks she is not qualified, her knowledge is from an other system. She is also a religious but wouldn't go to the church because she didn't go in the communism when it was a hard choice, she thinks she shouldn't go now either. She likes to watch sermons in TV.
* **Hierarchy.** The society might have or develop a hierarchy where people think that it is better if only those capable should get these powers, and everybody else would be incentivized not to. This is hard to do because everybody could try in secret, but I think might be possible.
[Answer]
The old gods might be dead, but:
1. their priests aren't dead,
2. the priests like being in power, and
3. the new god might not want the old gods's priests.
Thus, the old gods's priests preach against this new god.
[Answer]
# Gift might be good, but people don't have to
Consider biblical story of Jesus (it doesn't matter if you believe it or not). Jesus spent his life teaching, feeding and healing other people. But he did point out mistakes of *the old ways*, which eventually made Pharisees to kill him in the worst imaginable way (*I'm ignoring the Romans and a lot of details to simplify*).
Should your people have a similarly strict government, they could enforce a ban on using new god's gift. This could occur for several reasons:
* **They are worshippers of old gods**
Maybe they have some secret plans of reviving the old gods? Or they just don't beilieve they are dead and are afraid of punishment.
* **Accepting gift by the majority of population could result in uprising**
Improved learning capability for masses is not something you want under strict government. At some point people will understand that they are treated badly and will rush to create new, better government.
* **They want to keep the power for themselves**
If only a handful of people will benefit from the blessing, they'd have a massive advantage, which would allow them become a demi-god cast. Imagine a priest walking from village to village and multiplying their crops (for an outrageous price of course).
Since your world is medieval level, it would be pretty easy to enforce the rule. Your neigbour has a bountiful harvest while you're struggling to find a ripe potato? Report them to the guards. You went on a bar brawl and got your face mutilated for the next week, but the other guy looks like newborn next day? Guards will be very interested in this event. A street orphan has some good looking muscles? You know what to do.
And the guards *love* to deal with such unruly citizens. Since there's only one effect that works immidiately-ish is healing effect, **the best way to check if someone is using the gift is to break their bone(s)**! If they heal within a week - death. If they don't, well, they probably just disabled the gift for the time of healing. They were unable to move or do anything for two months, good enough.
Or the good ol' witchhunting method - [**Trial by ordeal**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal#By_water). Give your subject a poison. If they live, they are using the gift! Burn those heretics! If not, well, they were not guilty, too bad.
This approach is not only going to make people really unwilling to use their gift but also they will actively try to prove **not using** the gift.
Those that use will use the gift will try to minimize it's effects to be close to "natural". Just a bit of Green Thumb to get a kilogram more potatoes to survive the winter. Use healing only to deal with the life-threatening issues, and let everything else heal by itself. *Keep your head down if you want to live.*
[Answer]
# Independence vs Dependence - It's a part of growing up.
A common misconception of foreign aid programs is that we provide 'gifts' to other societies out of the kindness of our hearts.
The real purpose is for societies to be adequately supported so that eventually they would be able to provide *those same services to themselves*. In turn, their society would grow to support trade and other cooperative functions that benefit all.
The danger and ultimate balance with 'gifts' is then dependence, and the need to strive for 'independence'. If a society becomes dependent on a continuous gift, such that they cannot exist without it, and there is no desire to change or grow out of it: then there is a real deficiency in this society. It is far better for the society to work towards *not requiring the gift at all*.
To accept a gift without the ability to learn how to live without the need to accept it in future is dangerous, you would always be indebted to it, society would always expect it, and development within society would be damaged.
It is well conceivable that a society would reject such a gift due to the internal ruptures the gift would bring and the impediment it would imply to its development and growth.
[Answer]
## People can't control their new powers.
If you receive this "blessing", you don't get to pick and choose who benefits from your new powers. Your new abilities affect everyone and everything near you.
**Improved empathy:** You get to hear the problems of everyone around you, no matter how minor, all the time. Any sort of social situation is going to become a serious strain. Being in a crowd will become unbearable. People who receive the "blessing" are going to have to live away from the rest of the world, just to hear themselves think.
**Super Green Thumb:** Your crops, pets, and livestock will grow up big and healthy... but so will weeds and vermin. Having a healthy cornfield isn't worth it if it gets overrun by rats the size of draft horses. (And if your cat or dog gets *too* big? They might start to think you look like their next meal...)
**Cure Disease/Poison and Fast Healing:** The energy from this has to come from somewhere. If that "somewhere" is you, then this is similar to the Improved Empathy problem. You'll have to stay away from everyone so you don't starve to death curing every single stranger who walks past.
[Answer]
I have to voice my concerns over this premise...
You have a world where gods are absolutely known to exist.
Some old gods were killed off & one new god has sprung up to fill the void.
That god is now offering 'benefits' which, unlike most 'real world' gods, don't seem to rely on you first being dead to claim them.
It is absolutely **not** the 'one true god', it is simply a replacement for the older, now dead, 'many true gods' that previously existed.
**"One true god" as a concept can only exist when the mere fact of its existence is open to debate.**
If it is absolutely proven to exist, it simply does not matter which one it is, nor if it is singular or plural.
Unless there is some plot armour allowing these old gods to miraculously return later, then they're done with, whatever their initial purpose.
Your people now have the *new guy* in charge. They can choose to accept its 'gifts' with no apparent adverse reaction, or they can choose not to.
Why would they distrust this new god?
They have no history of distrusting their old gods. This new one is presumably equally omnipotent, omniscient, or not, as the case may be - but these people **know** their gods exist.
Unless you're going to play this for comedic value - whereby you take a pace to the left if you ever make a disparaging comment about your god - to avoid the inevitable thunderbolt, of course - then you have an established precedent for 'doing what they say' without question.
So, why reject the new guy?
His promise to his people that if they merely say 'sure, I'll have some of that' they get these magnificent benefits.
Their history has no concept of 'spam' or 'gods not upholding their word'... so go for it.
Which brings me to my concern...
How do you make a plot out of this?
Is there some blowback? The new guy has a sneaky agenda? He's really a devil in disguise?
This is not 'real world'.
You don't have two millennia of history of the populace lying/cajoling/poking each other with sharp sticks over whose god is the best god, culminating in war after war after war trying to prove who might be right - or at least have the biggest or most dedicated army of zealots... you have actual gods who communicate their desires to the population.
Why would your population **not** want this blessing?
'Belief' in a god as a concept can only be upheld so long as there is no actual proof of its existence.
As soon as it becomes a simple known fact, then everything else goes out of the window. Belief is no longer a driving force.
[Answer]
There have been some great and deep answers but I think this simple one is missing:
## Some people are fools
>
> “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
> completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
> fools.” ― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
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You have designed a very neat and simple way to make life better.
All someone has to do is accept this blessing and hey presto, better life.
So what about the people saying: "But what if I don't want to be happy?".
Good luck getting a stubborn fool to trudge down the nearest church of the new god or spin counter-clockwise with a bone in their hair to accept this new blessing.
Yes your story can go into why Bob didn't turn to the new God because he was of the opinion that this new god was up to no good.
But Jack was just a fool who didn't want anything to do with this god business in the first place, nobody could convince him otherwise because he had no reasoning or opinion to change.
[Answer]
I will add to the others and also, in a way, summarize them:
# Conviction
People hold different values and weight different things differently.
I can easily seeing somebody rejecting the Blessing, not because they think it has a negative side, but simply because they don't want to accept help from a place like a god.
They might also see it as completely opposed to how they think society or people should be.
* You do need the threat of great harm, otherwise criminals would become reckless.
* Being promised a given result with a given input does not reflect the nature of humans and true conviction (working until you achieve your desired result, instead of it being simple calculation: If i put in X hours, I will achieve X)
* Relying on an external power will weaken them, if it disappears (remember: gods have been killed before)
etc.
You can look at basically any good villain and you will find a conviction that is understandable and that you might actually be sympathetic to, but that is ultimately harming the well-being of humanity.
[Answer]
## Long term survival of the species
So there's a god that freely grants a boon that basically obsoletes the skills of doctors and farmers.
Also, there used to be something called the "old gods", meaning that gods aren't immortal, so some of the people will reason that the boon won't be available indefinitely.
Therefore, it seems likely that an **ascetic order of atheists preparing for the death of the god** would probably form: they would reject the boon (and all the food and medicine produced by people who have accepted the boon) just so that when the benevolent god eventually disappears, there would be at least someone who still knew how to farm land and heal people without resorting to divine favours.
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In my fictional planet, forests grow not on soil, but on vast spongy mats of fungi. Traditional Earth-like feet would struggle to get grip on the squishy ground, so most megafauna taxa have feet like blades that cut into the fungus.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eDC1Q.png)
*A very rough drawing of a classic fauna example from this world*
On this world, however, I want to have cursorial predators, like cheetahs, with high speed and agility. The thing is, I'm not sure if the "feet sinking into ground" idea would impair their speed.
So, what I'm asking is: **How would such a (quadrupedal) predator run, and what anatomical/morphological adaptations would it have to do so?**
I suppose you'll need more clarification on the "How would it run" part, so this is what I mean:
On the diagram below (Note: that is not what the creature actually looks like) I've labelled the respective feet 1, 2, 3 and 4.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2U9Gk.png)
When a leopard runs, it puts one foot forward at a time, so its running style would be like this, going by the diagram:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
A running cheetah brings its two forelegs forward, then its hind legs, like this:
1,2 - 3,4
Which style would be more suited to running with blade-like feet in springy, spongy ground?
Then, the second part of the question was "What anatomical/morphological adaptations would it have?". By this, I basically mean stuff like the shapes of the blade, overall build, spikes on the blades for grip, etc.
So, if I was to sum up the ideal, but not necessarily required, qualities, it should be able to:
* Run at over 100 km/h
* Jump 10 metres horizontally
* Jump 4 metres vertically
* Accelerate at 9 m/s
Answering with A) Which running style, and B) Morphological adaptations, what is the closest the creature could get to those abilities?
**EDIT:** Just had another idea. What about a second, smaller blade, perpendicular to the big one, that helps pull the creature back out of the sponge? Here's another very rough drawing to help you visualize it:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DoQ0r.png)
[Answer]
Gigantic Quad **Inverted Opposable Dewclaws** with a curved elongated spade shape that conforms to the limb during full compression.
A feline's hind legs store an amazing amount of energy when they are compressed during a stride. These dewclaws would do the same thing and help the limb explode from the soft ground, because they are compressed as they enter the hole created by the limb.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eqiBzm.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/w29GXm.png)
You can keep the toes if you want. I just Xed them out for illustrative purposes. This would be such an advantage over those waddling around with webbed feet that this creature would be at the top of the food chain and likely also the fastest land animal on the planet.
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Kinda like using a lever action post hole digger, backwards. If you stick it in the ground with the jaws closed and then open them, it'll pop back out of the ground. Or at least it would, if the hinge was (inverted) at the tips of the blades. How you're going to convince Nature to build that is on you, but I certainly wouldn't put it past *her*.
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> In my fictional planet, forests grow not on soil, but on vast spongy mats of fungi. **Traditional Earth-like feet would struggle to get grip on the squishy ground**,
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That's not correct.
Feet adapt to the environment, and squishy ground requires a large surface area. Consider the duck: webbed feet to provide large surface area to not sink too far, and claw toes to provide grip.
<https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/webbed-toes-duck-16472000.jpg>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AaYEs.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6Ury.jpg)
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> so most megafauna taxa have feet like blades that cut into the fungus.
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That's the worst possible design, since it'll quickly chop up the ground and you'll sink even further.
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You're actually looking to solve this issue in the exact opposite way that would be effective. Bladed feet on a soft mushy surface would result in a "spinning-car-tire effect", as the blades would cut right through the mycelium like butter, .
The trick is actually to look at ways of locomotion that create as little friction as possible, much like the act of sidewinding seen in desert snakes.
If I were you I would research the different types of locomotion used by various Desert Fauna here on earth, (as loose sand is a lot like the mushy fungi you are thinking of) like the sidewinder snake and the frilled lizard.
I would also take a look at the Jesus Christ Lizard (I know, you'll know why they call it that when you see it.) for inspiration.
IMO, the types of predators that would hunt in a Biome covered in soft fungi would most likely be fairly sedentary, and then when prey comes near, use quick bursts of energy to catch said prey if it gets too close. Moving around constantly in an environment like that would require a lot of energy, as you would have to constantly contend with the mushy ground. It would be like trying to run through Jello everywhere you went.
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I'm no expert. I just saw this in hot stack questions.
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That said, I see everyone is disagreeing with the blade idea and I think they're right, but I wanted to offer you another solution/perspective.
When traversing mud in a truck, you might use wide tires and high speed to skim the surface. Or you can choose tall narrow tires to cut through the mud into more solid ground below.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pwflN.jpg)
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The problem you are trying to solve is the same problem faced by predators on our world. The ground on most biomes may not be mushy, but many kinds of soil are unforgiving for running creatures that don't have proper gripping.
[Speaking of cheetas](http://www.dccafrica.co.za/cheetah-facts/adaptations-to-speed/):
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> They also have **semi-retractable claws which grip the ground**, giving them traction whilst they run.
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The animal you drew might have quite the grip, but placing those legs in the ground, and removing them, might take quite a while. A predator with claws that are short, sharp, and in large numbers will also have grip, and will be able to both run and change direction much more easily. Those same claws are also very good for slashing prey dead.
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Answering the question proper:
A) I don't have the math and biology in me to say which running style is better, but I think the cheetah's will provide more grip per stride. So I'm going with cheetah.
B) Cheetahs might fare very well in this world, and if introduced there as an alien species they might unbalance the local ecosystems. Any further adaptations would probably be physiological rather than anatomical, in my opinion.
[Answer]
if those points are that big they will not be moving very fast, they will not be able to pull those out at the end of stride without being slowed down significantly. There is such a thing as [too much traction](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1420-9101.2000.00166.x) for running creatures.
Second blades make for poor grip, traction claws are triangular with a flat side towards the ground for a reason. Claws that cut make for very poor traction.
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My suggestion would be:
* the slow part of the stride would be the digging the claws into the ground. The creature counteracts this by taking longer leaps like a toad, The creature would bury its claw into the mud then pull back on elastic limbs to catapult its self forwards. This is similar to the mantis shrimp’s hammer.
* the claws are flat on the back to prevent them digging into the mud and sharp on the front to allow them to quickly slice out of the mud that has pooled around it since the last claw hit the mud.
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I like the sedentary predator idea that was posted earlier. There are quite a few options. Make it like a huge trapdoor spider, or give it HUGE feet and really good camouflage, and when the prey gets close it leaps and tackles it.
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Rotate the bladed feet sideways so they turn into fat paddles that spread weight.
When it wants to cut the surface, it just stands on tiptoe.
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I don't know how well this would fit in to your world, but maybe their legs could be long enough to reach some solid ground and just walk like that. Or, instead of using the ground, they could rely on tree roots for solid footing to get around.
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Let's work from your premise that spikefeet are the best way to walk along this fungal sponge.
A cursory computation tells me that the structure of the sponge makes it much more compressive in the downward direction than it is horizontally: standing on it is like standing on a trampoline or waterbed.
However, if you were to slice out a cube of the fungus, and rotate it so that the former top is now facing to the horizon, you would discover that the cube is firm enough to bounce pogo atop it.
*Caveat:* I did not model or test any of this. I seems like it could work, but probably would not. Maybe it would require tweaking the conditions or method.
[Another answer](/a/112014/27708) suggested use of spurs. Here is my suggested improvement on that idea:
1. Spikefoot penetrates the top surface of the fungal sponge.
2. Spurs along the spikefoot, tips pointed downward, are pulled outward with the friction of the fungal sponge.
3. Mechanisms at the hinge of each spur store energy.
Springs operate with a linear i.e. curveless conversion of kinetic energy to potential energy, so you might want a system of hydraulic compression which increases the amount of energy required to unfold the spur exponentially. However, there is a reason why springs are springy but hydraulic cylinders are not. Gaseous, maybe?
4. As each spur penetrates transversely to the main spike, the area of the cisverse force downward is spread wider, causing the spike to gradually cease penetrating and begin compressing the fungal sponge.
Would the spurs simply tear away at the fungus and dig a hole into which the foot would sink?
Well, for the fungal sponge to be compressive in one axis but not a perpendicular one tells me that its structure is densely packed in the vertical layers but loose in the horizontal layers. However, for the spike to penetrate vertically, it would need to displace the fungus sideways. Doing so could only work if the displacement was redirected vertically i.e. up and down — where the sponge is compressive. For such to happen, and for the fungus to not simply turn into a big mush, would require that the sponge is also very strongly cohesive along the horizontal layers.
Seems to me that spikes, therefore, would easily penetrate vertically but not horizontally.
5. As the spurs tend to horizontal, their penetration is arrested and the spikefoot halts. Total penetration is balanced by the heft or weight of the creature, the force exerted horizontally by the spurs, and the pressure of the mechanism at the base of each spur.
Slower gait is achieved by inserting each foot, then withdrawing it. To spring forward, the foot is forced downward farther with each step. However, this would be much slower than if the compression of the fungal sponge was used like a trampoline. Such movement might not be feasible with a sponge that doesn't compress horizontally.
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They'd want to be more like ski poles, which actually serve a similar purpose, but on snow:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cn2x3.jpg)
It's good to stab the ground for traction, but only up to a point. If you sink in far you are wasting energy. Once you've got traction you want the sinking/stabbing to stop, so you need a flare like the end of a ski pole, that is flat and wide to resist sinking any further.
The stabby part probably wouldn't need to be very long. If the moss is more mushy, you want a multi-pronged or thicker stabby part. A longer stabby part just adds more friction and gets you stuck in the goo.
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I agree that you don't want blade feet; spongy ground is *springy,* so why not capitalize on that? Instead of blade-footed runners, you'd have springers that use flexible legs, bent backwards at the knee joints, with a more unusual foot arrangement: Picture a clamp, with each side being a curved claw.
These claws are triangular in shape and flat on the underside, and holds a springy orb, like a bouncy ball. When this mass strikes the ground, thanks to Newton's 3rd law (equal and opposite reaction), the creature's claws squeeze the orb, rapidly increasing the pressure put on the ground. As the force brings it up, it continues pressing down by straightening its legs, launching it forwards at high speeds.
This would be equivalent to jumping on a trampoline with miniature trampolines as the soles of your shoes (Yes, I know people don't really jump on trampolines with shoes) and would likely require special adaptations.
Its head may be tipped with a woodpecker-like beak, with a space between the beak and the skull to absorb force, and a special bone-muscle arrangement that would lock its head in place when it looks straight ahead. This would distribute force throughout its spinal column, preventing massive damage in one spot in favor of minor damage throughout the body.
But why would one want this? For one purpose: *Impalement.* Simply put, this creature uses it's powerful legs (and maybe even it's tail) to turn itself into a biological missile, lancing its prey at high speeds. Special fins along the sides could spread out or retract to stabilize and change its trajectory, with the tail now acting as a rudder.
Alternatively, it could have scythe-like forelimbs that start swinging forward as it leaps up, impacting the prey as it lands with the momentum of its jump, or if the orbs it uses to jump can be retracted, then perhaps its claws could lock together into spikes, channeling the force of impact; which will be much more efficient.
Protruding fangs or downward-pointing horns (perhaps even a spiked underbelly?) could have the same effect; when it lands, it would slam into the prey with the full force of its body, impaling it in multiple places.
Other good options (with the leaping legs) are telescoping arms or tentacles on the back, which would have hook-like claws or clamps at the end. This would allow it to do one of two things: 1. grab onto prey and then leap, pulling onto the prey both to ensure accuracy of attack and add momentum to the strike, or 2. to leap up and carry the prey with it before slamming or throwing it down, perhaps even *landing* on it! (Talk about adding insult to injury.....)
A 3rd option would be to leap and then grab onto the trees, allowing it to easily change the angle of its attack (for example: if the prey leaps aside or sidesteps it, it simply pushes off on a tree and swings around, striking it from behind). Essentially, it'd be a biological wrecking ball. With armadillo-like plating and spikes, this could easily be a deadly hunting method in and of itself.
Finally, it could just use the leaping legs to give it a head start. If it had plates of armor (perhaps with added studs for traction) running along its topside, it could roll up like an armadillo and become a living wheel, rolling over the fungi to slam and/or run over the prey. This would have the benefit of conserving momentum, at the cost of reduced visibility....unless it has special "lens", made of clear crystal to protect additional resting on its back? This would allow it to aim just fine when rolled up.
Hope this gives you some good ideas!
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I have an OC, who was born with this one-of-a-kind condition. His immune system is abnormally strong, invincible really.
He's incapable of getting sick, or dying of bacteria, viruses, venoms, poisons, drugs, chemicals, alcohol, radiation, basically any outside substance that can be consumed or injected. This ability gives him some form of semi-immortality.
So my question is, is this possible, or at least close to?
**EDIT:** to answers some questions, yes he can die from fire or bullets, if they're not related to anything mentioned above, he'll die. I probably should have clarified, just cause he can't die from radiation doesn't mean he can't be affected by it. In my story, rather than dying of radiation sickness like a normal person would've, the mutagens lingered in his system, and slowly began to change him. Finally, he's not really immortal, he still ages normally, he just can't die from pathogens. Also also, forgot to mention his overpowered immune cells also make him heal faster than normal (referring to platelets).
Thanks to everyone for your answers!
[Answer]
**TL;DR:** Powers as given: Not Plausible
### The Super-immune System
A person's immune system is designed to suss out things like bacteria and viruses, and likely anything that could mimic it enough. It finds an invader, pulls out the biological tools needed to ... handle ... it, disposes of it, and leaves a sort of memory behind should it ever show up again in the form of antibodies.
Second, not sure how much it was thought of, but the human body is home to its own ecosystem of gut bacteria and other things that should be there. Does your super immune system know how to tell the gut flora that should be there from the invading stuff that needs to be removed? If it is a superpower, I presume yes because reasons.
Based on your power's description, it should know to not murder all your OC's gut bacteria. But it may lead to food allergies if the food has a higher than normal bacteria counts (dead or alive) due to processing.
### DRUGS! Chemistry in Motion
But chemicals works by deceiving the systems in the body and not actually attacking them. Carbon monoxide binds to the hemoglobin instead of oxygen, and your immune system is none the wiser for it. As a more benevolent example, humble aspirin spoofs bodily functions to prevent the feeling of pain, granting you relief from that sprained ankle. Your immune system is likely not going to catch that either.
Likewise, we can trick various receptors and the like by figuring out the right chemicals that will trick them to do what we want. If you can't make your own neurochemicals, then store-bought is fine.
Likewise a chemical cocktail of a poison/venom might do this or it might just outright destroy things in chemical reactions. While the immune system might nab the dead and destroyed cells as invaders, it will not necessarily tag the stuff doing the destroying. In fact as cells themselves, they may fall victim to the same thing that is doing all the destroying in the first place.
### Radiation
Radiation will do similar -- cause damage without actually tripping the immune system. The only unknown is if the radiation is enough to trigger cancerous growths. Does your immune system know that these irregular and potentially lethal growths are dangerous and Not Normal, so they need to go?
This one is the middle ground -- I can see the super immune system being able to catch it in the early stages and prevent it form spreading. I can also see it not being able to do anything about cancer as it's still the person's body, just not doing what it is supposed to do.
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# Not only it won't work as you think, it might actually make them more vulnerable to death by (immune) overreaction.
You see, the inside of our body is a really good place to live in: it is nicely warm and there's plenty of resources such as cells and nutrients for bacteria, viruses and fungi to enjoy to their heart's content. To make sure they don't get the chance to trouble us, our immune systems are here to protect us from outside agents.
The problem? "outside agents" usually only stretches to other organisms that don't belong in our bodies and some types of organic toxins that don't kill us too quickly, and even then there is a large number of exceptions, as our bodies often get in contact with and house many substances and microorganisms which are neutral at worst and helpful at best, such as seen in our gut bacteria, which can offer help in functions that can range from digestion to aiding in our very immunity.
Now, to make sure we're on the same tracks: our immune response essentially works in 3 stages assuming we don't die midway:
* Stage 0: an external agent enters our body, and it hasn't been detected yet.
* Stage 1: our immune system detects the thing as a threat, usually by engulfing one of the invaders, and begins an immediate, less specialized reaction (usually causing inflamation) while it takes the information it got by eating some of the invaders to essentially research a more effective response.
* Stage 2: the immune system cracks the code and crafts antibodies specifically designed to target the invading elements, and so these are produced and released In mass, neutralizing the threat, and the information on it is stored, grating us immunity against it. If the same invader comes back later and hasn't changed enough, the immune system will immediately recognize it and jump directly to the stage 2 response again with little to no side effects or symptoms. This is what we know as a secondary immune response, and it's because of it we'll create to vaccines against diseases, especially those that are usually too debilitating and/or too aggressive for the infected person to develop an immunity in time.
With that said, we come to the main problem: for our immune system to work in the first place, there must be something to identify. And that's not how everything works:
* ionizing radiation, especially in cases like Gamma radiation, causes damage by essentially breaking you apart on a genetic level. As the thing is a wave and essentially energy, there's nothing to be picked up.
* heavy metals are a problem and accumulate on our bodies precisely because, despite toxic, they behave very similarly to other non-toxic elements we do need, the difference/problem being that they also work in ways that are detrimental to us. A good example is Carbon monoxide, which forms much stronger links to the hemoglobin than oxygen does, meaning it never lets go, doesn't enter the bloodstream and accidentally leaves that red blood cell unusable for oxygen transportation. Again, there's nothing to detect, and even when there is, it works too similarly to other chemicals to be perceived as a threat, because inherently, it really isn't unless it starts to pile up in quantities considered as too large, at which point it starts interacting with our bodies in ways that mess up too many important chemical processes for our continued existence to be maintained (in some cases "too much" may equate to "virtually anything more than none of it", but still).
Essentially, a realistic super immune system, as far as I understand, would work extremely fast, and could probably make it so you never got anything worse than a minor cold and normally short lasted inflammations, as it'd fight off and develop an immunity faster than the problem could spread, and thus you wouldn't really need to worry about death by viral or bacterial diseases, poisons or venoms, since all of these are natural organic substances your body can and will develop an immunity against under the right conditions. However, it doesn't really help to make you immune to everything, far from it. In fact, it won't even help reducing aging, as the inflammatory reactions caused by our normal immune response is a contributor to that, and the degradation of telomeres, the biggest link to aging we seem to have, isn't really something out immune system can help with. Rather, not getting hurt or stressed is the best way to ensure they don't need to be degraded by "unnecessary" cell division.
There's also one problem you need to consider: **an immune system like that can be more trouble than it's worth**. Our immune system is pretty crafty, but not the brightest, and like everything in our body, it must act in a balanced way. A weak immune system leaves us vulnerable, but an overagressive and oversensitive immune system can be worse.
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> He's incapable of getting sick, or dying of bacteria, viruses, venoms, poisons, drugs, chemicals, alcohol, radiation, basically any outside substance that can be consumed or injected.
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Is how you described it. But do you know what has a similar description? Allergies. Allergies are basically what happens when your immune system detects and reacts to an outside substance, but in an overagressive and damaging way. Essentially, the immune system is so sensitive that it detects things as threats when they're not, and reacts to them in a violent way, which can even cause someone to die by eating a harmless peanut butter sandwich, or petting a cat. An immune system that targets **EVERY** outside substance isn't going to make you healthier. In fact, it might kill you depending on how it actually works.
Another big complication is that, as no immune system can be perfect, it can detect harmless things as dangerous invaders, and sometimes, that something is yourself. Auto immune diseases are essentially that: you mistook yourself for an invader and now your body started breaking part of itself apart. problem: you still need that to survive, and when you immune system is violent and efficient enough to grant you immunity to venom in seconds, such a mistake could easily be a fatal one.
So summing it up:
* while you don't get to age well if your immune system does not work, it's not your immune system that controls your aging. A super immune system doesn't make you age slower, and might actually make you age faster if it's super sensitive as well.
* if it is or becomes super sensitive though, you might not need to worry about aging, because auto immune responses and anaphylatic shock (an extreme and dangerous allergic reaction to a normally harmless outside substance) might do you in long before your first wrinkles form without proper (and perhaps constant) medical assistance.
* despite all this, you're still very much in risk of dying from radiation poisoning, mercury poisoning, suffocation by carbon dioxide and other types of poisoning related to heavy metals, as there's really nothing to be detected as a threat, and if your immune system somehow does detect it, chances are that it's already too sensitive for your own good and is already targeting the substances the heavy metals are usually mistaken for.
* things like fire, deep enough cuts and bullets will also still do you in without medical assistance (and sometimes even despite that). Your immune system is ultimately still organic and carbon based, and it doesn't really work well at over 80 degrees, or when most of your blood is leaving your body.
To get something closer to the kind of semi immortality you want you'd basically need the following:
* an immune system more like a bat's, being effective but not too keen at causing inflammation.
* different genetics, including the ability to regrow telomeres in all cells and rapidly divide them in cancer fashion. The ability to edit your RNA like cephalopods do could also help you rapidly adapt to certain things such as temperature changes.
* extensive genetic repair mechanisms and special protection substances and processes, allowing you to naturally resist certain things, like how targigrades protect themselves against radiation through special proteins shielding their DNA.
[Answer]
**Moving the Goalposts**
Since the general consensus is "not possible" maybe just move the goalposts a bit and think of how it (or something effectively similar) could be made to happen (since this is Worldbuilding and not Biology). This would depend very much on your setting.
**Victorian steampunk:** the character is just really really good with medicines, antivenoms, etc. I've seen stories that have assassin characters that are nearly unkillable simply because they always have a counter for everything. Most poisons and diseases don't kill them because they know how to counteract it and have what they need on hand to do it. They would protect themselves from carbon monoxide poisoning because somewhere on their person is a crude detector that warns them if CO levels are too high. Etc.
**Futuristic sci-fi:** nanobots. They have medical nanobots that take care of everything. Maybe it's alien tech. Maybe they're the developer of the tech. Maybe they're an experimental super-soldier. However they acquired it, the medical nanobots can't necessarily sew an arm back on but they can handle nearly any infection or poison.
**Magic:** *because wizards.*
For modern day you could potentially go with the steampunk answer or the nanobot idea since both are at least vaguely plausible (we could probably do nanobots today if we hand-wavium a tiny battery technology that holds 10,000% more than current technology. Quantum tunneling something something. The mechanical design is within our ability, we just lack a power source.)
Or, you know, you go the Wolverine route, but that's effectively magic.
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# Not possible at all
An immune system simply can't protect against everything. A peime example is HIV. This attacks the immune system to great effect, using it to spread further. But rabies is also a good example. They infect neurons, which have a way to signal an attacking immune cell to destroy itself. Or certain amoeba, which can be so large they simply attack the killer cells by sheer force.
Poisons and the like are largely out of the jurisdiction of the immune system. They are chemicals that do things in our body. This is good, as by eating we can use these chemical processes to do anything at all. Some chemicals disrupt this in any number of ways. They bind to neurons preventing messages or stimulating too much. They simply disolve or destroy cells. They interrupt mitosis or the mitochondria. It can do a lot. There is no guarding against it, as many poisons just use the system we absolutely need. They interact and just happen yo have unintended side effects.
## What if it was possible?
Let's just say that your immune system does do what you say. It prevents all. Then we're not out of the woods yet by a long shot.
Ever wondered why our immune system isn't fully functioning at all times? You might understand that increasing the heat is bad for most of the bidy, but why not leave an army of immune cells active to prevent any threat?
The problem is that the immune system is actually damaging and draining on the body itself. The immune system isn't like a good army that protects it's citizens. It is more like wild carpet bombing your own cities to destroy the infiltrated enemies. It isn't healthy at all. That is why our immune system is mostly at a low ebb, enough to deter a large amount of invaders, but not enough to stop all.
Now imagine you put the immune system in just a bit higher than normal activity permanently. It can go ok for years. Decades even. Then suddenly there's burn out. Your immune system has depleted you, causing a major problem for your body.
Do **not** try to make the immune system an all powerful super whatever. This is impossible. All in all our immune system is already incredibly powerful. It is also dangerous.
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It is not possible to be immune to all poisons as there are so many of them and many toxic chemicals cause strong redox reactions that won't give a damn about biochemical niceties. For example Chlorine Trifluoride is one of the most reactive substances known, it will set fire to concrete and is spontaneously flammable with water. It is very nasty stuff and would burn down any biochemical immune system to fluoride ash.
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**Not plausible.**
The term **poison** ranges from complex [nerve agents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_agent) to something as simple as [carbon monoxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning) binding to hemoglobin. An improvided **immune system** is something different.
The effects of improved immune protection might somewhat plausibly be lumped with an increased resistance to [mutagens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutagen) by improving self-repair mechanisms. Having the same explanation fight both bacteria and simple chemical compounds in the bloodstream is less probable.
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## BEHOLD: THE [PRION](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion)
I can't see how your OC could be possibly be immune to *everything*, because there's one specific type of infectious agent that *cannot* be fought with anything that isn't [100°C+ temperatures *and* strong bleach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization): a prion. Prions aren't killable microorganisms. Rather, they're mis[folded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding) proteins that make *other* proteins misfold - think of them as zombies that are even smaller than your body's cells.
I strongly doubt your hypothetical person's biology, however unique it is, can fight off an infectious agent that turns *the very building blocks of their cells* into more infectious agent, and see absolutely no way by which this could realistically happen within the realm of conventional biology.
After all, it is rather difficult to kill that which was never alive in the first place...
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**"Born"**
Your hero ain't from around here. He was raised as a human and his body was meant to pass as human under cursory exam but he is not human and not even a biological organism. Germs, toxins and drugs don't work because the inner functions of his body are not at all like any terrestrial life form and may not even be carbon based.
Or at least outside influences don't work as one would expect them to work. The thing that he is might be still be affected by certain outside influences. Those things and the effects that they have on your hero will probably come as a complete surprise to all involved, at least the first time.
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## Your hero needs a hazmat suit or some equivalent
**If you want to avoid poison or pathogens, don't take in things from the environment, including air, water, or food. Also, you'll probably want to cover your skin with something less permeable. Probably don't have sex either.**
It is effectively impossible for a living thing to be immune to all poison and pathogens. A better strategy is to keep the poison or pathogens from getting in the first place.
Living things are complex machines that are constantly trying to maintain their insides under the right conditions for life: the right temperature, the right amount of water, salt, glucose and other chemicals. Living things contain thousands of different proteins and other molecules that do thousands of different jobs to keep a living thing alive. Hence, there are thousands of different ways to break a living thing, which are called mechanisms of toxicity. Drugs and poisons work by interfering with various processes, often by binding to a protein. As mentioned in another answer, carbon monoxide kills you by binding to the iron ion in the heme of hemoglobin (a protein), which does not allow oxygen to bind and you essentially suffocate you from inside. Nerve agents kill you by binding to the protein acetylcholinesterase. Under normal conditions the job of acetylcholinesterase is to remove the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from nerve synapses, allowing nerves to turn off after being excited. If you cannot clear the acetylcholine, the nerves cannot turn off, so muscles cannot stop contracting.
Bacteria, viruses, and cancer kill by replicating in ways that disrupt important biological processes (or sometimes due to overreaction of the immune system). This is the problem with your superimmune system. The immune system is a balance between recognizing and destroying pathogens and being overzealous and destroying your body (see autoimmune diseases).
So the point is that there are many chemicals that can kill you. In fact most chemicals can kill you. [Too much salt.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernatremia) [Too much water.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypokalemia) However, for poisons (or pathogens) to kill, they must enter the body. The most dangerous poisons are those that enter the body through the air (carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, nerve agents). Also, some of the most dangerous and contagious diseases are passed through the air (influenza, COVID-19). **A good way to avoid these poisons and diseases would be by not taking in air from the environment.** However, living things use oxygen and sugars as a source of energy. So your hero would either need to carry their own safe oxygen supply or have an air purifier/sterilizer. So basically they would need a hazmat suit. It even possible that this hazmat-like equipment could be biological, although it might take more energy to run than required by your usual 2000-calorie per day human.
Taking in oxygen could be avoided if your hero had a different source of energy, but this would require radically non-human biology. One option that exists on Earth already is a [sulfur metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_metabolism). Maybe your hero could carry around a block of sulfur. Other more exotic options are obtaining energy from a pellet of plutonium or some kind of nuclear energy source, so your hero would not need to breath air or eat to obtain energy (which would avoid another inlet for poisons and pathogens). This would require some radically different biology from life on Earth.
[Answer]
Lots of answers already. Yet, I must give a dissenting opinion.
## Diseases: YES
Robots are immune to all diseases. Computer viruses don't count. It's possible (not plausible) to have an alternate biology that would be immune to all Earth's diseases.
Furthermore, any one-of-a-kind biology can potentially be immune to all infectious diseases, simply by the virtue of being one-of-a-kind. Cross-species diseases are much less common than specialized ones.
Aliens might be wiped out by simple microbes like in War of the Worlds... or they might be totally immune. We don't know, it really depends.
The biology of any creature immune to human diseases would have to be incompatible with humans to a great degree. For instance, they would probably be unable to consume many human foods. There is zero chance of interbreeding.
It's definitely not plausible for someone to be born this way to normal human parents - their mother wouldn't be able to carry them to term. Also, changes like that don't just happen randomly. You're really inviting intelligent design here.
## Poisons: NO
Any biological life is only possible through chemical reactions. It takes A LOT of reactions, too. And they have to be within a specific band of equilibrium.
Anything that can react, can overreact. Any food that can sustain life, can be burned - it might not burn easily, but it will, that's how they measure food calories.
Life involves the interaction of open systems. Any living organism must receive building materials and energy for its growth and renewal in some way. That means it must have a way for chemicals to enter, to react with other chemicals inside it. Even a hazmat suit has to be taken off eventually.
The only way to be invulnerable to all poisons is to be dead.
[Answer]
**Diseases: Yes**
I would argue that anything that your body resists via its immune system could potentially be harmless, if your immune system were fast enough. The human immune system is already capable of responding to more pathogens than even exist on earth because of the variability of segments that make up antibodies. The main reason we get sick is when the infection-causing agent gets enough of a foothold that it exhibits symptoms before your body can get rid of it. You touch, inhale, and ingest possible pathogens every single day, but you don't get sick because usually your body's defenses destroy them before they can multiply enough to feel the effects. If your immune system were fast enough at cranking out antibodies and the requisite immune response cells (and those cells were effective enough at disabling/destroying the pathogen), you could conceivably survive any pathogen at all, even ones that no human has ever encountered before.
**Chemicals: Maybe?**
Chemicals, poisons, or toxins are a bit harder to explain away, because elements/chemicals are fundamental to the functioning of your body. In fact, the reason that many chemicals kill is because they disrupt existing processes by masquerading as other important elements, usually through similar shape or electron configuration. For example, lead takes the place of calcium in proteins and other cellular products but ultimately doesn't function the same way as calcium (misfolded proteins, etc) and can't be easily flushed out by normal cellular processes. Carbon monoxide does the same to oxygen, especially in your hemoglobin where it binds more tightly than oxygen, eventually starving all your cells of the oxygen they need. You can't just be immune to lead or carbon monoxide the way you can to a virus, because antibodies aren't involved, and you can't just make your whole body ignore something that molecularly appears to be the same as something it needs. Some chemicals only cause harm while they are circulating through your system, but are able to be broken down by your liver or excreted by your kidneys. Having super fast liver enzymes (like your fast immune system) or hyper-efficient kidneys could cover much of the problems of poisoning. Radiation kind of falls into this category. Since the biggest problem with radiation is the damage it causes to your cells, having super fast/efficient cellular machinery could mean that you can repair the damage before it has a chance to accumulate and cause symptoms.
Ultimately, this is a work of fiction, so how much explanation you want to give is entirely up to you. Maybe your character has studied the processes enough to know their immune system is just really fast and strong, but have no idea how they resist chemicals or radiation. You can leave this as a plot hole, or lampshade it by talking about the theories they had about it and why those aren't true and that they haven't found the full cause yet. Some would argue that hyper fast cellular processes means you could be actually more susceptible to some poisons, so covering that is up to you. The other thing to realize is that they don't have to be 100% resistant to every possible virus, bacteria, poison or toxin. They only have to have resisted the ones they encountered. That also leaves the opening for the antagonist to find the specific right means for taking down your hero, knowing their supposed invulnerability.
[Answer]
**Not possible, but ...**
You can approach this state by making your character an alien.
His biochemistry is subtly different to ours in just about every respect. This isn't something that could happen by random mutation of a human genome. Detailed analysis would soon reveal that he isn't any sort of Earthlife at all.
He can eat the same food, because he doesn't need any essential amino acids or vitamins that aren't available here. But our bacteria are woefully ill-prepared for countering an immune system utterly unlike anything that ever existed on Earth, so they get nowhere(\*). And of course his genetic code is different so viruses can't replicate in his body at all.
As for poisons: yes, he can be poisoned. But the chemicals to which he is sensitive are by and large different to the ones that we are vulnerable to, so poisoners get disappointed. Maybe nerve gases have no effect whatsoever on him. (They affect particular enzymes shared by most multicellular Earth life, which he doesn't have). On the other hand, he won't fare much better than we would if he fell into a large vat of acid. And it may be that a dose of, say, copper sulphate, that would give us the runs at worst, might be a lethal danger to his copper-intolerant metabolism. But those who wish him harm, don't know this. (Not so very far-fetched: Earth fungi and moulds are intolerant of copper, which is why copper carbonate a.k.a. Bordeaux mixture has been used as a fungicide).
If you are thinking Superman ... yes, the fictional details are risible but the concept is closer to the mark than many realize!
(\*) This is the optimist's scenario. The pessimist's scenario, is that microbes have the upper hand and only immune systems co-evolved with them can keep them at bay. So if we ever meet aliens, the result is deadly: their microbes reduce us to stinking goo, while our microbes do the same to them. HG Wells *War of the Worlds* was an intermediate scenario, where Earthly microbes and immune systems were triumphant over Martian ones.
] |
[Question]
[
I've got a society that worships their ancestors and frequently consults their spirits for advice through necromantic rites. I've decided that rather than burying or burning their dead they would instead keep the bones in the temples as an aid to summoning their ancestors spirits.
However they wouldn't want to put the bodies in whole as soon as they died because of a) the smell and b) the likelihood of spreading disease (I know they wouldn't necessarily be aware of this but they'd notice after a while) so they would need a way to clean the bones off so they could store them safely, cleanly and taking up less space.
Ideally this would leave the bones intact and could be considered to be done with respect and deference.
What would be the best method available to Europeans in the 11th century to strip the flesh from a body and leave the bones clean and intact?
[Answer]
I have read that in the real Europe there was an industry developed around preparing relics from passed away bodies.
Usually the bodies were washed, boiled and the flesh (now cooked) was separated from the bones which could be then distributed among the "customers" (usually churches and sanctuaries worshiping saints).
Your people might use a similar approach.
[Answer]
Carrion Beetles! Carrion beetles are fairly widespread through the temperate regions, and are very good at cleaning bones (in fact, some research labs use carrion beetles for this very purpose!). In addition, this could tie into the mythology of it, where the flesh goes on to nurture new life. (As a side note, this would probably lead to carrion beetles being spiritually important too).
[Answer]
You describe an **ossuary**.
So what you need is a **temporary grave**.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary>
>
> An ossuary is a chest, box, building, well, or site made to serve as
> the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently
> used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a
> temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are
> removed and placed in an ossuary ("os" is "bone" in Latin[1]). The
> greatly reduced space taken up by an ossuary means that it is possible
> to store the remains of many more people in a single tomb than if the
> original coffins were left as is.
>
>
>
I saw a TV article on the catacombs of Paris that described these temporary burials. My recollection is that the cemetery used for this was such that the bodies decayed very quickly. I could imagine this might be so if the decomposers in the soil were fed a steady diet of dead folks. Soil pH might play a role too.
In any case the temporarily buried are out of sight (and smell) but not out of mind. Once the flesh has decayed the bones can move to your temple.
[Answer]
## Bugs
As someone who has skeletonized many animals for museums insects are your best bet. We use [dermestid beetles](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-cleaning-of-Skeletons-by-means-of-larvae-of-Meeuse/b7f1c7ce5c07e14dc7bbd4366ade27c874092586), they are kinda finicky critters. Other insects like ants and maggots work just as well for your purposes.
Bug boxes which prevent larger scavengers are often used outside letting the local scavenger insects do the work. Ours are plastic but you can make something out of wicker, ceramic, or wood just as easily. What you are making is a container that lets insects in but keeps out larger scavengers like rodents which will gnaw bones.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BIXhO.png)
Sometimes we will boil a carcass first to take must of the soft tissue off, but if you are not doing it as an industrial process, just letting ants eat it all is fine. You do have to watch out for termites which will burrow through the bone. Cutting off most of the soft tissue first speeds up the process, but again it is not vital.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r6LNiqGFuM) is a great dirty jobs video of the process.
degreasing the bones for storage is a good idea (soak in soap or low concentration peroxide) but not vital, time will do nearly as good a job as long as you clean them once and a while to prevent mold.
[Answer]
what about [sky burial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial)? though i dont know is there a big carrion bird that can eat whole bone though in europe, so maybe the crow or other small flying carrion can suffice to left the bone intact, at least majority part of it.
you can also build tower to place the corpse there to make it out of human contact live bellow and not spreading the miasma if no mountain, and not necessary for you to grind the bone like some of this culture do if you want to keep the bone intact.
>
> Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered"[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial)) is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the region of Tibet and the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar.[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excarnation) The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds.
>
>
> Vajrayana iconography
>
>
> The tradition and custom of the jhator afforded Traditional Tibetan
> medicine and thangka iconography with a particular insight into the
> interior workings of the human body. Pieces of the human skeleton were
> employed in ritual tools such as the skullcup, thigh-bone trumpet.
>
>
> The 'symbolic bone ornaments' (Skt: aṣṭhiamudrā; Tib: rus pa'i rgyanl
> phyag rgya) are also known as "mudra" or 'seals'. The Hevajra Tantra
> identifies the Symbolic Bone Ornaments with the Five Wisdoms and
> Jamgon Kongtrul in his commentary to the Hevajra Tantra explains this
> further.[22]
>
>
>
also here [excarnation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excarnation) some copy paste method to defleshing maybe it can help (some contain burial and cremation method though).
>
> **Other methods**
>
>
> From the pattern of marks on some human bones at prehistoric sites,
> researchers have inferred that members of the community removed the
> flesh from the bones as part of its burial practices.[5]
>
>
> Neolithic farmers living in Tavoliere, Italy, over 7000 years ago
> practiced ritual defleshing of the dead. Light cut marks suggest that
> the bones were defleshed up to a year after death. The bones were
> deposited in Scaloria Cave and, when excavated, were mixed with animal
> bones, broken pottery and stone tools.[6]
>
>
> In the Middle Ages, excarnation was practised by European cultures as
> a way to preserve the bones when the deceased was of high status or
> had died some distance from home. One notable example of a person who
> underwent excarnation following death was Christopher
> Columbus[citation needed]. The American Revolutionary War general,
> Anthony Wayne, also underwent a form of excarnation.[7] A practice
> known as mos teutonicus, or active excarnation, was a German custom.
> The bodies were broken down differently than solely defleshing, they
> were cut up and boiled in either wine, water, or vinegar.[8]
>
>
> In modern Japan, where cremation is predominant, it is common for
> close relatives of the deceased to transfer, using special chopsticks,
> the remaining bones from the ashes to a special jar in which they will
> be interred. However, in ancient Japanese society, prior to the
> introduction of Buddhism and the funerary practice of cremation, the
> corpse was exposed in a manner very similar to the Tibetan sky burial.
> The Kalash people of Pakistan until recently (mid 1980s) practiced
> above ground burial in large wooden coffins called Bahg'a were the
> dead were laid with all their best belongings in cemeteries called
> Madokjal or place of many coffins. This tradition had been dying off
> with the last being the burial of a shaman in 1985, until the burial
> in 2016 of Batakeen of Anish village Bumburet. The Bali Aga people of
> Trunyan village on Lake Batur in Bali practice customs found no where
> else on the island, these are the mountain Balianese and they practice
> Animistic traditions that predate the arrival of Hinduism in Bali. The
> burial custom here is for the bodies to be laid on the ground and left
> to decompose, with a cloth cover or a bamboo cage . Once the
> decomposition is complete the bones are placed on a stair shaped altar
> 500 feet to the north. A large banyan tree called the taru menyan
> literally called the nice smelling tree is thought to take away bad
> smells . Pre-contact Hawaiians ritually defleshed the bones of
> high-ranking nobles (ali'i) so that they could be interred in
> reliquaries for later veneration. The remains of Captain Cook, who the
> Hawaiians had believed to be the god Lono, were treated this way after
> his death. The Moriori people of the Chatham Islands (now part of New
> Zealand) placed their dead in a sitting position in the sand dunes
> looking out to sea; others were strapped to young trees in the forest.
> In time, the tree grew into and through the bones, making them one.
>
>
> Following the excarnation process, many societies retrieved the bones
> for burial.[citation needed]
>
>
>
>
> **Defleshing during the Middle Ages**
>
>
> During the Middle Ages in Europe, defleshing was a mortuary procedure
> used mainly to prepare human remains for transport over long
> distances. The practice was used only for nobility. It involved
> removing skin, muscles, and organs from a body, leaving only the
> bones. In this procedure, the head, arms, and legs were detached from
> the body. The process left telltale cuts on the bones.
>
>
> King Saint Louis IX of France is said to have been defleshed by
> boiling his corpse until the flesh separated from the bones. This was
> intended to preserve his bones, to avoid decaying of the remains
> during their return to France from the Eighth Crusade, and to provide
> relics. The process is known as mos Teutonicus.[9]
>
>
>
[Answer]
Do what museum curators do today... leave the bones in the ocean for a few days and let sea lice go about their business!
See this time-lapse video of a full pig carcass being reduced to clean bones in just a few days by these little critters: <https://youtu.be/xXtSw1FPkhM>
This apporach requires no technology and would have been known to humans for a very long time.
[Answer]
**Lye**
Lye is the household name for the strong base Sodium Hydroxide. It was known to the Romans and Babylonians so is certainly 11th century friendly. In the modern world it is used for dissolving cadavers, bones and all, in a matter of hours.
Dump the body in a vat of lye and let the flesh dissolve. But be careful to fish out the bones before they dissolve too!
Weak lye was historically used as body soap. Stronger lye was used for disinfecting and in food, for pickling and cooking. This is safe because cooking breaks down the lye so it's safe to eat.
[Answer]
We could look at what usually did happen. Bad news for you is that that grave is not yours for life... well you know what I mean. **Burial** is the answer for many european places.
To remove all but the bones you have several options:
* Mechnical reclimation then disposing of the soft bits (burn them or bury them (think composting) or thrown them in the river or reuse them for some other process
* Animal processes such as sky burials where you expose bodies for flying carrion
* Partial cremantion as it takes a lot of fuel to burn a body you might want to just try drying out and burning some of it, either as a whole or as parcels.
* Natural above ground processes as you may notice there are not dead animals everhwere. Leave a person out somewhere and a combination of the elements and animals will get rid of most of it for you
* Water process which is just another set of animals
* Natural below ground processes i.e. temporary burial. If you do not embalm a body it will digest itself in a few weeks. Many graveyards were not places of perminiant burial but an area to put bodies for a few decades before moving them to a crypt or ostuary
Other options are to remove the more unpleasant parts and most of the fluids then put your not quite a mummy on a shelf to gently carry on despensing whisdom and decay. After a while you move what is left further into the structure and stack its remaining parts more efficiently.
Some interesting refences could be found by reading up on [Body Farms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm) and how [Ossury Burials](https://mht.maryland.gov/documents/pdf/archeology/currentresearch/middle_atlantic_ossuaries.pdf) were conducted.
[Answer]
**They're Necromancers, so get over petty morality - eat them!**
If you have a medieval society of ancestor-worshipping necromancers, why not go the extra step and have them just EAT ancestors? Endocannibalism (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannibalism#>) is considered a cultural practice in a variety of societies, especially those who desire to be close to the souls of the dead. What better way to be joined with your dead ancestor than to consume them? This is often seen as a way to save or preserve the life force of the person and is an act of compassion. Sometimes flesh is consumed, while other times the ground-up bones and ashes of the dead are incorporated into food or beverage. This is rarely done as an act of nutrition, but instead as a religious one.
You can still have bones left over at the end, if you want them. There will be some cut marks and pot-polish, but it's all in the family. Just be sure to cook everything well to avoid prion disorders.
[Answer]
**Cremation.**
If you’re willing to use *bone fragments* instead of whole bones, cremation is the way to go. There will be plenty of leftover bone fragments following cremation, especially if you use low-temperature open wood fire rather than a high-temperature furnace. Usually, [leftover bone fragments are ground up into bone powder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremation#Burning_and_ashes_collection), but you can use them for your purposes instead.
Cremation has other benefits as well. Minimal contact with the dead body is required, reducing risk of disease - just plop it into a wood fire and you’re done. It also doesn’t require anyone to do the gruesome and gory “dirty work” of handling or processing flesh to extract bones.
Really, it depends on how “intact” you want the bones to be.
] |
[Question]
[
Question inspired by discussion under this answer: <https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/70360/2071>
Dear people of Proxima Centauri. Our planet is dying. Our suns are dying. As you all know. We found out that nearest stellar system just 4 lightyears away has G2V star. And not only that. We *think* that one of its planet could hold life. Most probably the third from the star, maybe even the fourth one.
We made attempts to send signals to that star, but no one is answering to our signals.
We built the ship which can get about 50 000 of our people to that system and we will aim for third planet, because our data give us 98% probability that such planet has sufficient environment to allow survival of our people.
The trip will be one way ticket. People on that ship will most probably be the only ones surviving from our race, so we hand-picked the best of the best.
Now, we have tough decission to make: **Should we pack weapons?**
So far we listed these pros and cons:
**Cons**
* Every gram of equipment is calculated and carrying x kilograms of weapons is real premium price for the bucks, because you will not need it until arrival
* We can make weapons to hunt animals from materials on that planet
**pros**
* We do not know what awaits us
* If such planet holds intelligent life, it can fight back with firearms
---
Assumptions you can make:
* Aliens from Proxima Centauri think as "human-like" as possible
* They can 3D print the weapons, but to make bullets is quite complicated, so they still need to pack at least the bullets
* They have no solid proof that there is intelligent life on Earth (their destination)
* Once they set to voyage they cannot turn back. It is one way travel all long
* Rest of planet will continue observing the Earth and send message to the ship
* Aliens are leaving their planet at same weaponry level as today Earth. They can pack *anything* you know exists on Earth and can be considered as weapon. But still, remember, weight is premium
[Answer]
No. They don't need to pack weapons. The very spaceship they are travelling from Proxima Centauri is already absolutely packed with weapons because by itself it is a weapon.
Its propulsion system will be powerful, destructive, energetic and deadly than any ship-mounted weapon would be. Even its communication systems, for example, interstellar range laser systems or even plain old fashioned radio will be powerful to fry targets from orbit.
If your fifty thousand can 3D print weapons like firearms I am dubious about your proposition "to make bullets is quite complicated, so they still need to pack at least the bullets". Which even if this was fully the case there is no reason why they couldn't fabricate high-powered air rifles or crossbows. If they can use local materials on their arrival, there should be very little to prevent setting up their munitions factories. Bullets seem to a quite straight forward and well known manufacturing process, requiring no more than a light industry workshop for their production and manufacture.
If you are so concerns about a hostile reception on reaching that G5V star and its attendant planets your brave Promixans are heading for, then train the entire population in martial arts. They are your best and brightest, and presumably also chosen for physical stamina, strength and general fitness. All capable of Olympic athlete performance levels. Would seem easy enough to train the bulk of them to Marine Commando levels of unarmed combat. Besides they need something to do during the long years of their interstellar voyage.
In summary: there is no reason to pack armaments. The spaceship is their most formidable piece weapon in and of itself. Vaporizing cities and continents from orbit should be a walk in the park. If their 3D printing can fabricate firearms, and since it appears likely bullets shouldn't be a problem too, then they don't need to bring their own. If bullets are genuine problem, air guns and crossbows are a suitable. If all else fails, the ship's complement can be trained to high levels of unarmed combat.
[Answer]
Yes, they should pack some form of weaponry. Besides protection from alien creatures and for hunting, there's also security. You're talking 50,000 people. That's a city. Some of those people are bound to be criminals. Or will eventually become criminals, at least. So there will certainly be some form of security apparatus to protect the population both during the trip and after arrival.
[Answer]
The other answers are great, so I'm going to fill in some misconceptions in the question.
---
# SEND A SCOUT FIRST!
Building and launching a ship with 50,000 people on board, and their life-support, for a 4 light year journey where they need to slow down and land at the end is a massive undertaking. Doing it with little information about where you're going is a risk you do not need to take.
While that's going on, make some small, fast, one-way robotic scouts and send them out. It can make some observations, answer some basic questions, and send the intel back. The composition of the planet and its atmosphere. Is there life? Is it intelligent? Is it hostile? Do we need weapons? What's a Kardashian and how much delta-V do we need to keep up with them?
Even if the colony ship launches before the scout reaches Earth, the data from the scout still gives the colony ship, with the help of the people back on Alpha Centauri, years to better prepare for the landing.
---
>
> *We can make weapons to hunt animals from materials on that planet*
>
>
>
You can hunt them, ***but you probably can't eat them.*** Meat on Earth is useful as food for humans because humans evolved from Earth. We share the same amino acids and vitamins as the rest of life on Earth.
In fact, we're so hooked into the rest of life on Earth that [we're dependent on eating other life to get some of those amino acids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid). We're so interdependent that there's some things we cannot digest, we need bacteria in our guts to digest it for us.
A life form that evolved on Alpha Centauri, even if it's using DNA and amino acids, will have evolved to use a completely different set of amino acids and vitamins. Even if they fill the same roles (they probably don't), they'll be at least slightly different and their bodies will not be able to use them. At best they'll be indigestible. At worst they'll be poison. They'll also lack our gut bacteria to digest things for us.
This isn't just a problem for eating animals, its a problem for eating ***anything*** on Earth. And this applies to all life coming from Alpha Centauri. [Earth life has evolved to make use of, or at least tolerate, the trace elements present on the Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_(nutrient)) like Molybdenum and even Arsenic.
Aliens from Alpha Centauri will have its own mix of trace elements, and its own trace needs and levels it can tolerate. It won't be the same as ours.
Life has evolved to deal with a certain amount of trace minerals naturally present, but no more. More would be inefficient, and something better optimized to the environment would have an advantage. This is part of why industrial pollution of heavy metals is so toxic to everything on Earth, we've changed the mix of trace elements faster than evolution can adapt. People from Alpha Centauri will also have no time to adapt. Something in our mix of trace elements will likely be above their tolerance levels, and something they rely on will likely be too low.
Farming, hunting, and even breathing will slowly kill them and leave them deficient. They'll need to filter and supplement everything.
---
>
> *They can 3D print the weapons, but to make bullets is quite complicated, so they still need to pack at least the bullets*
>
>
>
You have this backwards. Making bullets is easy, 3D printing a gun is hard.
[Brass cartridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartridge_(firearms)#Modern_metallic_cartridges) haven't changed much in over 100 years. Molding bullets is trivial. Making smokeless powder is also trivial for a space-faring civilization. Drawing a modern brass or steel cartridge is harder, but not difficult, and they can be reused and reloaded. At minimum, you can make [paper cartridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_cartridge). We figured this all out almost 150 years ago, and the Alpha Centauri folks can be safe to assume they'll find material on site to make bullets.
In contrast, a gun has to withstand the high pressures of the exploding powder. If you want it to be accurate, it has to be machined to high tolerances. If you want it to be semi-automatic, it requires fiddly little parts. If you want it to last, it has to be hardened in the right places.
[We can 3D print a modern gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printed_firearms), but we only got this working in the last few years. And they'll will only last for a few hundred rounds, as opposed to tens of thousands for a normally manufactured gun. Improvements in 3D printing will fix this.
Point is: making bullets is easy and very well understood and we've been doing it for over a century. 3D printing a gun is hard, and they're not the best quality, and we only recently figured it out. If you can 3D print a gun, you can most definitely make bullets.
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[Since every additional gram of mass will add many, many times its weight in fuel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_rocket_equation), any "weapon" they bring with them will actually be a tool that can serve as a weapon in a pinch. If they need real weapons, they can 3D print them.
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By weapons, are you simply considering only handheld weapons, or also stuff like artillery and tanks, or more importantly, ship weapons? Because you have no reason to assume you're the only sentients in space, and piracy should always be a concern.
EDIT: You shouldn't assume you'll only need weapons at the end point, unlike what the question seems to assume but on the journey itself.
Secondly, we do have ship based weapons, even with current technology--just pull 'em off aircraft and/or scale up. Yes, weight is a premium, but your payload only really counts once you get there. You can manufacture hand held weapons if you have 3D printers once you've landed, ship weapons need to be installed before liftoff.
**In summary: You do need weapons, but on the *outside* of the ship**
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Much of this depends upon how the settlers will arrive and live. Will the ship set down? Will they (one-way) drop lifeboats from orbit, with the hulk of the ship remaining a communications relay to the home world?
I'll assume that the ship says in orbit, and that it's a one-way trip to the planet surface. That is, once you go down, you have a new home, forever.
1. Not everybody goes down at once. There will be no infrastructure to support a civilization. So the marines and combat surveyors go first, to secure the area and find the best spots for several towns.
2. When the spots are selected, marines form a perimeter and the construction engineers begin building the basics of infrastructure - water treatment systems, sewage systems, basic housing, etc.
3. At the same time as #2, farming communities are also set up. The ship cannot contain an infinite supply of food. More marines, more engineers. These are not intended to be as large as the towns and do not need the level of infrastructure that New Town needs. The first non-construction-brigade inhabitants here could be hunters.
4. It would be years before the last person left the ship. Some will probably remain on the ship in order to service the communications systems. Perhaps the ship will have enough supplies to feed a few generations of engineers.
So what we have here are 50,000 people living in small towns surrounded by farming communities. There could be predatory indigenous animals or animals that eat the crops. These animals endanger the food supply. There are 50,000 human-like minds. This means crime. When resources are scarce, there will be organized crime, so it isn't just petty theft.
The settlers will need weapons. I would not say military weapons - no attack helicopters, tanks, or field pieces. But there will probably need to me police-force level of weaponry. I would expect people outside of town to be armed with firearms sufficient to ward off the predators.
EDIT - off topic, but it occurs to me the colony ship would not have lifeboats. *It would be made of lifeboats*. Like an earn of corn, or a [magnolia pod](http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/mastergardener/outreach/plant_id/images/ornamentals/so_magnolia_fruit.jpg "magnolia pod"), once the lifeboats had been dropped, only a spent skeleton of the ship would remain. Getting to the surface of the planet would be a matter of great nicety when the characteristics of that planet are not known when the ship leaves the homeworld. So there would have to be enough ship-board manufacturing to tweak the lifeboats to ensure their safe arrival to the planet's surface...
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Hunting on an alien planet is risky, you never know what type of creatures they might encounter. They would right as well, earth has some scary predators. Thus to make sure to protect themselves and hunt for food, they should pack some hunting weapons. If they believe there would be lots of forests, they would pack short ranged firearms, if they think earth contains open plains, they will go for long range ones. But in either case, the weapons will not be very well suited for vs. human combat. After all, we pack a big punch.
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If they are mentally "similar" to humans, then they will require people authorized to use deadly force. It isn't clear to me why this question needs asking, perhaps some of your assumptions haven't been made explicit? Perhaps a question opposite yours would provide clarity: Give a single example of a (historical) situation in which 50,000 people have lived together for years without weapons.
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* Should we pack military hardware (tanks, fighters, stealth bombers, artillery)?
**No.** 50,000 people represents a small fraction of their population, and with all else that needs to be done to setup a colony and get an industrial base going, few would be available to fight. A well-equipped but tiny army with no logistical base and no source of replacements would be unlikely to be effective enough and wouldn't last long. Even if they got to use it, it wouldn't save them so it would be a waste.
Further, if built at today's tech levels, their equipment would require extensive maintenance and technological support, but would be quite obsolete by the time they arrived. And of course, if they don't end up needing it, it would be a total waste.
* Should we pack individual weapons (firearms, melee weapons)?
**No.** Many ocean-going ships have a machine shop stocked with source materials so that if the ship is damaged or breaks down in mid-ocean, they can fabricate parts for repairs. If a ship traveling to Spain has that, a ship traveling to another solar system most certainly would.
The ship would most likely need pipes capable of withstanding pressure, so would have supplies capable of being made into firearm barrels. There may be no real reason to bring lots of gunpowder, but it isn't necessary. They would need tanks holding pressurized gases for life-support, firefighting, etc. Those could be used to make high-pressure airguns.
Contrary to the assumptions, bullets are not complicated to make. Explorers and settlers in the wilderness of the Americas made their own using nothing more than equipment they could carry - a handheld bullet mold and some lead. Assuming weapons like shotguns or blunderbusses, the shot needn't be too precisely molded. (But the Proxima Centaurians certainly would be capable of making precise ammo.)
Another thing that might be useful would be HERF and EMP weapons, in case they have to face electronically-augmented bandits or something. But again, the ship will most certainly have a store of electronic components anyway.
So overall, no need to bring weapons, just be prepared to weaponize unused spare parts and/or cannibalize the ship upon arrival.
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## No.
Disclaimer 1: I'm basing the answer on musings in [this article](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html), which months ago I found in answer to another question in this very stack
Disclaimer 2: for flavour I decided to write using made up alien units, in parenthesis I included same values in normal units.
Disclaimer 3: this answer is quite ugly, including terrible style in few places. I'll try to rework it later, I don't think I can do any better right now.
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Reaction mass and reactor fuel needs to be brought on board, which means that even more of both needs to be expended during acceleration phase to make deceleration phase possible at all. This growth is in fact [exponential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). At destination, decelerating single pound (kilogram, pounds are obviously some kind of incomprehensible alien unit) of payload, using our most [propellant efficient engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Examples) would require 2.6\*10^bę (10^13 Joules) and 8000 pounds (22000 kilograms) of propellant, assuming ship travelled at velocity of 0.01d (~0.01=1%) of the speed of light, and trip took 3d0 spins (~420 years)
This in turn means that accelerating payload AND propellant would require 8000\*8000=48000000pounds=48000gras (~22000\*22000=484000000kg=484000 metric tons) of propellant. Every kilogram of payload requires 7 orders (8 orders) of magnitude as much propellant to be delivered. To accelerate that much propellant, we would need b\*10^14ę (4\*10^21 Joules) of energy. Remember: that's for single pound (kilogram) of payload! And without factoring in weight of engines or fuel tanks!
Saying that every nan (milligram) is at premium would be a gross understatement.
**It's of utmost importance to save every bit of mass possible. In fact, that's exactly why during preliminary phase I was so adamantly insisting on frozen-embryos-and-artificial-uteri design.**
You want to send 14000 (~50000) colonists. Assuming some absurd efficiencies in life support, including 100Ɯ (100%) reliable cryosleep, we are still speaking of 1b00 gras (5000 ton) craft at minimum, and that's assuming that sleep chambers weight nearly nothing. This bumps up total propellant requirements to 2.7\*10^13 pounds (2\*10^15 kilograms) and energy requirements to 6\*10^1a (2\*10^28 Joules), for reference, energy-wise that's equivalent of total energy emitted by star in targeted system over 3 breaks (roughly a minute).
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Now that we are done with numbers, we need to think of feasibility of bringing weapons. Main question is: what for? If that planet is inhabited, then either inhabitants are so primitive that we can simply land in remote location, build infrastructure and weapons utilising on site resources, or they are advanced enough to be able to fight back, in which case we have no chance of success with 14000 (50000) of our own against resources and manpower of entire planet.
Considering that we have no reason to assume compatibility of local biochemistry with our own, **we will have to build closed habitats** anyway. For that **we will have to utilise local resources**. We will have to mine minerals, process them into construction materials and construct habitats. **We will have to build infrastructure** supporting mining and processing. Our ship will have to pack machines capable of building such infrastructure from whatever we find laying on surface. **I can see no reason why after we are done assembling habitats manufactured by habitat factory, we couldn't build weapons factory** or weapons factory factory. If aborigines are primitive, then as I said, we can land in remote location, build out infrastructure, and then go to war, if we find it necessary. If aborigines are advanced enough to be able to even detect our landing, then we will be quite literally at their mercy - before we discovered radio there was about billion (milliard, short scale is an obvious alien conspiracy) of us, we have no reason to assume indigenous people would be less numerous, thus if they poses any form of radar to detect our landing, or long-range radio communication to relay optical observation of our landing/landing site they could throw millions of soldiers at our outpost. This is not something we could endure without extensive fortifications, and without massive (both literally and figuratively) force multiplication.
**Remote-controlled tank company with required logistics would weight more than entire colony ship** and would be utterly useless if aliens are advanced enough - **they can afford to win by attrition**, taking out one tank for gras (thousands) of lives would still be in their favour if we are unable to replace the tank. **They could probably afford to simply run us out of ammo**. Small arms would be much lighter but too dangerous since **any death on our side is a direct threat to the future of our species**. **Remote controlled weapons are the only choice**, infantry as well as crewed vehicles and fortifications might render entire operation moot due to combat loses. Depending on their advancement level, we would have to bring not just tanks, but also helicopters, planes, artillery, and infantry-replacement robots, eclipsing weight of ship by at least order of magnitude, and that still might be for naught.
## As such, I think, we could as well bring no weapons.
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Yes, but only as props. The comment about "intelligent life can fight back with firearms" means to me that weapons described are not hunting tools but war weapons: the sort of thing intelligent beings use to fight each other. You could bring a couple of weapons which were examples of your advanced tech and it might be possible to use these to bluff. There is no point in bringing enough that you could really turn your refugees into warriors and fight a pitched battle or attack an advanced civilization from orbit. A plan for a first interaction being war against complete unknowns on their home turf is crazy cocky. If I understand right, even Cortez sort of worked up to the conclusion that he could pull off such a thing and it was still crazy cocky.
Your ship is a refugee ship. Fleeing as refugees is a desperation move. Refugees do not show up on foreign shores armed for war. People who show up ready for war are invaders or have the potential to become such no matter what they claim. If intelligent inhabitants of the destination planets are at a tech level sufficiently lower than yours that you can awe them with your tech, fine.
A guess that this might be the case is not unjustified. These refugees might conclude that a failure to hear a response to their call means residents of the target world are not adequately advanced enough to receive or reply to those signals. Even if intelligent, such as these will not be able to determine what the refugee ship is capable of when it arrives. Some weapons could be used for bluff and bluster to cow the primitives and get the refugees established.
If the inhabitants technologically would be a match or better in a fight, then hopefully they will realize that any weapons aboard the ship have been brought as part of a tech museum and do not pose a real threat. That means the weapons you bring should not be nuclear weapons or similar, which could make trouble even for an advanced opponent. Your hope in that situation is that this advanced civilization receives your refugees and puts you up as honored immigrant guests or allows your ship to serve as an internment camp, or enslaves you all.
Some things about this question make me think that maybe these refugees are actually not very advanced themselves: e.g. making bullets is complicated? They do seem ready to "tumble out and live as cavemen" as Hobson eloquently put it above in the comments. It is not an impossibility. Maybe these refugees were given a starfaring ship by some advanced race that felt sorry for them. That would be a sweet story and one I cannot recall ever seeing or reading. And now I want to read it - so if one exists please post it in comments!
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The original question seems a bit illogical and reminds me of many very old science fiction stories. In that particular type of old science fiction story aliens develop a civilization equal to 20th century Earth and continue to develop for centuries, millennia, or even millions of years more.
And then all of a sudden those super advanced aliens discover their world is doomed and in a panic they build interstellar space ships and invade the closest habitable planet, Earth.
But if extinction events only happen every few tens of millions of years on a planet like Earth, an extinction event is not likely to happen on an alien planet less than ten million years before the aliens develop a 20th century technology or less than ten million of years after the aliens develop a 20th century technology. The probability that an extinction event, let alone the total destruction of the planet, might happen when the aliens are only a few hundred years or a few thousand years more advanced than 2017 Earth is very, very, very small.
Thus the aliens are likely to be many thousands of years, maybe millions of years, more advanced than 2017 Earth when their home planet becomes doomed. And if those aliens have not already built many space colonies and space habitats all over their star system, and have not already sent many unmanned probes and manned expeditions to other star systems, they have certainly be sitting on their alien asses (if any) for all those thousands of years that they have had space travel.
In real life the aliens would probably have billions living on their home planet and trillions living in space habitats in their on star system, and should already have colonies in other star systems by the time their stars are dying (which is not due to happen for billions of years in the Alpha Centauri system).
So the aliens should simply build a relatively small number of new space habitats for the ones living on the home planet, attach star drives to all the space habitats, and set off for the star systems which already have colonies in them.
For a species which has probably been more advanced than 2017 Earth for many thousands or even millions of years, there shouldn't be any nonsense like sending only 50,000 people in a single space ship to an unexplored solar system. They should be able to send all the trillions of their people to star systems here they know they will get a reasonably kind reception negotiated by radio with the colonists already there.
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The most obvious reason of which I can think to take a weapon, within the context of your specified hypothetical, would be to use the weapon on myself in the case of contact with a hostile alien race (who I am assuming are far more technologically advanced than our own species), not so that I can use the weapon on them. That is, I would want the weapon as a final fail-safe against the possibility of torture or torture-via-study.
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Remember this is a targeted colonization attempt, and because they are unable to terra form their own planet instead of abandoning it their terra forming capabilities are limited. This restricts them to planets that they feel are reasonably close to their own home world. Since the people of Proxima Centauri choose Earth as a colonization spot because it supports life as they know it (or close to it) **there is going to be a better than average chance that Earth contains life**. They don't know what stage that life is technologically but they do know that life evolved on their home world under similar conditions. As such it is reasonable and prudent to consider how to deal with the native flora/fauna.
Nothing in nature cedes territory willingly for the simple fact that access to resources is crucial for life to sustain itself. If an organism cedes access to there resources their chances of survival are diminished. It is true that some organisms do a tactical retreat, but they never truly cede their territory permanently. The colonization of the people from Proxima Centauri will require any native flora/fauna to cede territory to some degree or another.
If the planet is devoid of life then weapons won't be needed to fight any native flora/fauna, but **planets that can support life as the people from Proxima Centauri know it are valuable**, since they are the minority both in their solar system and in this new solar system at the very least. That means it is worth defending a planet devoid of life from others who might not want to share. Similarly if the planet isn't devoid of life it is imperative that the people from Proxima Centauri are able to persuade the natives to share the planet.
Once the people from Proxima Centauri arrive at Earth they may not be able to communicate with the natives. This will complicate diplomacy, and depending on the tech level of the natives the people from Proxima Centauri might be vulnerable to varying degrees. If the natives are any kind of threat then investing in **weapons will be good insurance**. If the natives aren't any kind of threat the weapons still serve as insurance against other aliens. Keep in mind that *you don't buy insurance to make you money you buy it to protect your money*.
Since they are traveling to a known valuable planet with a better than average chance to hold and sustain life it is wise to have the capability to defend this planet. A smart defense plan will include a range of weapons that aren't going to render the planet uninhabitable, and allow focused attacks to minimize collateral damage. This allows you to retain the inherent value of a habitable planet, and reduce the fallout from any diplomatic failures. Furthermore it is imperative that the people from Proxima Centauri don't come in contact with the natives until the natives have been studied because the natives might be poisonous or otherwise hazardous to the people from Proxima Centauri at a biological/chemical level.
One big problem with "the drive is a weapon" is the same reason why we don't just carpet bomb insurgents with nukes. Yes the drive *can* be a weapon but it isn't going to be an appropriate or useful weapon except in the more dire of circumstances. Like nukes the drive is more useful as a deterrent. Also martial arts does fill a vital space in the defense/offense strategy, but there is a reason why commando's carry guns instead of just relying on their kung fu. Having a full range of intermediate options allows you to defend yourself, and engage in diplomacy from a position of strength without having to deal with the diplomatic problem of indiscriminate destruction.
**Bringing a variety of weapons allows the commanders from Proxima Centauri to use the least amount of force that is appropriate, which is helpful diplomatically.** For example if the people from Proxima Centauri come to Earth and find it inhabited as it is now they might choose to setup shop in the Australian outback since that is relatively empty. If the people from Proxima Centauri imposed a no fly zone around their base in the outback, and pushed all natives outside of their base, that would be less diplomatically damaging once two way communication is established than orbital bombardment of Australia. By consistently using a minimum of force to establish a peaceful colony there is a better chance for acceptance by the natives.
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**Reframe the problem: what do your people need?**
Rather than trying to decide whether you need to bring weapons for your people or not, look to the people you are bringing along. What sorts of people are they?
Weapons are tools. In the end, they are nothing but tools. They happen to be a particular category of tool, but in the end whether or not you bring a weapon should go under the exact same sort of scrutiny as whether or not you bring the mass spectrometer. Who can use it? If you have a bunch of chemists on board, ask them what tools they need for their trade. If they say their job benefits greatly from having a mass spectrometer on board, you bring it!
Likewise, if you're bringing a large number of individuals who are well trained in how to use firearms, and they say that they can do their job better with firearms, pack 'em in. Your job description called for it.
There will be a mass balance for everything. Presumably you already have some sense of how much mass you want to bring for particular tasks because you're bringing the people along with you. A mass spectrometer will be about 200-300 pounds of gear. Depending on how much ammo you choose to bring along, you can probably get 3-5 rifles to fit in that weight.
Another question to ask is what are the stakes? If this is the survival of your species, and you are willing to literally wage war to protect your species, you will want to bring real weapons. In the case of species survival, the idea of bringing nuclear weapons along is not unfounded. If this is just the first ship of many, and you plan on relaying information to the next ships, you probably don't need an arsenal.
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It's important to reason out the possible scenarios you expect your travelers to face on arrival - not in huge detail, but for a few factors. Things to consider:
* Planet habitability scale (move right in, "proximaform," nothing's right but the gravity, not even the gravity's close enough)
* Existing Life (none, slimes, complex organisms, etc.)
* Existing Intelligent Life Advancement (primitive, similar, more advanced, no common framework)
* Existing Intelligent Life Hostility (welcoming, cautious, xenophobic, hungry "It's a cookbook!")
* Travelers outlook (refugees, supplicants, neighbors, invaders)
For almost all combinations of those scenarios anything beyond a few handheld firearms will be pretty useless and other items that could be brought instead would likely be more useful.
Even for scenarios with intelligent hostile natives firearms would likely be pretty useless - 50,000 travelers on a generation ship means most are not actually combatants anyway even for a highly militarized society, and the refugee nature means that losses due to combat are something to be avoided at all costs. For intelligent but cautiously welcoming natives, showing up heavily armed would probably be a red flag and likely to make them less welcoming.
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> As he neared the outskirts of the city the canyons of multi-storey buildings lined with coffee- and tea-houses gave way to the large squat shapes of factories, storage-halls and other industry. If it weren’t for the ramps leading below ground, or the occasional slid-apart roof of a shipyard revealing the envelope of an airship; one could easily overlook the sheer size of these buildings, sunken many levels into the ground.
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**NOTICE**: I am looking for a solution within the confines given in the question. If your answer does not work without introducing anything to the world (e.g. super precise lenses, magical hotstones, etc.) please take the time to *weigh up the pros & cons* of whatever you introduce.
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This question is set in my [mind-bogglingly breathtaking conworld](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19788/how-would-flora-behave-on-a-two-continent-planet), where *heavily armoured airships majestically float through the skies* with help of [a science-defying, yet well thought-through lighter-than-anything material](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19630/is-this-concept-for-an-lta-gas-associated-element-lifecycle-feasible)1.
While you can make use of these facts & technologies in your answer. Making your answer work without them would make it much more useful for other people looking to solve the same or a similar issue
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In order to achieve the desired aesthetic of having most of these buildings sunken into the ground, we'll have to excavate quite a lot of material.
E.g. for a building of 80x130m with 2 stories above and 3 stories below ground, we get a depth of about ~8m. That results in an excavated volume of 83'200 m3 - that is ~34 Olympic swimming pools1.
Now this leads to two problems in my understanding:
1. Depending on the ground this means *possible huge amounts of labour* necessary for a comparatively *little advantage* over building all above-ground
2. We have *huge masses of dugout material* of which we can directly use only comparatively small amount for building the above-ground walls and structures.
The crux is that *rocky underground* means we can quarry off quality building stone, but it's also *more labour intensive* to dig out. While *softer underground* means that we have an easier time digging, but we *can't reuse much of the dugout* for building...
1or 146'411'532 British Pints - thank you Windows Calculator
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*Area*: The region I want to set these buildings & towns in is intended to be savanna-like to desert-like (take generously from Morocco and Namibia, sprinkle with Asia Minor, then roughly mix with a spatula).
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**Q**: What conditions would allow for this way of building to be predominant in the described areas?
A good answer might choose to address one or multiple of the following topics:
* What kinds of ground/strata would benefit this way of building large structures, and *why*?
* What environmental conditions could benefit this way of building / maybe even necessitate it for large structures, and *why*?
* How could the dugout be used so that it is not purely a waste-material?
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*Technology*: The world is set technologically somewhere between the industrial revolution and the invention of internal-combustion-engines. There's been heavy development and optimizations regarding steam-driven-engines as there is, at least in parts of the world, [little to no oil available](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57761/how-to-make-the-development-and-use-of-steam-engines-preferred-over-that-of-comb).
Electricity is something fairly new and so far doesn't go further than being used for creating light aboard airships and being used for telegraphy (little to no electric infrastructure).
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There is no other option. The underlying rock is limestone, and it has a network of karst caves:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pnSYx.png)
After several attempts to build something on top of the caves, they collapsed causing damage in life and property.
The solution was to simply build inside the caves. It is actually a pretty good idea. You don't have to dig too much out because the hole is already there! This solves your problem of waste material.
Whatever rock you do recover can be recycled to make Portland cement to actually build the buildings, because lime (= fired limestone) is an ingredient in the production of Portland cement.
In terms of climate, one would expect that you need to be in a rainy area in order to be able to dissolve enough rock to form the caves, but that in not necessarily the case. Karst caves form in a variety of climatic settings, from Southern Europe through the tropical Philippines to the arid Nullarbor in Australia. All you need is limestone and time.
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# Ankh-Morpork is mostly built on Ankh-Morpork
Theoretically the city is built on black loam, but years of fires, flooding, and rebuilding mean that the city is mostly built on older versions of itself. If you want a couple of floors of basements, you just have to dig out the old buildings that lie underneath. Of course flooding is a good reason *not* to build downwards.
There's an important point to remember here. Most cities are built on fertile and riverside ground. You get a reasonable amount of soft ground under your feet that you can dig down into without excessive difficulty.
# Draconian planning laws
Paris was built according to a plan. That plan forced all the buildings to look relatively uniform, have balconies that lined up with their neighbours and limited the height of buildings. If you want a larger building, but you're strictly limited in how far up you can go, perhaps down is your future.
# Soft drifting sand
You can't really build large structures on it, but you can build on the harder ground underneath. It's not so much that you dig down to build as that periodically dunes roll through town and raise the effective ground level a few metres.
Related to this:
# Wind
The howling debris laden winds that pass through mean that people want to expose as little of their building as possible to the risk of weather damage. A vast warehouse represents a massive exposure to the weather and hence risk of damage, sinking it into the ground protects the bulk of the structure from damage.
Generally sticking to low rise buildings will reduce the wind tunnel effect of larger buildings as the air at low levels is channeled down the narrow gaps through a city. If high winds are the norm in a region, keeping the buildings lower will make a much less hostile environment for pedestrians.
# The city is built on its building material
London is built on a particular clay that is shown in the colours of London brick. You dig, you bake, you build, all using [one hole](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-14). Paris equally is built on its own building material, the famous catacombs are originally the quarries for the stone from which the city is built.
# However
No matter how you approach this, the sheer quantity of removed material far outweighs any usefulness on the scales you're asking for. If perhaps you were building small mud huts and using the excavated clay to build the walls then it's practical. However the good old square/cube law mean that this method fails to scale up to larger buildings and certainly not the large empty volume of a warehouse.
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# A customised solution
Match the Parisian style draconian planning laws to Parisian geology.
The city is bound to a two storey building height simply as a result of an arbitrary leader at an arbitrary point in history declaring this must be so. The warehouses are built over the quarries that the rest of the sprawling city is built out of. Most people don't build down, they build out. The city is huge and requires vast amounts of stone allowing you to get round the square cube problems from the size of your warehouses.
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**These already exist**
This is more common than you think, most modern countries have cities with multilevel underground complexes. Tokyo is famous for how much of the city can be transversed by foot without ever coming to to the surface. Turkey in particular has had dozens of underground cities that are several thousand years old. Kaymakli City, Derinkuyu city, Özkonak City, Mazı City are just some of the examples, some of which go down many levels. removed stone was used to build additional above ground homes. Soft volcanic rock in the region makes excavating easy while still being strong enough for many levels of undercity. Dry hot conditions minimize the risk of flooding and makes the stable temperatures desirable, several cities are actually self-cooling using underground wells and evaporation. there is is a steady gradient from ancient to modern underground construction, you can easily find the particular "feel" you are looking for.
To summarizes the conditions you need.
1. The area needs to be dry and high enough that there is little risk of flooding.
2. The underlying material needs to be either a soft but solid rock or it needs to be several meters of loose earth overlying a shallow hard bedrock. the former makes building as easily as digging a hole, the latter makes deep excavation necessary for large buildings but makes a dug out solid foundation easier than pilings, (once you have dug it out why not use the space)
3. extremely hot or cold environments will also encourage building down, as the ground has a steady temprature and makes a good insulator.
As for reusing the material, stone was rarely waste, it can be reused for building well buildings as well as roads, sculptures, and depending on the rock many specialized uses. The type of rock will determine what is easier, but soft rock that makes digging easy also makes turning it into blocks easy, so it is almost as easy to build up as down is some places.
The below example in Cappadocia Turkey is almost exactly what you describe, it even makes your alliteration literal as part of the city is build in a canyon, with surface structures built from stone removed from the underground. The underground construction is rather rough but that is because it is mostly unused in modern times. We see in other modern underground construction that these tunnels can easily be further refines and modernized if they stay occupied.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0sxXw.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LMCLn.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/d5UW3.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/keIHb.jpg)
[Answer]
If the setting is desert-like then there are practical reasons and real-world examples for building into the ground rather that on top.
The prerequisite is a hard-packed and dry loam as the predominant soil. People can dig caves into the ground with the most promitive tools, so the tradition of building houses this way can date back into prehistoric times. Over time the caves evolved to multi-room buildings with inner courtyards and storage space in a second storey.
The obvious advantage is the stable climate you have inside the cave-house. The thick walls insulate against the scorching heat of noon and the freezing cold of night. The entrances are all build facing the one direction where the cool breeze comes from to trap cool air in the courtyards. The building itself provides shade for the yard.
The dug-out can be used to construct buildings (or parts thereof) above ground by mixing some water in and forming the loam into shape. Over time the ground level will rise naturally because you cannot use all of this dugout. You can also use it for repairs after rainfalls.
I saw a village built in this way in the Sahara in Tunesia. The people there preferred their cave-houses over modern concrete buildings. I don't know how big one room can be made. You probably have to include pillars to stabilize the ceiling in factory halls.
[Answer]
There is a small town in Australia that is mostly underground due to harsh environment.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy>
Note the upfront cost is the same but running costs (ie air con) is much reduced. It is economically smart to build underground in that environment.
Also note multistorey buildings only make sense if land is valuable and scarce. So it makes sense to spend a lot extra on building. Note in a multistorey building each floor has less usable area than a single storey (stairs etc).
Any building activity requires either trees to die or massive holes in the ground called quarries. Your world seems to lack trees. So quarries are the only local option for building material. Instead of digging quarries away from urban centres, they turn each quarry into a building when finished.
[Answer]
Natural canyons, if the ground is cut by deep canyons, either erosional or tectonic in origin, then cutting buildings into the walls of those breaks makes more sense than quarrying and building above. This is particularly applicable when the rock is industrially useful, Rocksalt or other evaporites, Limestone, Dolomite, Gypsum, any of a number of Iron ores that form thick geological units (banded iron stone, hematite, magnetite for a start) or coal measures. There may also be a demand for building stone elsewhere that could fuel the cutting and transport of the local rock, this may be because the rock is superior to that found elsewhere (from either an engineering or aesthetic standpoint) or it may be because the local rock is socially significant (bringing good luck or of religious significance).
The natural canyons provide ease of access making the process more economically appealing and logistically manageable but may not provide an incentive of themselves, a hostile environmental setting does. If surface of the area the buildings are in is inhospitable due to climate, vegetation, or fauna, then building down rather than up is preferred. There are a number of modern cities that have active or historical tunnel networks created for this reason, Montreal's "Winter City" is quite famous.
The other option is that the underground building is a matter of social necessity rather than being in any way cost effective. **Never underestimate the power of religion**; if the locals have a strict belief that any building that rises higher than a sacred quall bush is an affront to the gods they simply can't build up. Thus to have the high density population centres needed for industrialisation they will have to dig down for living space.
[Answer]
You're in a desert? Your buildings function as [solar stills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_still). It's really very expensive to haul water over the vast desert sands, even by your implausible airships.
Therefore, and to contribute to sustainability and economic independence, each building is build in a cunning fashion so as to route outside air down to the lowest levels, where the air is simultaneously cooled and also relieved of the undue burden of its water vapours. This water, along with careful water management practices, helps to ensure the independence of this desert nation from outside forces who would try to influence it through the monopoly of vital resources.
The ground-cooled air also contributes to the comfort levels of the buildings, lowering energy expenditures on air conditioning (if your civilization has that technology).
[Answer]
Realistically, the amount fo digging and spoil, as well as issues of potential flooding make this very unlikely at best.
However, you could have the effect of an underground city by roofing over a narrow canyon or large ravine and building along the sides, leaving the open space like an atrium. Depending on the technological abilities of the nation, this technique could also be adapted for worked out quarries and open pit mines.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6Qfj.jpg)
*The interior would have this effect*
The giant roofs would provide shelter from extreme heat, cold or raging winds (or whatever other environmental issues plague the population) and moderate the temperature. The interior space between the walls would function like an atrium in a building, and could be used as public space, for gardens and other outdoor activities. Due to shading issues, it is unlikely that you could practice intensive agriculture.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0NwQi.jpg)
*A more naturalistic space, but in reality the trees turned out to be [too expensive](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5517947/Parliaments-fig-trees-face-chop-10-000-bill.html) to maintain*
So a roofed built over a natural canyon, ravine or man made "hole" like a quarry or an open pit mine might fulfill the bill. It will provide shelter from extreme weather, and might even be a pleasant place to live, so long as provisions are made to prevent flooding, and a secure source of food is nearby to feed the population.
[Answer]
Underground structures have many advantages. They have better insulation against extreme solar heat (from a binary star system, for example) and extreme cold. They can withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, blizzards, dust storms, pterodactyl-size predatory birds, and earthquakes. They are a natural defense against early 20th century weaponry, meaning artillery, catapults, cannons, aerial bombs, al Qaeda suicide zeppelins, and snipers. Defensive anti-aircraft guns and missiles will have clear unobstructed shots at enemy aircraft without buildings blocking their shots. Water does not need to be pumped up to a reservoir since all the water users will be at lower levels. Plus, once the population grows, it would be easy to enlarge the living spaces by digging down, rather than building more levels to the top of a highrise building.
Underground buildings are vulnerable to floods so assume the elevation of the cities are high enough to avoid such catastrophes. Waste water and sewage would have to be disposed of in some way, so assume the lowest levels of the structures can still use gravity to drain waste water to a waste treatment facility elsewhere. Once the structure drops below 200 feet the natural heat from the crust will become uncomfortable.
So what should be done with the excavated rocks? Iron ore and uranium can be processed for useful tools and energy. Coal can be used to power the steam engines. Granite, marble, and quartz can be used in kitchen and bathroom countertops. Less useful rocks can be dropped underwater to form artificial reefs, which can increase the population of fish for aquatic farming.
[Answer]
Space for Airships.
This is an airship heavy world, there could be rules against building tall buildings or there are social and economic advantages to not having tall buildings. For example if most buildings in an area are low and of similar height it becomes easier to approach, moor and load/unload Airships there. A high building would make that harder and lower the local property prices.
Emergency infrastructure designed around Airships.
Similar in execution as the above but for differenr reasons. In our world we can reach just about anything by car. Cant reach it by car? We'll build a road so you can. Now imagine a world where the primary transport choices are walking, horses&carriages (no cars especially with the lack of fuel), bicycles (if any), trains or Airships. City planning might simply not include large roadways for transport, cargo and evacuation purposes. With Airships being so important for getting around a city the heights of the buildings are limited. I heard that there were actual rules that you were not allowed to build higher than the mooring masts of Airships but I cant find references to it.
Protection against warfare
This is set around the industrial age, with a different history and Airships so prevalent the act of stragetic bombing can be both feared and practiced a lot. As alternative you could have sabotage and terror attacks similar to Vietnam or Partizans in WWII by commandeering an airship and having it ram tall buildings with a large payload. As a defense mechanism building into the ground could be less expensive than armoring tall buildings against damage and having a widespread network against such attacks.
Scientific misconceptions.
There have been tons of misconceptions in the past, such as that trains going more than 30km/h would mean its occupants would suffocate. The misconception could simply be that building too high would make the buildings catch too much wind and they would topple.
There are still plenty of reasons why building underground is going to be expensive and challenging, from getting enough fresh air into the buildings to their construction. But is it important enough to take into consideration? It might be like sound in space: it doesnt make sense in our world but damn doesnt it add to the feel of a well fleshed out world.
[Answer]
**Think about lighting**
One of the reasons for building up is to have windows to let in light. Old factories and schools often had more window than wall. Unlit space is only useful for storage.
One possibility is to have your people's eyes more sensitive than ours, relative to outdoor ambient light levels. Then maybe they build underground to get away from excessive light.
Otherwise, while lighting considerations can't explain why people build underground, you need to explain why they don't keep people above ground. To do that, you need cheap, effective lighting. In the era you're taking your tech from, we had skylights and deck prisms to distribute natural light, but they couldn't consistently keep a desk light enough to work on, especially on the second story down. We also had candles and whale oil for artificial light, but they weren't all that expensive and weren't cheap. Gas light may also have been available; I don't know how good it was. So, you need to introduce something special.
[Answer]
On Earth, building underground has been suggested for several reasons:
* to protect the houses from hurricanes
* to protect the houses from cold
* to preserve the surface on the roof of the houses as arable land or air filter or oxygen source
* because skyscrapers are ugly so we hide them in the ground
[Answer]
The most plausible reasons are solar radiation protection (sudden flares) and thermal management (less sun facing surface) as in the answers by hyperion4 and CatCat.
Basically unless you decide that the environment has a inconvenient sun you will have to make some other reason that the surface must be kept flat. The desert lets you stay below ground level because you do not have to worry about rain but you have a lot of other problems, you need to maintain airship wind speeds, you have to keep your structures clean of sand. You need to manage sewerage and lighting and a host of other things we take for granted with gravity pulling things down hill.
The only convincing reason is the immense cost and irritation of protecting structures from the regular and debilitating explosive tumble weeds.
However as these tumble weeds are explosive to help disperse seeds and penetrate natural barriers they are a nuisance on this continent. All the flat areas have been levelled to an almost perfect runway flatness by explosions on any bumps and filling with wind driven sand, clay and dust. Eradicating the plants is near impossible and wildlife and crops are only grown on the slopes and mountains that the tumble weed does not overrun. The flat land is no use for anything except solar collectors and underground structures that maintain a flat top when closed. Periscopes and wind sensors are used to check before opening doors. Once on the surface the area can be inspected and scanned by lasers to determine if there are any bushes moving closer.
Temporary work and larger construction in the correct non-tumbling season is safe enough but having any protrusion is an invitation to erosion by inevitable explosions.
The surface is flat enough to land aircraft but parking them there or landing in a wind is asking for trouble so this continent has elected to use airships and work underground.
Teenage rites of passage include catching a tumble weed bush while windy (must grab and hold the roots) and juggling one or more to gain rights of not chaperoned dates with consenting partners. Household chores include taking the garbage out to the local explosive detonation pit and vacuum cleaning the seals and hinges in the doors and surfaces of windows and solar collectors.
There is enough subsurface water to provide for small green houses and domestic use but no rain to cause flooding.
] |
[Question]
[
In the climactic final battle Faction A engages Faction B on Faction B's planetary base, both in orbital and ground combat. Realizing they can't win, Faction A activates a device that transports and traps the entire planet in what can be compared to a pocket dimension.
So basically **the entire planet vanishes from existence in (almost) an instant**. Now there are two fleets of ships around the space where a planet used to be.
**What is the effect (if any) on said ships?**
Half of me thinks that because it's in space there won't be any effect, but of course it would be cool if there was some sort of displacement effect.
**EDIT:** A few answers mention the planet returning at some point. I'll have the trapped people escape several decades later, but the planet itself remains lost.
Several answers have been extremely useful, but unfortunately I can only pick one, so I went with the one that gave me the best alternative. The rest get upvotes though. Thanks to everyone that took the time to answer.
[Answer]
Earth has a Schwarzschild radius of about 3 mm.
This means things at geostationary orbital distance have a time dilation of about
$$\sqrt{1-\frac{9 mm}{35786 km}}$$
or one part in $10^{-10}$ roughly. (if they are actually orbiting this value changes slightly, as does the rotation of the Earth)
This also lines up with the length contraction factor.
When the Earth disappears "instantly", a gravitational wave of that magnitude is going to be produced. How much energy is that?
Well, 1 solar mass converted to gravitational waves and sent over 1.4 billion light years produced a $10^{-20}$ amplitude wave (LIGO observation). [The energy in a gravitational wave is proprotional to amplutide squared](http://www.lightandmatter.com/html_books/genrel/ch09/ch09.html).
So, per meter squared, the LIGO observation would carry:
```
(1 solar mass * c^2) / (1.4 billion light years*2)^2 / 4 pi * 1 m^2
```
2 \* $10^{-5}$ J (apparently it was 1 solar mass of matter converted into a gravitational wave at a distance of 1.4 billion light years).
The gravitational wave from the Earth disappearing is going to be ${10^{10}}^{2}$ stronger than that, or 2\*$10^{15}$ J. This is an insane amount of energy; however, very little of it actually deposits on normal matter.
Suppose we are 1 Jupiter-radius away from Jupiter instead.
Jupiter has a Schwarzschild radius of 2.2 m. Titan has an average orbit of 1,221,850 km. Then the gravitational wave would carry 500 times as much Energy.
The question becomes how well does it convert over to normal matter? Will it occur fast enough to disrupt an atomic nucleus?
The compression effect on molecular-level matter will only involve modest pressures. But the compression effect will occur all the way down the length scales, and I suspect it requires lots more pressure to compress a nucleus.
---
But back up a second. We ripped the planet from our universe. One could argue that would involve forming an event horizon around the planet and making it disappear.
I mean, photons not coming from an area is the definition of event horizon. Stuff an event horizon somewhere, and you warp space. The volume we need to swallow is the planet. So, black hole the size of the planet in effect blinks in then poofs?
If we are 10 planet-radius away, and the event horizon forms tightly around the planet then disappears, this would generate two gravitational waves of impressive magnitude.
$$\sqrt{1 - \frac{1 r}{10 r}}$$
gives us a amplitude of 0.05. The energy carried by this wave is about 10^17 times greater than the ones we are describing above.
In effect, all matter would suddenly feel stretched by 5%, then compressed by 5%. This would occur all the way down to the molecules, quarks and nuclei. I'd be worried about fission events from this happening suddenly, let alone the amoung of energy released by compressing "incompressible" solids by 5%.
[Compressing water by 5% would take 0.1 GPa](https://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090718001908AAEGhNH), so we could estimate the effect would be akin to a pressure wave of that magnitude over humans. [And 0.4 GPa for iron](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101123191731AALTdXN).
This level of pressure in a conventional blast is enough [to blow limbs off](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpressure).
I cannot believe the compressibility of EM mediated molecule-scale solids is in the same universe as that for a nucleus or a proton. So I would be very worried about atomic disintegration...
Ignoring that, matter slows down gravitational waves. The effect is extremely tiny, but we could use that to estimate how much impulse this would provide and how much energy deposited. I cannot find the correct equations for this case.
---
Calculating what exactly happens is going to be quite tricky. For a planet-sized event horizon, the effect will be explosive at "molecular" scales, blowing objects apart. At atomic scales, I don't know (will it cause fission?). At macroscopic scales, I don't know (will it impart a large radial impuse from the matter slowing the gravitational wave down?).
There is plenty of energy to work with. The kind of effect that energy density and flux could cause seem unbounded.
The above also neglects the power; how long the teleport takes determines the power the wave carries (how "sharp" it is, not just how much energy it carries).
[Answer]
You can have it affect them as much as you like. The device is magic, so the additional effects can be whatever you want.
On a more practical note if the mass of the planet really has disappeared then orbits are going to be thrown way out of whack - depending on what point of their orbit around the planet the ships were at they could be thrown in any direction as the acceleration towards the planet's center suddenly vanishes.
The ships are not "outside" the gravity well, in fact there is no such thing as "outside" a gravity well, although there is a point at which it's insignificant. The ships are in free-fall, but at the same time they are moving sideways so fast that even though they are falling towards the planet all the time they move far enough that they never actually hit the atmosphere.
If you're writing space-based sci-fi you should definitely read up on some basic physics and orbital dynamics (simple Newtonian stuff would be plenty) if you want the results to be plausible.
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Gravitational acceleration is continually changing the direction of a body in orbit around it, tugging it in a circle (we will assume) around it. If this tug disappears objects will just carry on in a straight line with their original velocity. The directions will just be along the tangent of the orbit they were on.
So nothing too dramatic so far.
However it really depends on how your planet disappearing act works, if they are tangled up in different but still present dimensions the mass may still be present and our 3D space might still act as though the planet is still there. This, however, is all speculative as we have no real idea. Another possible speculation is that, if the mass does disappear, our space will spring back and the space-ships will experience the stretch and squash of gravitational waves caused by such a dramatic difference in the dip.
But in the end, we don't know, you get to decide how the machine works to best fit your story. Do they know how to return? (This would imply they were still linked to the original position) Or perhaps they can return anywhere in the universe (possibly very messy) which would do wonders for space-travel.
[Answer]
The orbiting ships would stop moving in the curved (by gravity) line of their orbit and suddenly (continue to) move in a straight line in whatever direction they were moving at the time of the disappearance.
At worst, this would be inconvenient, as to stay in the vicinity of where the planet was, they would have to decelerate then turn around and come back, at which time staying in the vicinity would be simply adopting the speed and velocity of the former planet, as their new stable orbit would be around the host star.
[Answer]
If the planet goes away, the gravity well goes away, and the well is no longer "turning" their orbits. Wherever they are in their orbits, they now go in a straight line. *That's not the problem.*
## The planet comes back. Uh-oh.
The problem is when the spaceships come back and loiter in open space to await **the return of the planet**. (their science teams figure out pretty quick that's a highly improbable way to destroy a planet.)
The ships have nothing to orbit, so they must "sit there" in the general vicinity of where the planet is expected to return. When the planet returns, they will suddenly find themselves in a gravity well, with no sideward velocity for an orbit. They will **Fall Straight Down** while the planet turns under them.
Their engines will need to generate somewhat more than one local "gee" of thrust to escape - even more if they're late - and that may not be practicable for a slow, large interstellar capital ship. Could they merely bend their fall sideways into an orbital velocity? Maybe, I haven't run the numbers.
They might have a better shot if their ship is designed for reentry.
## The critical delay
Keep in mind what Sully Sullenberger talked about at the NTSB hearing. He pointed out that all the simulations had the pilots knowing exactly what to do, zero seconds into the event. He said what actually happens in real life is some time figuring what's going on and what to do about it - when they added 30 seconds of "figuring out options" time, every simulation crashed.
Even if they expect it, the vigilance could be hard if there's a long wait for the planet's return. Guard duty is boring. It might be the third-watch crew who's least competent, and things might not get sorted until the captain comes out in his pajamas.
So you have to figure 30-90 seconds minimum for crews to discover the planet has returned, realize their peril, make a plan to thrust away from it, and get the engines spun up / ship physically oriented engines-down. They may not know exactly where the planet will reappear.
That's going to depend a lot on the distance from the planet. Hopefully their captains have thought this through (probably not, it *doesn't ever happen* so how would they be prepared for it?) What if it's a "race" by competing factions, where you need to be closer than the other guy?
Assuming Earth pops up 300km away, in Sully's 30 seconds, things have gotten rather worse - you have fallen 4.5km and gain 300m/s velocity *straight down - that's a kilometer in 3 seconds, a mile in 5.* At 90 seconds you've fallen 40km with 900m/s velocity, a kilometer per second! Since you hit atmo' in 150 seconds (2:30), the point of non-recoverability may be sooner than you think.
Damn, that'll be an exciting chapter. Several chapters if you spend time on several ship bridges watching different captains deal with it in a different way.
Maybe there's even a spot for unexpected heroism, where the Vollchon ship throws a tractor beam or grapple to help a Hegemon ship get enough escape velocity.
## Why so close?
*What? And risk my ship?* So much easier to sit 100 million km away with a bag of popcorn. But consider the drama.
Whatever made the planet disappear, *something* else is going on. It's not that simple. The situation may justify putting ships at risk.
* A siege doesn't happen in peace. What's the point of the blockading ships sitting at a nice safe distance, when the blockade runners simply position themselves *much* closer? (and the capital ships may presume the blockade runners may have insider information.)
* A *Mad, mad, mad world* treasure-hunt doesn't have *one* competitor. (at least not ones that get into science-fiction novels). You're safe, you lose.
* The waiting ships may have a reason to want the planet inside weapons range the moment it returns.
It may be worse. Their science teams may have error or faulty presumptions in their calculations. (this is a new phenomenon, right?) *Rogues don't even have science teams.*
Lastly, what if the planet is be able to *control* where it reappears? If so, that is trivial to weaponize, the waiting ships **would have no choice** whether the planet appears 200km under them. That will surely occur to their science teams. And they may not know *whether* the planet can control that, if this situation is novel to them.
Speaking of novel, that's up to the writer. *Of course,* the power of science is that we can avoid drama, but if science fiction novels wanted to avoid drama, *they too* would stay in spacedock.
[Answer]
The basic idea behind orbit in Newtonian physics is that the centripetal acceleration required for the satellite to go in a circle around the planet (or other body) is perfectly fulfilled by gravitational acceleration. That is,
$$G\frac{M}{r^2} = \frac{v^2}{r}$$
This means that these satellites (space ships) are not supplying any power if they're in orbit, but "coasting" (so to speak). It also means that ships at the same altitude must have the same speed.
For an in-orbit dogfight, what this means is that maneuvering is something that won't happen much, and when it does, changes in speed must either be accompanied by changes in altitude or fuel spent to maintain altitude. For example, speeding up means decreasing altitude and slowing down means increasing it. Or to keep altitude constant, speeding up means directing thrust away from the planet and slowing down means directing thrust toward the planet. Saving fuel is important, so we'll likely see more of the former than the latter.
If we suddenly take away the planet, the conditions of orbit are no longer satisfied. But the basic equation of physics,
$$F = ma$$
should still apply. As such, we know that since no force is applied to the space ships (most will be "coasting", remember?), they will simply continue on their present trajectories. They will no longer be moving in a "circle," though, but a straight line, just like a ball on the end of a string when the string breaks.
If one ship is chasing another, they will both head off in ever so slightly different directions. Any kinematic shots that were in-transit when the planet disappeared will likely still make contact unless they're fired from particularly long range. In order for that kind of attack to be effective, it has to outrun the ship it's trying to hit, which means it's shot in a trajectory closer to straight-line than the orbit anyway.
But as these ships are floating off on slightly different trajectories, no doubt the pilot or navigation system will notice and make corrections to either continue dogfighting or retreat because what the #@\*$ just happened.
I'm no expert on gravitational waves, but I don't think they should be too much of a consideration. With how weak gravitational force is and how quickly the waves propagate, it would take a much larger object disappearing and a much larger satellite for this to make too much of a difference. Geosynchronous orbit on Earth is around 35 786 km. Propagating at lightspeed, gravitational waves would cover that distance in roughly $\frac{1}8$ of a second, and cover the distance across the ship's y axis in no time. There will be some distortion of space but nothing intense enough to be noticed.
[Answer]
Let's talk side effects.
As noted by others, the ships in orbit would cease orbiting and start moving in a straight line, the exact motion dependent on how far they were from the planet. The ISS for instance would have a considerable straight line speed and would complete an axial rotation once every 90 minutes. Something the distance of the Moon away wouldn't experience a particularly notable difference in orbit until minutes or hours have passed. That bit is boring.
First interesting side effect: Gravity, or sudden lack of, propagates at the speed of light. Objects will continue to feel the pull of gravity from the now missing planet until the difference has propagated the distance between them. Mostly irrelevant due to the tiny magnitude of action during that period of time, but still kind of interesting. Would be more of an interesting point if the ships were more like 1 AU or more from a star and the star disappeared at a known time.
Second interesting side effect: How far out does this disappearance affect? Does the planet have anything in orbit? In the case of the Earth, if the effect were confined to the right distance, the planet and it's atmosphere could be "removed" while leaving objects in orbit in place. Nearby ships would then have the fun of thousands of high speed metal objects suddenly moving at tangents to the planet's previous position. I imagine it could be considered a solar fragmentation grenade.
Third interesting side effect: How does the planet disappear? If the disappearance involves stretching of space time around the planet then you have some interesting relativistic consequences to consider. If the mass of the planet disappears but space remains the same you instead have a large hard vacuum in a spot where the intra-solar vacuum wasn't all that empty, I'd expect this possibility to result in something like an implosion that would affect anything close by though I don't know how much by.
Fourth interesting side effect: Anything mechanism resulting in the disappearance of a planet should require a massive amount of energy, which in turn should result in a massive amount of waste energy being emitted. I think it would be justifiable to assume the space previously occupied by the planet would now contain energy equivalent to some portion of the planet's mass. How much energy depends on how strict you want to be but I'd expect a pretty substantial amount of gamma and X-ray emission. If you wanted to be very strict you could plausibly say that the planet was replaced with an amount of energy equivalent to the entire planet's mass, that's an explosion of considerable magnitude.
Fifth interesting side effect: 3 words: Van Allen Belts. All that lovely radiation is confined by the influence of the planet. No more planet, no more confining influence.
Hope that gives you something to work with.
[Answer]
The ships will fly off at their current orbital velocity, as others have explained.
However, you can easily have the effect justifiably be more damaging: in orbit, the ships posses a large **angular momentum**. We might suppose that the defensive mechanism goes to pains to make sure the planet is treated gently enough, and in any case it has a huge moment of rotational inertia so the imposed change has little reaction.
But the disappearance causes each ship’s orbital angular momentum to be dumped into the ship itself! And in a fairly random haphazard dumping: so various parts of the ship suddenly are sent *spinning* with great force, tearing the ship apart.
[Answer]
As other answers have noted, if you think it would be cool for your planet eraser to cause a displacement effect then go for it; no one could dispute it without knowing the exact science behind the superweapon, which means you get a lot of license. (And let's not forget the [Rule Of Cool](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool)!)
I don't think that you'd necessarily see any effect in 3D space, because the orbiting ships were all being accelerated "downwards" by gravity and so the planet doesn't play much of a role at all in their relative motion unless the direction of that "downwardness" is significantly different for each of them. If a ship is approaching another ship, it will still do so once neither is being pulled downward. If however your ships are so far apart that their vectors are significantly different, so that they're effectively fighting *around* the planet rather than above it, then with the planet's gravity removed the ships would start to drift apart if neither corrected their course. In other words, if ships A & B are dogfighting somewhere and ships C & D are dogfighting a quarter-orbit away, neither of the dogfights would be noticeably affected by the loss of the planet, but the two dogfights would drift apart. This could easily be corrected for, just as if the other ships had simply changed direction.
So far, so unsexy. Your superweapon could still have side effects, however, depending on how it works -- which is up to you! You don't have to simply replace the planet with vacuum and call it a day. If the entire section of 3D space that contained the planet has now been "pinched off" by the superweapon, then the *space itself* is now inaccessible. In other words, if you have ship A and ship B who were very close to the planet on opposite sides, those ships would now find themselves right next to each other as the space that separated them has been pocketed off. There isn't just a big empty space between them, because that space is where the planet *still is*. The whole thing has just been pulled out of our plane of 3D space.
By this logic, if you had a dense shell of spaceships around the planet, on the event horizon, they would find themselves smooshed together into a small dense blob. Either handwave this away, or don't draw attention to it.
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I don't think anything would happen to them at all, but I'm not a physicist.
If they turn on their engines, then it's a moot point. They can go where they want, since they already possess enough power to overcome solar system gravity.
If they don't turn the engines on, and since the planet was orbiting a sun, the ships are, too. They will still orbit the sun. For a time, their orbits will be unstable because they were primarily orbiting something that's now gone. Their orbits must adjust to a new focal point.
They would probably settle into a stable orbit around the sun. But it's possible that one or both would be flung out into the solar system, or inward. They could become captured by another celestial mass and slowly settle into orbit there.
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Assuming the planet has no moons nearby which might substantially alter things, they would just go into a solar orbit of roughly the same path as the former planet.
Their position in the orbit of the planet will affect slightly their final orbit. Assuming an equatorial and prograde orbit, if the craft were on the opposite side of the sun from the planet when the planet disappeared, that tangential velocity would be added to their orbital velocity, resulting in an aphelion slightly higher than that of the former planet. If the craft were on the side of the planet closer to the sun, its tangential velocity would be subtracted from the orbital velocity, resulting in a perihelion slightly lower than the planet had.
You could even get into a situation where the tangential velocity cancels out the eccentricity of the planet's original orbit, and puts the craft into a more circular orbit than the planet had.
But really, the end result is basically nothing will happen, unless the planet is of a huge mass such that the tangential velocity of the orbiting fleet is large relative to the orbital velocity of the planet around its star.
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As has been at least hinted at more or less precisely/coherently, the moment the planet vanishes then any object actually orbiting that planet will continue moving in a straight line\* in the direction they were moving when the planet disappeared.
What happens next depends on a lot of things. If they are flung towards another planet, they may get trapped in an orbit around that planet, or "[slingshot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist)" around it. They may smack straight into it. They might get flung into an orbit around the sun the planet is orbiting - assuming the planet **is** orbiting a sun. They may - and could be the most likely outcome - leave the solar system altogether, maybe bending round a few of the other bodies in the system on the way.
But that's *objects*. What about *ships*? Well, Star Trek-y, Culture-y, or Star Wars-y ships that basically scoot about all over the place at ridiculous speed with effectively infinite fuel won't care much at all, they'll just scoot off somewhere else.
But for a more realistic ship, as you might find in Arthur C Clark, or [The Expanse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)), the effect would be profound. What if their planned itinerary required refuelling at that planet and they didn't get the chance? What about an orbital shuttle or space station? Even under ideal conditions suddenly hurtling into the dark at thousands of kph with no other planet closer than a few months away, and maybe with not even enough fuel on board to "stop"\*\* let alone figure out how to reach safety, is Bad News. And if all other craft in the same boat are similarly realistic in their limits, the chance of rescue or aid is slim even from someone fully stocked up.
And there in you might find the real drama. How to combine scarce resources - time, fuel, food, oxygen - with orbital mechanics to weave an improbable path to safety.
\*Very very Straight-ish anyway. Gravitational influence from other bodies will be extremely slight at typical solar system distances.
\*\*"Stop? Relative to what?" you cry. Yeah I know, the point is you're instantly in the situation of having a lot velocity that may well be very unhelpful.
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Gravitational effects of said planet will disappear instantly. However, orbiting vehicles will experience the change in gravity effect based on their orbital distance since gravity travels at the speed of light.
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I recently came up with an interesting idea for a power: glitch power!
I originally thought the idea was great until my brother brought up a valid point: what is there to glitch? Normally glitches are coding errors, but this power is supposed to work in the real world, so there is no code. At best this power would just become an illusion power with a cool aesthetic. The best solution I could conjure was that he would be glitching physics..
Let me be more clear:
The power itself is an uncontrollable power which can act as a catalyst. At random moments the character can cause events which seemingly defy all logic. This, I thought, would work OK with the real world.
At this I was presented an interesting question: Are the laws of physics similar enough to game code that someone could exploit their flaws and/or break them without exploding the universe (shall we say "crashing the game")
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You asked this question: "Are the laws of physics similar enough to game code that someone could exploit their flaws and/or break them without exploding the universe (shall we say "crashing the game")"
The answer is absolutely and categorically no. The laws of physics are not at all like game code. By the laws of physics this means the nature of physical reality. There is nothing to glitch. End of story.
However, if there was a more fundamental level to nature that was response for making physical reality real and the laws of physics what they are, then, purely hypothetically, that might be glitchable. Except, that really doesn't make sense.
Metaphorically this would be the equivalent of marionettes, that is string puppets, being able to control their own puppeteers and make the other parts of the puppet play they are in that is reality dance to their tune. Again, this doesn't make sense.
Is physics capable of being glitched? Nix. Nyet. Nein. Non. No way. No.
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The closest you could get is collapsing the quantum superposition of states into the least likely one. Or something like a non quantum size tunnel effect.
Normally if you run into a wall you smash your head onto it. By having quantum effects scaled up, it could happen that you tunnel through the wall. This would make all convicts in jails, or bank robbers outside the bank, really happy!
Another example could be by entropy inversion: some scent dispersed in a room which spontaneously fills its bottle, or air molecules which coherently hitting a body and make it move up a stair. Such events are extremely unlikely according to our present knowledge of physics.
They are all not glitches, in the sense that is not a malfunction of the law, but it is just an odd consequence of the law.
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It all depends on what you mean by "glitch".
If you mean an error of programming then the answer is, as others have rightly said, a resounding "NO".
Reason for this is that "this specific programming" *is* reality, so any (possible??) "error" in it *is* a "law of Nature" and not a mistake (yes sir: this is not a bug, it's a *feature*!).
If you look at it in this way then the specific programming of any (even the buggiest) game is what actually defines that world, so "glitch" assumes a different meaning: an unexpected result of some action (i.e.: experiment) obeying to "laws" not yet discovered.
In this meaning history of Science is full of "strange glitches", from the famous Michelson-Morley experiment to quantum effects that allow your PC to work.
What would be different in finding a wormhole connecting two different points in space (unlikely, but not ruled out by current scientific knowledge) and your "using a plate to penetrate a wall"?
Only difference is in our expectations: we know our reality still has undiscovered aspects while you pretend to know what's "right" in a game.
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# Possible? Yes. Probable? No.
What are "the laws of nature"?
In short the laws of nature are...
**Descriptions of how reality has behaved so far**
Let us take a simple law of nature: the theory of gravity. What does this law tell us? Well in short it says:
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> "Everyone that has taken a long walk on a short tall cliff has gone **SPLAT** at the foot of the cliff"
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That is all it says really, along with some nicely detailed formula on how to calculate at what velocity everyone up until that point made that big **SPLAT** at the foot of the cliff.
We as humans make one critical but unproven assumption about the laws of nature:
**The laws of nature will not change in the future**
This is an assumption we make. Can we know with certainty that the Law of Nature that is Theory of Gravity will not change in the future? No, we cannot. Gravity might very well change in a year from now... tomorrow... or in ten seconds after you finish reading this sentence. There is no way we can know that for certain, until we get to those ten seconds into the future.
However — hand on your heart — you are not very willing to challenge that law, now are you? You are not willing to bet your life that you **can** take that long walk off of the short, tall cliff and remain suspended in mid-air because gravity just then decided to stop working.
# What governs the laws of nature?
The funny part is that the laws of nature are governed by other laws of nature. and those laws of nature are in turn governed by yet more laws of nature. And finally we reach a point where we have to say "Ok, we do not know the laws of nature that governs that particular law. So this last law we know, we will consider immutable.
...for now".
The "for now" is due to that fact that sometimes we **do** discover new laws of nature. This in turn means that some of the old laws of nature are amended (never changed, only amended). So in the case of gravity, this was amended as follows:
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> "Everyone that has taken a long walk on a short tall cliff has gone **SPLAT** at the foot of the cliff... **[unless they had been using parachutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAygUFwCrUc)**."
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So will it be possible to "glitch" the laws of nature in the future? We have — after all — "glitched" a number of laws already, such as splitting the atom when previously the law was that atoms are not possible to split.
Well, maybe. But it is not very probable. If you find a way, congratulations: Nobel Prize for you.
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What you mean by "**laws of physics**"? Nature **does not know** "laws of physics", "laws of nature", or whatever you may call it.
"Laws" as you mentioned, are just phrases formulated by scientists, who observe certain numbers of phenomena and notice a pattern happening. The phrase itself is just an *approximation* of how nature behaves. There's always an exception in human-defined "law".
We call it a **anomaly**.
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It's not an exception to mother nature. **It's how it's always been.** Nothing excepted because *it's always been like that.*
Is *water expands when it's chilled from 4 degrees Celcius* **a anomaly**? To mother nature, no. It's always been like that. It is, however, an anomaly to what scientists have observed from all other liquid, which *contract when they are chilled*. Might we found other liquid that behaves anomalistic? Maybe. Maybe we'll write a new law that covers the behavior of this anomalistic liquid.
So, **there are no glitches or anomalies,** or anything else that suggests you can break "laws". It's always been like that, and you just *discovered* how it works *differently* than the law(s) you know.
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You seem to not actually understand what a 'glitch' is.
A 'glitch' (more commonly known as a 'bug') does not defy the code that runs the game, it exists because the code running the game is somehow causing that behaviour.
For example, the infamous Pac Man kill screen is caused by a block of code that does not properly account for 'arithmetic overflow'.\*
This is true of almost all bugs: the bug exists because the code dictates that the bug will occur. The main exception to this is hardware-level bugs, where the issue is a hardware fault.
If you were to try to make the analogy between physics and program code, for there to be 'glitches' in physics, they would have to be there because the laws of physics themselves contain the glitches, not because your character is capable of introducing them.
Anyone with a copy of pacman has the ability to initiate the kill screen by completing level 255 (though not everyone is aware of the bug and not everyone has the skill required to do so).
Ultimately though, the laws of physics are not governed by software code. Admitedly nobody can say they aren't because nobody actually fully understands how physics work, and all humanity can say is that they appear to be governed by mathematical equations. (Or, more strictly, physics is full of behaviours and relationships that can be modelled by the human concept of mathematics.)
Whether you can get away with saying that the physics of your world are governed by some sort of 'code' or not is a different matter.
If you declared your world to be a computer simulation it would be a lot harder to question it though.
All that being said to directly answer your question:
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> Are the laws of physics similar enough to game code that someone could
> exploit their flaws and/or break them without exploding the universe?
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The answer to that is that **it's extrememly likely that they are not similar at all**.
There is no reasonable/unquestionable way of doing this based on real-world observations of physics. You can explain it by saying that the world is a computer program written by some greater being (who naturally would make mistakes that introduce bugs into the program) and that everyone is an AI, but you cannot explain it without giving the world a different set of physics to those that govern our world.
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\* Computers work with fixed-size numbers that can only represent a limited range of values. When a fixed-size integer attempts to reach a value larger than what it can represent it 'overflows' and wraps around to the beginning. In the case of an 8-bit integer (a byte) where the minimum is `0` and the maximum is `255`, attempting to calculate `255 + 1` results in `0` because the byte overflows.
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You write in your question
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> Normally glitches are coding errors, but this power is supposed to work in the real world, so there is no code.
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As @Christmas Snow has pointed out, however, this is does not need to be true. See Wikipedia's article on the [simulation hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis). In this case, as has been discussed (see especially @ZioByte), what we think of as real-world physics would be whatever is coded up in the universe-game's [physics engine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_engine). Hence, a glitch in the sense of "unexpected or non-physical behavior due to a logical error in the code" is very arguably impossible.
The phrase "logical error" was used just now. A logical error reflects a failure by the programmer to impliment an algorithm in the way that he or she intended. I want to emphasize that **logical errors are not the only type of error that a program may encounter**. See, for example, the [stdexcept](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/stdexcept) C++ header.
An overflow error is a typical runtime error that will not generally cause a crash. Modern programs normally use 64-bit chunks of memory to store integers, which means that they can represent unsigned integers as large as $2^{64}-1$ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. If you try to calculate $(2^{64}-1)+1$, then the result depends on which computer you are using. The easiest thing for your computer's [ALU](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_logic_unit) to do is to give a result of 0. So, say that the universe-simulation tracks the number of rain drops in a storm using an unsigned integer. If it gets just a little bit too rainy, and if the programmer forgot to check for overflows in this particular scenario, then suddenly the number of raindrops is zero.
The raindrop example is not that great for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that physics as we now understand it does not directly tell us how raindrops behave: our best fundamental descriptions of the real world come through [quantum field theories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory), such as [quantum electrodynamics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics). Basically, physics tells us how stuff works on the subatomic level, and the interactions of a huge number of these subatomic particles (or fields...) is supposed to give rise to the behavior of the macroscopic objects that we observe in everyday life.
Of course, **if the computer responsible for simulating the universe does not have infinite computing power, it may well take a few shortcuts**. The most advanced modern simulations of stellar evolution do not track every single particle in a star. They track a few macroscopic quantities like pressure and temperature. These quantities change according to differential equations derived from the laws of thermodynamics, which are in turn derived from the most fundamental laws of physics. Assumptions and approximations are made at every step along the way, but a good simulation will consistently turn out stars that grow and die much as we observe. So, it is not ridiculous to think that macroscopic quantities, such as raindrop count, might be directly accounted for in the universe-simulation.
This opens the door to talking about the single biggest difference between the real world, as we currently understand it, and every existing game's physics engine: real spacetime is continuous, but game spacetime is not. Perfectly simulating continuous space and time would require infinite computing power.
Consider that many physics engines use [Euler's method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method) to solve the standard Newtonian [equations of motion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematics) for the trajectory of an object, where time is the independent variable. As the step size approaches zero, a better approximation of the continuous-time universe is achieved, but the computing power required to complete the simulation is inversely proportional to the step size. This forces a discretization of time in the simulated universe. Combine this feature of simulations with an algorithm that uses an [adaptive step size](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_stepsize), and you can get all sorts of unpredictable weird-looking effects showing up here and there, if the programmer was not extremely careful.
Think about a satellite in orbit around Earth. After each time step, the size of the orbit will increase very slightly, due to time discretization. Maybe the programmer anticipated this effect and wrote in a piece of code to occasionally bump the satellite back into the correct orbit. If the adaptive step size algorithm and the orbital correction algorithm are not talking to each other, then you might imagine that the step size could be greatly increased at the same time that the bump occurs. The effect of the bump would be magnified far beyond what was intended, sending the satellite plummeting down to Earth.
As discussed in the answer written by @L.Dutch, such an effect might not be considered a true glitch, since time in this simulated universe really is discrete, even if the programmer wanted to make it look macroscopically as though time were continuous. If I were programming the universe-simulation, however, I would log this satellite-crashing behavior in a bug database and try to modify the code such that the behavior would be eliminated in the next release. Whether or not you consider the behavior a glitch is a valid metaphysical or linguistic question, but the answer would not change my behavior as the programmer.
For an alternative metaphysical/linguistic interpretation of "glitch", see the answer by @Pharap.
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Absolutely, physics can glitch, and it does regularly. But it's not of any use.
The reason there are "glitches" in games, is that there are different sets of rules that make up a game, and they conflict.
1. The rules, as defined by the *running* code, as interpreted by the running CPU - load a memory location into a register, add 1, store it in another location, and so forth.
2. the rules, as defined by some arbitrary "canonical" code, or by any code released by some (arbitrary) "canonical authority", as interpreted by the CPU
3. The rules, as defined by , as interpreted by a correctly functioning CPU.
4. our (social) understanding of what "the game is supposed to do". When you press the jump button, Mario should go up a certain distance, then fall down until either there is something solid under him (when he stops), OR we have fallen off the screen (when he dies). We find this out by by playing the game and seeing what stimuli provoke what response.
5. The rules as set down in the instruction manual.
6. how the author intended "the game" to behave. I can make a guess at what Shigeru Miyamoto might have intended for Mario, I do not claim the same for this universe. Note that this includes cheat codes intentionally left in.
7. how the author intended us to understand "the game" - similar to to the previous, but excludes cheat codes, even if intentionally left in.
8. Our moral code applied to our understanding of the game. "in-game murder is imoral", "bots are cheating".
9. The way things are perceived for an in-world character - what does Mario experience/remember when he dies/restart? Does he know about the load/save menus?
Reality and games always play by the very first set of rules. Note that, by this definition, everything is allowed - patches/mods/cheat systems redefines the rules, the player is bound by the (new) rules. And, if your CPU crashes, that's part of the rules too.
We think we are playing by the "what we think the game is supposed to do" set of rules. When the rules we play be (#1 by definition) and the rules we consider the "true rules" conflict (Mario walks on empty air), we call this a glitch.
These two both have counterparts in the real world, and sometimes they do, indeed, contradict each other.
The first (equivalent of running code on a running cpu) is how the universe behaves around us.
We observe how the universe behaves, and formulate "the laws of physics". Newton's law of universal gravitation states that "a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers."
However, the universe does not care about our rules, and blindly went on following "the code". The result was a glitch - photons, which do not have mass, continued to be affected by gravity, in contradiction to "the rule". (I am not a physicist, and the details are probably wrong. If so, please treat it as allegory, metaphor, alliteration etc - "If we spirits have offended....")
At this point, we have two options (both in-game and real-world):
1. We can decide that our made-up rules are right, and reality/the code is wrong. This is a glitch, Mario/light is breaking "the rules", it's "magic", Mario/light should behave the way it's supposed to, you're not supposed to look behind the curtain/figure out what the rules really are.
2. We can decide that reality/the code is right, and our made up rules are wrong. We can use this to our advantage, if we understand how things work.
In-game, we tend to follow the first option (usually attributing it to the creator of the game, though that's not necessarily true).
In "real life", most people choose the second option.
Note: I started this posting with 2 options, and realized as I got further in that there were more and more alternatives. Some of these have real-world equivalents, some do not, and some are the domain of religion.
If the "Universe" we live in is a simulation (a serious theory proposed as being almost certain - see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#Ancestor_simulation> ) then most/all of the above rulesets should exist. This also implies a de-facto deity.
As an example, see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixu8tn__91E> for someone who managed to use a glitch to modify a savegame, to add an memory editor. The rules, as defined by the running code, allowed changing of the rules.
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This sounds a lot like Douglas Adams' HHGTG <http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Flying>. Fall but get so distracted that you forget about falling.
(The joke being that you forgetting about physics turns into physics forgetting about you. Think about it too much and "physics will notice you". A lot like Wile E Coyote not falling until he looks down.)
This is not how nature works: it "pays attention" to everything in parallel all the time, not like a simulation on a CPU.
This is why physics simulations take so much CPU time: you have to calculate what happens to each atom, or rigid body, soap bubble, or whatever separately, but real physics just happens in parallel on everything consistently all the time.
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Without adding something like magic (you might find magic in Terry Pratchett's Discord novels interesting, as uncontrolled magical discharge causes similar effects), or state something generally held to be true is not (say for example that quantum theory is completely wrong, then this might be possible), then no.
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There are recent documentaries on youtube presenting the hypothesis that the universe is a computer simulation so detailed and so intelligent that it has created conscious artificial intelligence which includes us. Sort of matrix, but way more advanced. You can play on that theme with sufficiently convincing argument where this consciousness or a group of such manages to access this computer code and exploit glitches. Are biblical miracles the result of alien programmers attempting to interact with such consciousness? If our world is just computer information, and you can create information out of nothing, can you create "matter" in our universe, and free energy? If the "glitch" does exist and we find it, we can make what seems impossible to our ancestors, as we have become a "computer virus" created by that same computer.
Search youtube for "is the universe a simulation" and "the simulation hypothesis".
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Well, as others have said, the actual laws of physics cannot be glitched ever. Our models of the laws might fail, but if it's allowed by the Universe then it's a part of the laws. So no, I don't think the actual laws of physics would support that.
However, I still think it's an interesting concept! Especially when one considers that our Universe might actually be simulated (I mean probably not, but it's an interesting thought experiment). What sorts of things might glitch out in such a Universe? A programming error might suddenly cause the character's position information to be overwritten allowing them to teleport instantaneously elsewhere. A known glitch in many programs that use GPS data is that rather than reporting Null for an unknown location, they report (0 degrees, 0 degrees), resulting in many people and objects appearing to be located at Null Island briefly until their actual position is located.
The exact state of a quantum system cannot be known until it is observed because it is in a superposition of states. If one were to wave their hands vigorously, this almost seems like it's because the Universe doesn't bother to simulate it until it absolutely has to. Why waste computational cycles needlessly? That's not the actual reason as far as we know, but it does sound interesting.
Current velocity, momentum, energy, and mass might "glitch out" allowing them to travel very quickly, or punch someone while their fist has the mass of a small star, or other oddities. Perhaps the Universe even "forgets" about them for a period of time rather than instantaneously overwriting one of their properties.
In summary, while I don't think it's exactly compatible with the real Universe, I think it would be pretty interesting to have a character who is able to ignore the laws of physics temporarily. Maybe they learn to control it? Maybe they eventually find out there are laws that govern how the glitch works? In that case, is it possible that their "glitch" isn't a glitch at all but is really written into the laws of the Universe for some reason? Whenever we have a scientific model in the real world that fails, the reason is always that the model is wrong, not the Universe. If it was written that the laws of physics in the character's Universe actually support them being able to do what they do, then I do think that would fit more closely with our real Universe.
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# What is a glitch?
In the general case, a "glitch" is a surprising (and often temporary) interaction of systems under unexpected circumstances. (This definition might be a bit broader than usually, as the term "glitch" is normally only associated with a program or hardware malfunction, but it should translate well unto other fields than computer technology.)
# So, what might constitute a "real-life glitch"?
This depends a lot on our perspective and understanding of reality, but basically: Two or more "laws of nature" can under specific circumstances interact in a way that is contrary to all reasonable expectations.
### Just a thought experiment:
Imagine you have a wall with 2 openings in front of another continuous wall, and you kick footballs against the wall. Some of them will hit the wall, and bounce back. Others will hit one of the openings and hit the wall behind, hitting the wall in 2 regions corresponding to the 2 openings.
The systems in this case are "movement of matter" and "collision with a static object", with expected interactions between the footballs and the walls. No surprises this far.
But now, let's miniaturize our setup: Instead of footballs, we're now shooting electron at a double slit. Suddenly, we get a completely different hit pattern on the wall behind the double slit: Instead of 2 initial hit regions, we get an interference pattern! (But only when we don't measure which slit each electron travels through!)
This is/was surely surprising, as a simple understanding of the systems involved would let one expect the same outcome as in the football example.
Of course, nowadays scientists have a lot of fancy theories to explain it all, but how is this not a glitch according to my definition above? The devil is in the detail: Are those circumstances "unexpected" for the "laws of nature" involved or is it just our lack of understanding as we have no absolute definition of those laws, just theories based upon observations?
Of course, deviations between expectations and reality have historically often been the trigger for new discoveries and better understanding of our world. But the point is: We don't actually know whether our understanding of our world, our so-called physics, are the actual laws governing our world. So it isn't strange to find edge cases in our understanding of the world where our expectations simply fail.
### Back to reality
So, glitches are "defects" in the interactions among the actual laws of nature where those surprising outcomes might or might not be covered by our existing theories (as we derive our theories from observations, and those observations would include that glitchy behavior in cases where we got the "unexpected circumstances" right).
So, in the case that a glitch is covered by our scientific theories, your power wouldn't actually do anything really unexpected for us. Of course, there might be subtle aftereffects (see butterfly effect), but generally speaking, that power could as well be non-existent.
However, in cases where a glitch is not (yet) covered by our scientific theories, your power might result in unexplained events. And while these will not break reality per se (as they work alongside the real laws of nature), they should be really surprising for our scientist.
However, in those cases you are left to your fantasy on the question "what might those unexplained events be?", as everything unexplained by our current theories could still be a valid consequence of the actual laws of our world.
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Looking at other answers, I am confused about the question. Do you want to glitch physics in the game, or in reality, or glitch physics in the game in such a way that it *could* be done in reality? Do you want to know *how* to do it in a game? Do you want to have unusual responses to the controls, so the resulting actions are still law-abiding, just unexpected, or do you want the actions to respond to the controls appropriately, just in an exaggerated or diminished fashion?
Every game has 'constants' in it, that are used in algorithms. These constants, for instance, determine the level of play, or the speed of characters, or the level of intelligence. Inserting some random number function (that is itself triggered by a randomized 'do/not do' routine) to randomly alter them at some random point during game play would certainly look like a glitch, but would not change the overall coding of the game. For instance, something might fall slower or faster, fly farther, hit harder, have more or less strength, based on the value of a *variable* constant. These changes could be temporary, or lasting.
Also, every game has selection structures, where a value of *choice* determines what consequent code is executed (jump, run, duck, fall, etc, in response to what controller button is pressed). Putting in a random number function for the variable *choice* that is triggered at some random time would make the game appear to be glitchy and unpredictable, but the coding would actually be intact. Again, these changes could be temporary, or lasting.
You could also do this with the variable that determines what comes next. Usually, this variable is incremented, but if it randomly was randomized, it would certainly look like a glitch. (For instance, sent to a different room than expected, or go in a different direction than expected).
Since everything still follows rules (which can simulate physics), the integrity of the game is not altered, just the implementation.
In a way, it introduces the concept of *unpredictability* to the game. Things are going peachy-keen, you think you have it mastered, and then...
However, someone who plays the game long enough would be able to discover what glitches and what doesn't, so it would have coherence to them. Eventually this information would hit the internet blogs. It would just become another 'rule of the game'. Thus, the game designer would simply make the probability of the glitches in the random function even less probable, and thus more sporadic. Perhaps some players would never experience them.
In essence, this is what was built in to the 'poker-playing' algorithm that out-played world champion human poker players - the ability to bluff. 'The feat represents a leap forward in developing artificial intelligence that can learn with incomplete information' [link](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-fold-humans-poker-playing-ai-beats-pros-at-texas-hold-rsquo-em/) - the ability to respond in a way that was not expected or predicted.
But if you want to know if such things are possible in the real world, I would posit that only the first one - being able to change the value of generally-accepted *constants* would even come close. For instance, a 'bubble' in which the gravitational constant were changed locally, so things fell slower, faster, or not at all. Or that the universal speed limit ***c*** was changed in a local bubble, so things could go faster than our expectation of ***c*** in that bubble. That is, you are not changing the *rules* (the math, the equations) that apply to gravity, just the value of the constant. ***e = mc^2*** still applies, just a different ***c*** value.
Physics today can't rule this out, we just have no idea what the mechanisms for doing so would be, or even look like, let alone how to implement or manipulate them, to modify the constants. But just because we can't do it today, and have never experienced an event where it was done, with our limited knowledge, doesn't mean it *can't* be done. My guess? There is absolutely no reason why these constants could not be different in a black hole, or perhaps a worm hole, or even another universe, for instance. We just don't know, and therefore can't answer that question definitively.
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TL;DR: Whether something is a glitch depends on the intention of the universe's designer, which may or may not be known by the characters in your universe.
Wikipedia describes a computer glitch as: "the failure of a system... to complete its functions or to perform them properly." Implicit in this definition is that fact that the software behaves in a way that was not intended by its creator – in a way that is considered improper. If your characters are ignorant of the intentions of the universe's creator (or your universe has no creator), then there is no way to define a glitch because the intent of the creator is unknown. Any glitch would be seen as part of the rules of the universe.
If you were PacMan, Level 256 would simply be a physical limit that you can't overcome. You might even see it as a feature intended by the creator of the universe. It is PacMan's end of time. Often glitches in games are later seen as features. For example, straferunning in Doom is based on exploitation of a bug in the game, but was later considered by players to be an intrinsic part of how the game is played ( <http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Straferunning> ). This Wikia page claims (without a source, mind you), that straferunning was "unanticipated in the design of the original levels."
Depending on how you imagine our universe's creator, many aspects of our physical world can appear to be glitches. For instance, who would have thought that if you concentrate a certain component of an element left over from a supernova (uranium), you can make a chain reaction that will produce another rare substance. If you put this rare substance at the center of a sphere and time some explosions just right, you can destroy a whole city. If we suppose that our universe's creator is kind and merciful, it sure sounds like the Manhattan Project was exploiting some unintended behavior of physics – a glitch.
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For something to "glitch", i.e. to act in a wrong way, the *right* way has to be clearly defined. In physics, **the universe is postulated to always act in the right way**, and artificial laws are invented to describe it. When a contradiction arises, **the laws are always considered to be at fault** and modified, amended or discarded as appropriate. Of course, if every feature is considered to be "by design", it's simply impossible to have a glitch.
If we decide on a "perfect" set of physical laws, then it's indeed possible to have all sorts of violations. Radioactive decay doesn't respect the mass conservation law, objects which receive enough impulse to travel faster than the speed of light under Newtonian laws don't go as fast as they should be going, etc. If we choose to ignore the 20-th century physics, we might as well call these things "glitches".
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To glitch physics doesn't depend on the glitch but on the universe.
The movie "The Matrix" is the prime example. It looks like the real world but once you know it's actually a program simulation, you can change the code to do things normal people couldn't
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Are you familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive in the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy?
Your idea of using glitches in reality reminded me a lot to that. Basically, an event might be very very improbable, but your superhero could have the (uncontrollable?) "gift" to make it happen.
Physically possible? No way. But very few superheroes would exist if they had to respect all laws of physics.
In fact, that is the reason why superheroes do not exist in reality.
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If you have at all studied chemistry, physics, astronomy, or other 'physical' sciences, you will note the proliferation of 'constants'. Almost every equation has one or more. These constants of proportion turn `'A` is proportional to `B'` into `'A = B x` (constant of proportionality).
These constants were defined at the time the universe was created (the Big Bang) and really, they could have been anything. (That they turned out to ALL be exactly what was necessary to produce an earth capable of life, instead of some other kind of universe, is quaint, and begs the issue of 'why?' but I digress)
Take `c` , for instance. A constant that defines the speed limit of the universe.
But why exactly is the value of `c` what it is?
Why not a few thousand metres per second faster or slower?
Bear in mind, any such change in the value of `c` could be quite disruptive to the universe as we know it. Things just wouldn't work the way they do with 'our' particular value. But, there is no inherent reason in physics it to be exactly that value. It just is, so it are taken for granted that it *must* be. But there doesn't seem to be anything *enforcing* these constants to *be* or even *remain* what they are, except the will of the physicist to insist they must be a constant with a constant value. Otherwise, well, they just can't *predict* anything, and that would make them useless. (It would also destroy their argument against there being a god,that the world *must be* what it *is*, for *all time*, but again I digress.)
So, to 'glitch' physics, all you need to do is to change the value of a constant or two.
But that is a *very* big 'All you have to do is..."
In some of the more obscure explanations of what astronomers and cosmologists see when they look at the heavens, some posit that `c` is a constant across a region, but not necessarily constant *between* regions. Some areas of the universe might have a different value for `c`. Really, really far out on the extreme of thinking, extremely implausible, but not entirely impossible.
So, what happens if the value of the gravitational constant, `G`, is altered? The equations, the relationships, the theories, the calculations, the math, all stay the same, but the answers are different.
So this 'glitch' would simply be a change in the value of some constant.
But it would be result in the butterfly effect. One small change in one constant would so alter the universe that it would be hard to predict exactly what would result.
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The universe doesn't glitch, but in the context of very scant probabilities, bizarre things *are* possible.
This would be an interesting phenomenon in the context of a Rick-and-Morty style multiverse, where your main character happens to be the luckiest idiot in the multi-verse. If your character is escaping death in incredibly lucky ways, the downside is that all the nearly-infinite versions of your main character would have died horribly, and your main character might be basically the only one (or one of a very few) that haven't managed to kill themselves.
It wouldn't be so much a power as sheer dumb luck.
It would be interesting to see a character wrestle with how his decisions have resulted in the deaths of countless millions or billions of his counterparts in other universes in the multiverse - once he finally finds out the "reason" he's been so lucky. It might also cause him to reconsider continuing his risky behavior - since it could still get him killed at any moment.
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There's two opposing forces acting against each other in a covert intelligence war.
The names here are substituted to protect myself.
**The United States of Eagle** - High technology, overtly bound by ethics and reportability
**The Confederation of Crow** - Mediocre technology level (think of your generic African or Middle East aggressor state as part of your generic 80's/90's pulp spy movie/book).
The intelligence agency of the USE has managed to infiltrate the part of supply chain of the CoC that supplies the defence and intelligence agencies.
This part of the supply chain supplies basic office supplies, including, but not limited to:
* Paper
* Printer Toners
* Keyboards/Mice
* Mouse mats
* Ring binders
* Pens/Pencils
* Whiteboards
* Desktop calculators
* Desk fans
* Consumer level batteries
The USE intelligence service does not yet have access to the disposal side of the supply chain.
The CoC performs basic checks on incoming goods, checking for explosives and electronics where there shouldn't be. Bear in mind that the CoC are intelligent enough to change suppliers if their computer mice keep exploding...
Given access to tamper with the types of products listed before deliver to the CoC intelligence/defence installations, what attack vectors can be used? What damage could be caused, and potentially how could intelligence be gathered (assuming the agents of USE cannot get within radio distance if the installations)?
**Setting**: Modern day. **USE Technology**: Believable, with spatterings of handwavium.
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Here is a bit whimsical method to mess with the bad guys. Take a page from the Joker in the 1989 Batman film. Use a 2 part toxin in the pens, toner, and paper!
Bureaucracies mean paperwork, and lots of it. If printed sheets off gas something that is mildly toxic, not necessarily lethal or dramatic, you could create all kinds of bureaucratic snafus. Get the workers slightly high all the time and you run a good chance of really screwing things up even for the most brilliant of generals. Examination of the office supplies might not happen immediately and it would be slowed down even more by the 2 part nature of the toxin.
There is a theory among students of history about how events may have been affected by drugs. For example, it is surmised that Napoleon got a non lethal dosing of Laudanum just prior to the battle of Waterloo, messing with his judgement and costing him the war.
It's not a long term strategy for a major win, but it is something to help things along, and even if found out, to inspire even greater paranoia in the CoC.
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By misdirecting shipments so that e.g. one base gets 200 tons of paper, but one doesn't, thus requiring extra effort to redress the bureaucratic screw-ups. This wouldn't require any technology at all - just an "incompetent" pen-pusher in the right office.
If you want a technological attack, something along the lines of firmware attacks (e.g. [BadUSB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware#BADUSB)) on mice/keyboards would help. Something like:
* Keyloggers inside an keyboard
* Capacitors with a large enough charge to fry the computer
* Malware (something like Stuxnet)
If enough of these occur or are spotted, the COC will start adding extra security checks to try and catch these, which will result in things slowing down (if you can't do your job because of Super Critical Security checks...then anyone who's depending on your work is going to be delayed).
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Tempering electronics would be my choice.
Depending on the technological level difference between the two states, I would assume adding electronics to existing electronic devices would be best.
* Add a hardware keyboard logger to the keyboard.
* Add a microphone to the desk fan
The CoC may perform basic checks but unless they do a comparison between the layout and the schematics, the personal won't ask about every die on the PCB.
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What's giving me a headache is:
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USA... USE agents must at least have gained access to some communications provider to transfer the intelligence to the outside world.
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New Answer
## Access to keyboards are still instant win buttons
Like the old answer, compromised keyboards are prime targets to hacking because so much sensitive information passes through them. Mice are probably a good thing to compromise but I don't know how much they add.
## Attack Environment
It's very common for high security computer networks to be protected by what's known as an 'air wall' or '[air gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking))'. These are designed to drastically increase the difficulty when exfiltrating data from a secured computer/network. Combined with the inaccessibility of the target locations by radio, this raises an interesting problem...which requires interesting solutions.
Occasionally, high security computers will be put in close physical proximity to low security computers that have (direct or indirect) access to the internet. The air gap still exists between those two computers, so we need someway to jump the gap.
## Jumping the Gap
Using the USB cable tampering technique described below, in the keyboard include an [SoC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip) that is capable of driving the USB antenna (I mean, EMI shroud) as a transmitter or receiver.
Each SoC will be capable of the following:
* Detecting whether this computer is capable of connecting to the broader Internet
* Driving the radio receiver
* Driving the radio transmitter
* Storing key presses and mouse strokes for later transmission.
If a keyboard detects that it can connect through the PC to the Internet, it will put itself in receiver mode and begin to store the transmissions from nearby keyboards. Else, the keyboard will put itself into transmit mode and start broadcasting all keystrokes. A small amount of overcurrent may be required to get acceptable transmit ranges. As with the old answer, a fingerprint should be added to each keyboard to ensure that keystroke streams can be properly analyzed.
As time goes by, the receiver keyboards will collect keystroke streams from the transmitting keyboards. Possibly, using a virtual USB network device built into the SoC, the keyboard can upload data to the appropriate network. Care must be taken to ensure that these transmissions don't look like exfiltration traffic. Perhaps a few bytes an hour on well-known service ports? You'll have to contend with firewalls, blocked ports and a host of other network defense measures. That SoC plays a huge role in getting out the required data.
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Old Answer
## Access to keyboards and mice are instant win buttons
All of the other office supplies are yeah, kind of useful, for espionage (I can think of ways to track internal supply chains by doping printer toner with "fingerprint" chemicals). BUT! Keyboards and mice are super win. Every password is typed on a keyboard. Every secret letter is typed on a keyboard.
## Exfiltration
Putting micro storage devices in to keyboards and mice doesn't make a ton of sense since USE can't reliably recover devices at disposal. Even if they could be recovered, keyboards and mice can stay in service for many years. With perfect storage these devices would contain data from a "long long time ago" which would be of decreased value compared to data of "this happened five minutes ago". Further, let's assume that CoC is super paranoid and destroys all electronic devices on retirement. (Doing so would be really good operational security. I'd be surprised if they didn't do this.)
USE should do the following to selection of keyboards: Leave the USB cable shield floating and add a 'fingerprint' to each keyboard.
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> Interesting. However, I think that the shield (cable braid and plug/socket shell) must be connected to ground on at least one end. If the shield were left floating, then other signals would be able to couple to it and use the shield as a nice long antenna to radiate EMI. ([source](https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/usb-device-cable-shield-connection-grounding-it-or-not.58811/))
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The 'fingerprint' for each keyboard ensures that USE spies can differentiate between affected keyboards. It'd be a shame to have five spying keyboards but the data isn't useful because you can't tell one keyboard from another.
**Need more range?** Embed a radio-reflective layer of metal into the whiteboards and build in an ever so slight concave curve with a focal length of several hundred meters. To gather these reflected signals, station a listen post at the focus of the whiteboard.
You've basically turned affected keyboards into miniature radio towers. I'm not an electrical engineer so I can't tell you the range of transmission but any range of transmission is an exploitable property. Combine this with some kind of recording device that listens for data from these keyboards and you've got a first rate espionage tool.
## Benefits
The benefit of this approach is that if detected, it is merely a manufacturing defect in the keyboard, not an overt attempt at espionage. Care must be taken to ship 'defective' keyboards at or below the typical failure rate for keyboards (I wasn't able to find a source for what the defect rate is.) Stuxnet survived for a very long time because it didn't do anything beyond making centrifuges wear out faster.
This attack also doesn't rely on the Internet to get data out.
## Limitations
You can't control where the keyboards are deployed so you may end up with some less than useful placements. You're unlikely to get a juicy stream from the Supreme High Leader of the People's Republic personal machine. However, you are likely to get intel from his secretary. Remember, secretaries know *everything*.
## Damage Dealt
Keylogging attacks reveal passwords, usernames, meeting agendas, private notes to colleagues, internal dissent (if any), operating procedures, power hierarchies, office politics, (after analysis) possible recruits.
*No handwavium required. All proposals for espionage with these tools can be accomplished with 2017 level tech.*
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Conveniently, the CIA recently declassified a [manual with instructions and suggestions for sabotage](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf). It's short and simply written, and you should read it.
The manual describes a few different considerations. The big ones I remember are distinctions between actions when the armed forces are mobilized or not, distinctions between skilled and unskilled saboteurs, and a focus on making sabotage more than just malicious mischief.
It also speaks to the effectiveness of slowdowns, even without physical damage. This got into the news around 2010, so it may look [familiar](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/simple-sabotage.html):
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> Here’s a list of five particularly timeless tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual:
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> Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
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> Employees: Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one.
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> Organizations and Conferences: When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
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> Telephone: At office, hotel and local telephone switchboards, delay putting calls through, give out wrong numbers, cut people off “accidentally,” or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again.
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> Transportation: Make train travel as inconvenient as possible for enemy personnel. Issue two tickets for the same seat on a train in order to set up an “interesting” argument.
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In general, you also want your sabotages to have follow-on effects. So, if you blow up a jeep, that jeep is gone. If you introduce sugar to *some* but not *all* fuel cans at a depot, you will take out several jeeps, and *incur the costs to do a full inspection of the fuel supply.*
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Tag office supplies for the CoC foreign intelligence service with something that shows up under [forensic identification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_identification#Product_identification) methods like [DNA marking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_marking).
When somebody shows up on your borders with a high concentration of those tags, that person gets close attention as a likely spy. (Don't stop them, follow them instead.) Someone with a low concentration may be a *contact* of a spy, perhaps a family member, and become a target for compromising operation.
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**Heat Activated Paper**
Modern laser printers and copiers work via fusers. Fusers work by getting really hot. Like 200°c/400°f temperature ranges.
So you make paper that's heat activated. If it goes above about 100°c, it melts. *This will mess up your printers and copiers.* Repairs are disruptive: parts have to be ordered. Trained technicians have to be dispatched. Repair bills must be paid.
Interleave these pages such that there are between 0 and 3 sheets per ream (or better yet, *box)* of paper. This way, they don't know if or when their printer/copier will be taken offline and for how long.
Sure, CoC will switch paper vendors *(once purchasing department decides to act and gets a new contract through the legal department. Government doesn't switch vendors quickly!)* But this technology would be easy to do to *all* the paper vendors.
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Lets add some chemicals to the paper. Semi-randomly (never the first or last sheet, never both chemicals in the same ream of paper) and at a low frequency.
Chemical A: Inert. Enough heat converts A to C.
Chemical B: Inert. Enough heat converts B to D.
C + D + pressure causes a slow reaction that produces crystals of E.
E has a very low ignition temperature and can be triggered by friction.
Result: A ream of paper can never be made to do evil--this will make this sabotage very hard to detect.
However, when you move the printed materials around the danger arises. You put a C paper in a folder and also a D paper. This state is still safe as the paper is merely sitting there. The danger arises when you stack up those folders, now you have the pressure and E is formed. Leave that stack alone for a while (storage) and it becomes dangerous. Now, when someone messes with it (say, opens the file drawer it's stored in) it may be triggered. It's possible the crystal is buried too deeply and goes out due to a lack of oxygen, but if it's close enough to the edge you may get a slowly smoldering fire, in time this can turn into a big fire.
CoC will in time figure out that the fires are sabotage but how will they trace it to the paper? Even if the identify E there's no E in the paper, they'll be looking elsewhere for where the E is coming from.
(You said some handwavium is acceptable. I don't know if suitable chemicals exist.)
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There are two tremendously powerful uses for this level of access...
**1). Intelligence Gathering**:
Who is paying for particular supplies and where those supplies are being sent are both incredibly valuable intelligence items. If the office supply needs of a toy factory are being paid for by the military then that factory is probably not making toys. If the Supreme Leader prefers a particular cigar or vintage champagne, then knowing what locations are stocking up on those products could help your assassins predict where he will be. If you can get hold of the requisition forms and see whose signatures authorize whose requests, you can quickly map out their entire command structure. This can have a tremendous demoralizing effect on the enemy. Imagine their reaction when your agency sends flowers and congratulation notes to all the recently promoted staff, celebrating their career advancement. It is the ultimate mind game; casually letting them know that you know everything about them.
Eat your heart out, Tokyo Rose!
**2). Destruction of their Intelligence Gathering**:
Coat everything going to the intelligence agency in a slow acting, colorless, odorless neurotoxin which initially induces apathy and memory-loss, then progresses into paranoia and mild hallucinations.
As it takes affect, your enemy's intelligence community will loose its edge. They will diminish in their ability to keep track of you. Later, as the poisoning progresses, they will start providing their superiors with insane conspiracy theories and random misinformation. In their paranoia, they will mistrust the real information coming in from the field, replacing it with the products of their every increasing hallucinations.
If your looking for a sequel or a high tension ending for your story, there is an easily overlooked negative side to this destructive approach. It will eventually spread up into the enemy's command structure as letters and reports from the intelligence agency get sent to the Supreme Leader and his command staff. Now the commander of your enemy's nuclear arsenal is becoming a hallucinating paranoid and his staff is feeding into his delusion from hallucinations of their own.
Oops! Apocalypse!
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Assuming you are using pens that have replaceable cartridges:
Treat some of the cartridges for fancier pens with a **small** dose of dimethyl mercury in dimethyl sulfoxide. This is inside the pen where it is normally not touched, but it's placed so that you're likely to touch it during cartridge replacement.
While this stuff is an incredibly lethal contact poison (even able to defeat latex gloves, so dangerous it is referred to as liquid death) we want to keep the dose below that point. The objective is to mess up their minds, not kill them. Think of the damage to the organization when some of the bosses (why we targeted the fancy pens) slowly become mad as a hatter. (I'm using this quite literally--hatters used to slowly go mad from occupational mercury exposure.)
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If you wanted to maximise casualties and didn't care about the ethical consequences of your actions you could insert a biological vector such as anthrax in any of the items listed above. This would probably wipe out the whole of the office where you had supplied the goods to.
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**Not much**, at least not for long
CoC also has some really smart people and there is probably a person or even a department dedicated to security. They would scrutinize everything if they detected a malware often in their computers. They will notice if there is wireless communication, it is not like they do not know about that you can communicate with electromagnetic waves (radio). They probably also follow statistically things, so if things start going wrong too often they will scrutinize everything. Also they are smart enough to check their suppliers facilities from time to time.
**But still something**
The real value comes from a coordinated joint attacks. When the effectiveness really matters, the supplier will give the bad stuff. A short circuit in their command center could be an attack signal at somewhere else. They will not suspect at first the office supplies, because these things happen statistically. So they will use them again, creating an another short circuit. This would make a real mess **at that particular operation**. But then the link would be lost.
PS. If you do not work in a big institution like ministry and do not know what the security people do, they are those crazy guys that tell you: not to wear suits because you will be recognized as a manager, not to put your your job in Facebook or LinkedIn because somebody may fish targets from those, not to even tell your friends that you work there because the word may spread and you can be targeted etc. Even though you are not doing nothing security critical and everything is public information. Nobody takes them seriously (and that is how the USB attacks still work :D). But in CoC agency I think these things would be taken really seriously, and enforced strictly. Especially being prime target to technologically advanced USE.
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Modify the logic units in the calculators. When asked for a 4+ digit and 4+ digit multiplication or division there's a 1% chance it changes one of the middle digits to an adjacent number before doing the operation. If the errors are noticed it will take a lot to figure out this isn't just a case of fat-fingered users.
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These are mostly nuisance ideas aimed at increasing workload and decreasing efficiency.
Anything powered can have a small circuit added to transmit noise at low powers on communications frequencies. Even battery-powered devices if it's just a pulse. A few devices combined and any wireless comms on those frequencies will start dropping or getting noisy. Distributed across devices means it's harder to track down the source and analogue lines would slowly degrade rather than a single event cutting them off.
Mains-powered devices could leak a small amount of current to ground, but only occasionally/only when they'd been on for a while. These would cause any RCDs (GFCIs) to trip, hopefully losing lots of unsaved data. The circuit to do this could be built in to the speed control of a desk fan.
Make the keyboard occasionally send Alt+F4, Alt+N to close work without saving. Or have you ever tried to use a keyboard with a stuck Ctrl key? How about one that randomly presses itself. Perhaps that's too subtle.
Printers could be modified to occasionally replace addresses on random letters with addresses you control, in the hope of exfiltrating things like employee information. This would best be done in large print runs (could the printer detect a mailmerge of annual pay letters?). Alternatively put an address that's an obvious red flag -- your own embassy if you still have one in the country -- to sow suspicions.
Anything with a large switch-mode power supply (laser printer, for example) could release infectious or even just unpleasant materials from a fake capacitor (an undersized cap in a big can, with the failure of the underspecced component triggering the release (and right next to a fan for easy distribution, in many printers, which could also spread it via paper). You could choose the severity of the agent, from H2S to flu and upwards.
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Modify the keyboards/mice with a small amount of memory to deliver malware into a machine the first time it is plugged in--like an infected pen drive. If the machine is connected to the internet, you basically have a back door into the machine to do whatever you like, and you won't get spotted unless they've got a hardware firewall
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If you don't care about civilian casualties and/or just want to kill everyone, biological weapons are the answer.
For maximal effect, use persistent spores that will only germinate under certain conditions. For example, if your pathogen only germinate upon a sudden transition from a cold, dry environment to a warm, wet environment, it would do nothing until winter when it would begin infecting peoples respiratory tracks. This would allow you to distribute the spores to the entire army before anyone noticed.
If you can time the distribution well enough, it does not even mater if your disease is lethal. When the entire defense force of a nation all becomes ill at the same time, you can invade with minimal resistance.
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There are many possibilities but I would differentiate two concepts:
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* ***Obtain information:***
Discard the options that have already been said, to be more original.
**Whiteboards**
The whiteboards are placed in places where they are seen and usually have good visibility, so it is an ideal place to hide a micro camera.
*How obtain this information?*
Using the keyboard or the mouse, we can implement a micro data receiver, bluetooth for example, that receives the information of the whiteboard and this can be sent through the computer.
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* ***To cause damage:***
I'm going to explain some of the ideas I've had about causing damage to the enemy.
**Printer toner**
**>** We can use the ink to burn documents, mixing the ink with some product that is highly flammable with the temperature.
**>** Use of very sensitive biodegradable ink to spoil printers.
**Consumer level batteries**
**>** Modification of some batteries to generate toxins and chemical reactions damaging to the human body. By modifying the batteries to have a bad operation, they can be burned internally, this would generate harmful and highly toxic gases. Long exposure these gases can be a serious problem.
**Desk Fans**
**>** Modification of some the fans plugs to create a short circuit or dead short. This can end up generating voltage drops in the electrical circuit and even injuring people who manipulate it.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine two groups of people exploring the same location, but at different times. For convenience, think of the group exploring first as the "ancestors" and the group exploring later as the "descendants." It is easy to invent ways for the ancestors to affect the descendants. For example, they leave treasure buried and a map to find the spot in an urn. How can the exploration decisions the descendants make "matter" for the ancestors? This relevance could be figurative, narrative, or even silly. Not necessarily physical cause-and-effect. I would prefer to avoid traditional sci-fi time travel, with its commensurate split time-line paradoxes.
[Answer]
Nothing impossible may happen.
In the C and C++ programming languages, there's such a thing called undefined behavior, where basically if the program performs certain illegal actions, it goes in an invalid state. Notice I said if, not when. The program is invalid *after*, *during* and even *before* the action that invoked undefined behavior. In other words, if your program performs a certain illegal action at some point, it's not invalid after that action, it's invalid for its entire execution. A compiler is free to assume that undefined behavior *never happens* and it can transform the implementation of the entire program, including parts that come before the illegal action, based on that assumption. If undefined behavior is actually invoked, the program may observe paradoxes.
This is a very real effect, happening right now in the world, with current technology. For example, an action on a specific variable (called a "pointer") is invalid if the variable contains a specific value ("null"). Consider this short snippet:
```
if (ptr == NULL) {
some_action();
} else {
some_other_action();
}
action_that_assumes_ptr_is_not_null(ptr);
```
In this example, `some_action()` may never be included in the program at all, even if `ptr` can sometimes be equal to `NULL`. Why? Because afterwards, an action is executed unconditionally and that action will put the entire program in an invalid state if `ptr` is `NULL`. In other words, as far as the compiler is concerned, `ptr` cannot be `NULL` in a valid program, so only `some_other_action()` can exist in a valid program. The above program could be transformed by the compiler into this:
```
some_other_action();
action_that_assumes_ptr_is_not_null(ptr);
```
As you can see, an action that is supposed to take place *later* will disable a choice (the `if` construct) that was supposed to take place *sooner*. Of course, all of this is possible because there is an entity (the compiler) that analyzes the program statically, i.e. outside that program's execution. In other words, this analysis is performed outside the program's concept of *"before"* and *"after"*.
If your story has metaphysical underpinnings, you could say that just as there are laws of physics that govern what can happen in a given universe, there are meta laws of physics that govern what a universe may or may not do. Much like the laws of a programming language govern what a program may or may not do.
Then, come up with an action (or a sequence of actions) which doesn't violate any specific physical law of our universe but, when performed under certain circumstances, it would put the universe in an inconsistent/invalid state that is illegal as far as the meta laws are concerned. If a universe contains, in its timeline, such actions that would bring it to an illegal state, that entire universe's existence could be rejected and that rejection would happen at a level outside the universe's execution and therefore its concept of time.
Now if the descendants perform an action that is possible but would be illegal ("apparently impossible") provided the ancestors had performed another action, then you're set. The ancestors are not allowed to have performed the second action, because if they had, their universe would have been in an inconsistent state and its existence would have been rejected. Such a universe could not have existed to begin with.
So how would that look? Anything that would prevent the ancestors from performing the action would suffice. However, it would probably be much more interesting to include a person or an entity that can recognize the inevitability of their actions in that meta context and be able to articulate why the ancestors are bound by the actions of their descendants. Without such an agent in the story, the entire explanation could be lost on the audience.
[Answer]
That is simply not possible. Cause always precedes effect. The only way to change that would be to time travel (which OP excluded)
[Answer]
One classic alternative to time travel is premonition.
One of the ancestors is a seer, a person who can peer into the future.
Given enough cooperation, the seer can replace the typical 'push' request (aka travel back in time) with a 'pull' request: the seer peers into the future and follows advice of the descendant.
How does the descendant know to give the advice? Because the ancestor left a note with a request to do so.
There is no hard time paradox here (killed my grandfather) - merely the soft kind (sent lottery numbers to past self to fund time machine research). The seer gets guidance from a descendant despite the descendant never actually seeing the seer; but upon receiving the much needed guidance, the seer leaves a note for the descendant, asking to provide the advice, asking to speak, show, lecture - into thin air - at the right time and place - the exact time and place the premonition had taken the seer. This stabilizes the time loop, leaving no unsolved paradoxes.
[Answer]
# Don't do what we did
I don't know what your technology or magic level is going to be, but the classic example would be that the ancestors wish the decedents to avoid the mistakes they made that lead to turning their farmland into a desert, releasing the Dark One, or destroying their homeworld.
There are many mechanisms for this to happen, from the familiar (climate change) to the sci-fi (shouldn't have sent those SETI signals towards the Zerg Overmind) to the fantasy (don't break the seals).
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and the in-brain conversations of Rand al'Thor and the Dragon are the best example I can think of in fiction. That brings us to another point. If history or time is cyclical in your world, then it may matter a lot to the ancestors what choices their decedents make.
[Answer]
## Time May Be Subjective Only
[According to physics](https://www.wired.com/2016/09/arrow-of-time/), the linear flow of past to present to future is created by human awareness:
>
> PAST. PRESENT. FUTURE.
>
> In physics, they are all the same thing. But to you, me, and everyone else, time moves in one direction: from expectation, through experience, and into memory. This linearity is called the arrow of time, and some physicists believe it only progresses that way because humans, and other beings with similar neurological wiring, exist to observe its passing.
>
>
> Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat. A faraway corner of the universe might be moving future to past. But the moment humans point a telescope in that direction, time conforms to the past-future flow. “In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer,” says Lanza. “Our paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer actually creates it.”
>
>
>
This line of theorizing is still developing, but perhaps there is some possibility for unobserved current events of descendents lives to coexist in time with unobserved events in ancester's lives. During that coexistence, perhaps events could influence each other and have the effects last even once observation begins.
Perhaps "unobserved" events could be when people are asleep, or when people simply are not looking in that direction.
[Answer]
You don't want time travel in the conventional sense, but to get what you want, you need to mess with time. More specifically, you need to mess with causality. You would have to come up with an entirely new physics in which causality points **both ways**. The implications of that are staggering and thinking it through is no small feat. All the questions of causality, like free will, re-appear with a vengeance.
You also get the same paradox effects as time travel stories get, just several orders of magnitude worse. In a time travel story, you need to worry about future knowledge affecting past events and what ripples it causes through the timeline that is already established. But with retro causality, **everything in your world** is in time-loops, and not just one, but millions. If you thought the Many Worlds Theory is mind boggling, the Many Timelines Theory that you have to invent for this to work makes it look like 1st degree math.
But I see this as the only solution to your question. Causality in your world has no direction. That means time has no direction. So in your world time actually **is** an illusion (some scientists and philosophers discuss this in respect to our world, but so far the evidence is strong that time actually does have a direction).
If causality has no direction, you have the mother of all feedback loops. The butterfly effect with self-reinforcement.
Frankly speaking, the longer I think about it, the more I'm sure your world, if it came into existence, would instantly explode. :-)
---
Some reading material:
* <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/>
* <https://books.google.de/books?id=nwfvCAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA55&ots=AnDf52Lt4I&dq=causality%20time%20direction&hl=de&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q&f=false>
* <http://www.thomasblanchard.net/uploads/2/2/5/1/22518468/dtac8.pdf>
[Answer]
You can come up with novel ways to describe time travel besides the obvious “time machine”, but retro-causality as you described **is** explicitly the very meaning of time travel. So no, you can not have retro-causality without time travel.
In the spirit of what you’re getting at, you might look into [delayed choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler's_delayed_choice_experiment) in quantum mechanics. But what you come up with won’t “matter” to the ancestors in their own experience, only show something that can be determined after the fact.
[Answer]
Another perspective that is not being considered is this: some ancient mythologies (and even contemporary philosophers like Nietzsche) advocated for a circular timeline.
IOW the time would flow in cycles. At the end of each cycle, time would be reset and another similar cycle would begin. The ancestors and the descendants would explore the world again in a similar fashion, unaware that they had already done it.
Which means that the future of a timeline is the past of the subsequent timeline.
If the events are not completely reset at each cycle, the events of the future may indeed influence the past, even though in different timelines.
So the causality would go like this: ancestors from timeline 1 ==> descendants from timeline 1 ==> ancestors of timeline 2
[Answer]
I see 2 possibilities:
1. precognition
This has already been mentioned. The ancestors somehow know about the descendants and their actions. This still involves some "magic" and possible paradoxes.
2. guessing
The ancestors may know (or at least guess), that some people will explore the same location in the future. So they may guess what the descendants will do and act accordingly. Since these are only guesses, there is no time-travel-paradox.
[Answer]
Technically, if the two groups were relatives of one another, since the term "Ancestor" is defined as anyone you are descended from usually more distant than a grandparent (but not necessarily dead even though it is implied), it is possible for the actions of the descendants to affect the ancestors without the application of time travel. Only if the ancestor is still living. For instance, if your great grandfather had done something to assure his last years on earth were to be peaceful and enjoyable (possibly by composing a treaty that would bring about world peace), and then you were to violate that treaty by building a nuclear weapon. Therefore, causing world peace to come to an end, causing war to break out all over the globe, and leaving your great grandfather to have to fight for his life or hide out and live in fear for his last years on the planet. Or, if he had set it up so that his remains were to become incorporated into the liquid metal used to pour a sculpture of himself that would live on the family estate and you had melted the statue down to make your own bullets or even simply moved the statue to another location off of the family estate. Then, the actions of the descendants could affect the ancestors because your great grandfather would now be unable to live his last years on earth in a way which would be peaceful and enjoyable as referred to in scenario #1 or be a statue living on the family estate as referred to in scenario #2 So, it really depends upon if the "ancestors" you are referring to in your original question had already passed away or not. If they were already dead, it would require time travel or a multi-directional timeline in order for the actions of the descendants to affect the ancestors.
[Answer]
Here's an idea:
What if, through magic or technology, there exists an object which can be anywhere in the x,y,z dimensions but which has infinite length in the time dimension. Therefore whatever you do to that object changes its state at all points in the past, present and future. It could be something they could write on and therefore send messages throughout the timeline. Or it could be a box into which an item can be placed and then collected at any other point in time.
[Answer]
Applying a bit of lateral thinking: are the actions of the ancestors defined by what truly happened, or by what we know about it?
You could set up the story of the ancestors using a narrative device, for example a diary written by one of the expedition members. You follow their actions day by day as written.
Then cut into the future in the story. The descendants find a piece of evidence that completely changes the interpretation of the diary. Perhaps the purpose of the expedition wasn't mere science, but a failed search for a lost person? The brave research efforts change into desperate search of their lost companion, whose destiny they have since edited out of the diary.
[Answer]
By becoming notable in their exploration, the descendants make the ancestors notable, i.e., "But Anna Ancestress had discovered it first in 1967!"
Thus the ancestor's explorations, until then obscure, receive worldwide attention.
Option 2:
The ancestors were already notable, but either hailed as heroes or mocked as charlatans. The descendants discover or clarify something, reversing the public image of the ancestors from one extreme to the other.
[Answer]
Imagine if you can an entity that exists outside of time.
50 years ago your father fought a dragon and it took his eye. today you are fighting a dragon in the same place you father fought one 50 years ago.
It is the same dragon though as it exists outside of linear time.
From your perspective the strike you made that you thought missed/was to shallow opens up into a serious wound/ turns out to be a critical hit.
In reality it was your father striking it 50 years ago in a similar location.
From your fathers perspective the dragon often leaves itself open/moves randomly.
in reality it is dodging/parrying your attacks.
From the dragons perspective it is simply a 2 vs 1 fight and in a few of its minutes it will be a 3 vs 1 fight.
In reality every 50 years the chosen one climbs the mountain to stop the dragons return.
As the dragon interprets all 3 times as a single liner event your actions are taken into account in your fathers time.
if you prescribe to the closed loop theory then you actions and and that of your sons were already accounted for when the dragon took your fathers eye, if you believe in free will then that parry you made could leave your fathers eye healed after your battle concludes in linear time - a miracle in action.
the perspectives offers a large scope for story telling. you are raised on the tales of a god of destruction that resurfaces every 50 years that must be stopped, the dragon is popping down to the shop for milk when 3 similar looking guys jump him in an alley.
[Answer]
You listed narrative connection as an option. Use it.
It is fairly common for events that happen later to affect the interpretation the reader gives to earlier events. The trivial example would be the classic detective story. A classic detective story will first give the reader a description of the actual events that includes all the clues necessary to determine the murderer and then present the final solution of the detective that connects the clues and makes the reader reinterpret the prior events.
This is not of course really reverse causality, but you did give "narrative connection" as an option, and the reinterpretations caused by the later investigation can in theory be quite drastic. Stories where the narrator or even the detective turns out to be the murderer have been done. So you probably could get the effect you want with this method.
A word of warning: such classic detective stories do require some work to plot correctly because you have to keep track of all the relevant facts and be totally sure you are not missing something that would be relevant. It also takes skill to fool the reader without breaking the rules by hiding relevant clues. You wouldn't really be bound by rules of classic detective story, of curse, but those rules were agreed on for good reasons so you probably should try to follow them.
[Answer]
>
> "How can the exploration decisions the descendants make "matter" for
> the ancestors?"
>
>
>
Time Capsules work that way: ancestors are leaving items in a sealed box because they expect their descendants to find them (and somtimes be amused). If it wasn't for the descendants, clearly the ancestors would care less about such items.
Let's say your ancestors want a cave to be open, but not until a certain date. What is inside doesn't matter. It can be an elder god, a treasure, or anything you want. They can set up traps along the way, just to be sure no random person would open it before. At this point, the ancestors are taking all the decisions... but! since they know and WANT their descendants to find the good path and enter the cave, they have to think and set the traps in a different way than usual: in a conventional story, they would teach something to their children or grand-children to avoid these traps. But what if, instead, they *counted* on the natural skills of their descendants?
My grandfather made me crosswords when I was a child because I loved crosswords. But my sister loved archery, so he also made her a bow and a target in the garden. Would we have any other hobby, he would have made something else to please us. And this is how the descendants decisions matter for their ancestors... given the opportunity for the ancestors to have that information.
Also it is not uncommon, in real life, to have two or three generations of children in a row adopting the same way of life as their parents: your world could have entires families just knowing what their descendants *will* do, because that's what they do and there's little chance their behaviour in the future will be very different. With that knowledge, any decision taken by a descendant will mirror the "hope" one ancestor had when setting a particular trap (which could be solved by force, by answering a riddle, by a particular skill they know or hope the descendant will have, etc.).
If you take the fantasy course, you could have a prophecy about someone who will have a specific skill or knowledge in the future, so they can think ahead and plan the route for this "chosen one". Here again, the decisions of the descendant will force the ancestors to act a certain way to clear him the path in the future. You even can have just the *idea* of a chosen one, given that at any point in time, there eventually will be someone who fit the characteristics of said chosen one.
In other words, either the ancestors know how their descendants will behave, and react upon it, either they decide to trace a particular path, with required skills and knowledge, and wait and see until the good person show up.
...Or maybe they would just have a map to a certain treasure that reveal itself "when the right stars are aligned", centuries later. The ancestors may know how to get to the door, but only the descendants will have the key.
[Answer]
The descendants already have by their very existence have had an impact on the ancestors.
Their existence implies that the ancestors did and all their descendants did not go extinct.
In short, self-consistency. Anything that the descendants experience must be consistent with what the ancestors left behind.
This is a strange kind of "causal channel", but narrative-wise it can work (with effort!)
Imagine the ancestors run into a large military force. Then a "cut" to another scene, followed by the descendants learning about the result of that encounter.
More generally, the ancestors can set a goal or encounter a challenge, then you can cut to the descendants discovering the result of the goal/challenge, then cut back to the ancestors having completed the goal/challenge.
The narrative causality doesn't line up with the linear time causality.
You can even go meta on the narrative. Set up this non-linear pseudo-causality, then throw in the fact that the pseudo-causality was a misunderstanding. The descendants aren't actually exploring the actions of the group of ancestors you are following! But instead a different people. Or maybe only *possibly* a different people.
Then you cut back to the ancestors, who now have to overcome some problem that the narrative had earlier indicated was predestined to be solved.
And there is always the cheesiest version of that switch -- the descendants are actually the ancestors and vice versa.
[Answer]
If you leave a giant red flashing button, someone is sure to press it. If you don't want it to be used (action that may happen in future), you can't design it to look like that (action happening now, depending on actions by your ancestors).
We don't want future people to open bunkers with barrels full of radioactive waste, so we can say, we are forced to mark them with scary symbols.
If you are looking for a place to lock *Ba'al The Souleater* and **DON'T** want him to be released, ever, you can't put him at the last level of some long dungeon full of treasures, as your ancestors are sure to explore them.
] |
[Question]
[
In my setting, a near-human species attempts to invade modern-day Earth. With a few, very strange, outlier exceptions they are limited to WWII-era technology, and cultural/societal restrictions keep them from adapting and improving beyond this. The exceptions are the absolute minimum necessities that allow for large-scale space travel, and planetary take off/landing. These processes are generally crude in nature, but effective enough to get the job done.
They have the ability to land their WWII era aquatic ships in the oceans in a controlled descent. They have the ability to send in aircraft in drop pods that deploy once reaching a proper altitude. Similar technology allows paratroopers to be deployed. Other land forces must be deployed from a water ship. Communication with the orbital fleet is limited to communication aquatic ships and communication towers that can be established planetside. Radio and encryption technology are otherwise roughly on par with WWII.
They have WWII-style artillery that can fire from space. Similar to America during WWII, they have used computers to calculate required trajectories for angle, elevation, etc, and fire the shells according to lookup tables and books. The largest space artillery pieces equaling that of the Schwerer Gustav. The shells are specifically designed to withstand atmospheric entry.
**Edit:** Per discussion with Mołot, the accuracy could be no more than a 20 mile radius. The time from firing to impact would be *roughly* half a day, allowing developed nations plenty of time to respond. Anti-ballistic missiles would be a natural defense against the artillery, against which the only real counter (that I can think of) is to simply exhaust the anti-ballistic supply with enough artillery shells.
On principle of honor, they refuse to perform acts of mass destruction or non-traditional warfare, such as gas attacks, atomic warfare, or accelerating large objects into the surface of the Earth.
Potentially I can make the invading force number millions, billions, or trillions in size. Similarly, the ammount of non-perishable supplies they bring with them can upscale as needed.
The goal of the invading force is to subdue the armies of Earth and occupy the planet, not mass genocide.
Ignoring the logistical issues with commanding and mobilizing forces on such massive scales with such antiquated technology, how much larger must the invading force be to be more or less on equal footing against Earth? What would be the primary challenges this invading force would face?
[Answer]
Invasion from space obviates difficulties with covering ground and intelligence, so that's nice. The difficulty is really how big your army has to be to totally and completely subdue all human societies capable of resisting in a serious manner. There are 7.5 billion of us here; let's say of that, about 4 billion of us will be seriously capable of resisting in some capacity or another. There were about ~550 million people in Europe at the start of WWII; it took a German army of about 13 million, plus the armies of Italy, Romania, etc. to subdue that continent almost completely; I would estimate 20 million a good count.
If it takes an army 20 million strong to subdue 550 million humans, then it seems like it ought to take 145.5 million troops with accompanying materiel to bring Earth's fighting population to its knees and keep it under control.
However, Earth will use nukes. It will use chemical warfare. It will carpet bomb your troops stationed in human cities. It will steal your technologies and use them against you in novel ways. It will employ fanatical, brainwashed children with bombs on their chests in your alien management centers. Earth will dig itself underground. It will scorch its own infrastructure and commit every kind of sabotage and betrayal imaginable. Its religions will make of you devils, its languages words of hatred reserved for you, and its nations will define themselves by the bodycount they reaped before they fell. It will stop at nothing to oust you from its only planet.
Triple the number.
[Answer]
No chance. As soon as they are in orbit, a few US/Russian/Chinese/British/French/? missiles with nuclear warheads induce a Kessler syndrome, and that will be the end of it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris>
To make this a bit more clear:
Debris orbiting earth occasionally hits other debris, thereby increasing the number of particles. Over time, the smaller particles are decelerated in the upper atmosphere, and burn up as meteors, or are blown away by the solar wind. If the number of debris particles gets too high, however, there is a runaway effect.
The original effect predicted by Kessler would not be nearly as bad as to pose a real threat, but here the space junk is not aluminium and plastic from old telecom satellites, but megatons of steel from that invasion army & *navy*.
Those WWII spacedonks are either very lightly armoured, and get killed by the first hit on their ship, or heavyily armoured, and maneuver *very slowly*, and get hit so often they still die. Every ship has a lot of fuel, explodes, and increases the junk density ever more.
I guess you wouldn't even have to shoot at them. In thousands (millions?!?) of ships, a few inevitable accidents with following explosion would start Kesslers cascade.
[Answer]
The aliens are toast, in so many ways.
# Air
Modern air combat is all about missiles, and WWII era planes have no defence against them. One shot, one kill. Even at guns range it's vanishingly unlikely that the aliens would get a single kill against a jet. Possibly against a helicopter, but even then it's questionable.
And that's before we look at all the various ground-based options. In WWII there were planes shot down by infantrymen with rifles, never mind modern anti-aircraft guns or SAM batteries.
Basically, humans own the sky. Which means...
# Land
... anything which moves on land is dead. WWII proved that you need at least a neutral sky to have a chance on land. If the enemy owns the sky, it's game over. Cluster bombs, napalm, phosphorus - alien infantry will be annihilated. And WWII era armour doesn't stand a chance against an Apache. Humans also have the option of tactical nukes, but the aliens would be dead long before that.
Modern infantry weapons aren't *that* much better than they had in WWII. But of course it's not just infantry versus infantry. Modern land combat is about manoeverability. The aliens simply wouldn't be able to land a shell on a tank from orbit, whereas air superiority means we can pick them off at leisure.
Of course getting onto land means you have to land on the water first and get ashore. But...
# Sea
WWII proved decisively that the only way to win on the water is to either be a carrier group or a submarine. We own the air, so that option is out. Us Brits got ASW up to a standard by the end of the war which made WWII-era subs just a complicated form of suicide, and modern ASW is a whole lot better even than that. If it's in the sea or on the sea, it's dead.
Literally, the only way in which the aliens could beat humans is for there to be more aliens than the world has bullets.
So, having established that they can't land and beat us...
# Space
We have plenty of means for getting into orbit. Currently it's all geared around avoiding losses, but if you're in a wartime situation then that doesn't really count. If the aliens can release drop-ships, then there's a way back inside too. A few Space-X Falcons filled with SAS/SEALs/Spetznas will make short work of them.
[Answer]
The previous answers have addressed
* How many troops earth has
* How much danger space debris would pose to the alien fleet.
I will address what force ratio will give a WWII era force equal footing with a modern force. This analysis will assume no nuclear weapons are used (this fight will happen after earth has exhausted its nuclear arsenal destroying aliens)
For infantry there is little difference modern rifles and body armor are a bit better but the difference is likely less than 3:1.
For sea power, the ratio is far worse -- there are 3 attack vectors that a WWII force has no good counter for:
1. Modern Nuclear subs can stay underwater for weeks and are too quiet to be detected with the low sensitivity sonar available during WWII. They could strike with threat of retaliation.
2. Modern fighter bombers are both jet powered and stealthy (the are very hard to detect on radar). WWII saw jet powered jets and radar but their radar is not up to detecting a stealthy plane and their jets are not manoeuvrable enough to dog fight against modern jets. Modern aircraft could strike with impunity against enemy aircraft carriers and support ships. There are two limiting factors the WWII aircraft could strike the launch site for the modern aircraft, and the modern aircraft will run out of missiles and fuel at some point.
3. Cruise missiles allow small destroyers to strike large enemy ships from well beyond the horizon and WWII ships have no counter. The only response is trying to attack the launch ships before they launch or running them out of missiles.
Between these I think a WWII force would need 200:1 odds to take a modern fleet.
The ratio would be as high for air power.
The aliens would be unable to target modern stealth aircraft but they could target the airbases is a massive wave attack even if heavily outnumbered they can still take the airbase. (The initial few waves would be wiped out by airburst nukes.) If the aliens know where our airbases are when they arrive then the odds in the air are not as bad as they are in the sea, maybe only 100:1 after nukes are used up.
[Answer]
Their biggest challenge is going to be the lack of resupply. Traversing the cosmos in chemical rockets will take generations. Even an Orion drive vehicle (which would require access to nuclear technology) will take years to get here from the nearest star, and weeks if they live on Mars. If the unexpectedly run short on something, getting more probably can't happen before it's too late.
Still though, it wouldn't take all that many if they were smart and could pass as either human or mechanized infantry. A few million if they played it right. Land a small force and take over a small, war-torn country that nobody cares about. Use that as a base of operations and a source of actual humans. From there, there are three possible goals:
Stage raids to destroy advanced infrastructure. I've seen estimates that if the entire US power grid were destroyed, 75% of the population would be dead in a few months. Target oil and gas storage facilities as well, and it undoubtedly gets worse. I'd expect that most advanced nations are in a similar boat. They could probably destroy the ability of most first-world nations to wage an effective war before anybody figured out that the attack was extra-terrestrial in origin, especially if they can provoke the various powers into blaming each other.
Second possibility would be "decapitation raids". There are a lot of dictatorships in the world, and nobody looks at it too closely when another warlord comes in and ousts the current one, and the people are used to obeying and fighting for whoever's on top. For the non-totalitarian countries, just be flying the flag of their worst enemy when they charge in and set off their 2KT-equivalent fuel-air bomb (Yes, those were invented during WWII) in the middle of the capitol when the government is in session and everyone's there. In the ensuing chaos, it will be much easier to provoke WWIII (which they sit out in their backwater refuge) and then swoop in and pick up the pieces afterward once most everybody is dead.
Third possibility: Are you kidding? They've got a serious work-ethic, and advanced spaceflight technologies if they can get here. If they attack us, they really can't win without destroying our advanced technology, but there's enough platinum in some asteroids that selling just one would make them able to buy themselves a good-sized chunk of land and access to modern luxury. Set up an ore-processing base on the moon, and maybe conquer that small war-torn nation as a landing zone (although buying it would be better diplomatically) and just start trading. The wealth they could accumulate with this option would far surpass what they'd get after their war of conquest destroys most of the world's capital goods and population, and probably almost none of them would die in the process. (Of course, that does kind of ruin the bit about an invasion from outer space, so probably best to just make them long for a glorious death in combat against overwhelming odds or something like that.)
[Answer]
Much, much less than the other answers suggest. If the aliens are at least a little bit smart about how they do this, I think they could pull this off with an army smaller than the German army during WW2. Why? You seem to be forgetting that the aliens:
# Have Nukes
What? I thought this was pre-ww2 technology? Let me explain: The escape velocity of earth is 11.2km/s. In other words, if you drop a sufficiently large and heavy object to earth from rest, it will impact the earth at 11.2km/s (Air friction will reduce this number, but also the ship will probably be moving at a considerable speed to begin with). A 25 ton panzer tank moving at 11.2 km/s will impact with approximately 2% of the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This may not seem like a lot, but Germany produced 50,000 tanks during WW2. If the aliens tie 50 tanks in a bundle, and drop them at once, they essentially have 1,000 nuclear weapons. Did the aliens bring a navy with them? 1 capital ship will impact with the energy of 1,000 hiroshimas, which is on par with modern nukes. Assuming they brought 13 million infantry, and each infantry transport weighs as much as the ISS(450 tons) and transports 100 men, then they will have another 65,000 items which can impact with the energy of a Hiroshima.
So, the strategy for the aliens is actually incredibly simple. Basically, destroy the entire surface of the earth, then send in a few million remaining infantry to colonize the earth(hopefully they brought some women), killing off the remaining survivors of Armageddon wherever they are found.
Now, finding the absolute minimum number of troops they would need, basically depends almost entirely on the mass and number of the troop transports, and other vehicles. If the aliens are smart, they won't even bring an army or navy. They'll just bring a million tons of garbage with them.
Edit: I just realized that the question specified "not mass genocide." Nonetheless, I don't think this really changes the answer. All the aliens have to do is nuke a few cities, and negotiate a surrender. Then just keep a bunch of stuff in orbit to drop on earth if earth ever rebels.
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Actually there is a series of SF books by Harry Turtledove almost covering your topic.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwar_series>
The only minor difference is that the invading aliens have slightly better warfare technology (like from 1990) than humans during WW2.
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I think they can "win" fairly easily with an army in the sub-billion range, provided the earth doesn't have a few years warning to re-arm beforehand. We can't retaliate against their cities, and it becomes difficult to use the nukes once they've landed. They'd have to *start* by paradropping near to urban areas and taking over cities first.
Logistics and supplies will be crucial, theirs and ours. Just as in WW2 oil was critical, so it will be now. Shipping is also crucial. Both of these are concentrated in a small number of unprotectable supertankers and supermax container vessels.
If they need to capture our oilfields to keep going, that will determine where the battles are. If they *don't*, that's a massive advantage to them.
You've mentioned that they don't intend genocide, but I don't think they can win without seriously damaging the global infrastructure that keeps 7 billion people fed and warm. There's going to be worldwide waves of refugees while at the same time shipping food internationally becomes much harder. Things like the natural gas pipelines that keep Europe warm in the winter will be destroyed.
Also, I don't think that you can assume that humanity is going to present a united front. And we've already seen how unenthusiastic people are about refugees; if faced with the choice of "your food is going to be rationed to starvation levels so we can feed the arriving millions" versus "sink the boats", plenty of people will advocate murdering the refugees.
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First let me say that nuclear weapons would not be able to destroy enemy ships. The ship is capable of surviving speed faster than the speed of light then I will definitely survive a nuke.
Second let me say that World War II military and weapons will not stand a chance against our military weapons. Not only do we have better weapons we have better communication assuming that they're still relying on World War two methods of communication then there's probably very little communication between the ships and the enemy forces and if there is there was a gigantic time delay. Whereas our forces can communicate with are satellites in real time.
Ultimately I see this war ended in a draw. We would not be able to damage their ships but they would have been if they run out of ammunition for them I would not be able to continue firing.
We would win the ground war. So ultimately it would be in the place will we would not be able to hurt them but neither would they be able to hurt us.
] |
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[
I'm ready to reduce a certain amount of scientific rigor for a good story.
In my world, some person invents a theory of everything. Is there a way that scientists would test the theory, to prove that its right, instead of some scrabbled equations?
From my limited understanding, neither string theory nor loop quantum gravity have predictions and operate at such scales that can't be proven or falsified. I think string theory made some predictions such as supersymmetry that were proven wrong by the LHC.
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A common misunderstanding about theories in general is that *you can prove them*, when in fact you will *never* be able to *prove* a theory - you can only ever *falsify* a theory. There is simply no way to prove that a theory will always apply to every case that it's supposed to be usable for. You can only ever *falsify* a theory and thereby say that it doesn't work for a specific case and thereby say that it can't possibly encompass all the cases it was supposed to be applicable for, because you have at least one example for which it doesn't work.
This means that no scientist will ever be able to *prove* that the theory of everything is correct.
They can only conduct experiments to falsify it. And if they can't falsify it then it's good enough to be used until a case comes up where it's falsified, which would mean that they would need to search for a better theory that is also applicable to that case.
---
As was noted in the comments this is not a complete definition of what a *theory* is. For example to be a theory you need to be able to check it. The easier it is to theoretically falsify it the better the theory. The logic behind this is that if there are many points you could attack and anyone could attack the theory at any point without a lot of resources then *someone* will surely be able to find flaws in your system at some point. If your theory still manages to stand and not be falsified despite experiments being easy to do and many experiments being conducted your theory seems to be usable and people will start to accept the theory as a basis for their work.
High attack surface + after long time still not falsified = good theory
This still means that your confidence in the theory is the only thing that can rise and you will *never* be 100% sure that your theory is *correct*. You simply *can't* be sure that a theory is correct. You can only say that it worked for all tested cases and until a case comes up that falsifies the theory you simply assume that it works this way to make your life easier and continue your work.
If there is no way to falsify a *theory* then you are in the range of pseudo-science and disregard the normal scientific process. A *theory* that you can't possibly disprove is by definition not a *theory*. The same applies to arguments like "There was something here that made it work when I did this experiment, but now it's gone and you can't reproduce it, but my experiment was successful so my results are correct." If another person can't reproduce it under the same circumstances it's useless and not done with the necessary scientific rigor. Yes, the experiment could be very costly or difficult, but it *has* to be possible to repeat an experiment.
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First, we should establish what a "theory of everything" actually *is*. I'd describe it as a mathematical model that predicts the behavior of fundamental particles and forces (from there, emergent phenomena can be described by theories more suited to those particular condition). It should be valid in all situations, and should, experimentally, match previous observations of the universe. Some would argue that such a theory should also be "beautiful", by some definition of the word. Maybe that's true; maybe it's not. At any rate, a theory of everything should explain exactly what it claims to: everything.
Central to the idea of a theory of everything is the idea of unification. There are four fundamental forces in the universe: electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and gravity. We believe that a valid theory of everything would explain how all four forces are really just manifestations of a single underlying force; this principle is called *unification*. At high energies, all four forces should behave the same, as components of this force. We would expect similar results when talking about the particles involved in the theory.
Let's talk about an example, a partial analog to a theory of everything: the [electroweak interaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction). The electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces were unified successfully by a number of theorists in the mid-20th century. Now, this unification *did* make some predictions - some of which you might have heard about:
* We need [the Higgs boson to explain electroweak symmetry breaking](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/4937/56299) - a way of saying why the two forces have carrier particles with different masses (the photon is massless, while the W and Z bosons have mass). The Higgs boson was detected in 2012.
* The theory predicted the existence of the [Z bosons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons), which mediates the weak force along with the previously-predicted W bosons. All three were discovered in the 1980s.
* [Neutral currents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_current), a type of weak interaction, were predicted to exist, and found in 1973.
A theory of everything will predict the existence of new particles or new phenomena, typically at high energies, and would take more powerful detectors and colliders to detect them. Obviously, as technology gets better and better, more powerful particle accelerators and colliders will be built. I'm excited in particular about the [International Linear Collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Linear_Collider) and the [Future Circular Collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider). The [Superconducting Super Collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider) would have been amazing if it had been built, but it was cancelled because of budget issues. The electroweak force provides an excellent example of predictions at high energies being verified - see, as I mentioned before, the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Now, it's also possible that we could find evidence for a particular theory of everything in nature - possibly in astrophysical experiments. To use your mention of supersymmetry (SUSY) as an example, [certain superpartners are candidates for dark matter](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/17841/56299). The study of those in various environments could provide support for SUSY - although it's important to consider that supersymmetry does not imply that string theory is right, and string theory doesn't *need* supersymmetry. They're just close companions, and each works rather nicely with the other.
If a theory of everything keeps garnering evidence, eventually it might be accepted as generally correct, although as [Secespitus pointed out](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/113820/627), a theory can never be proven; it can only be supported by more and more evidence. Maybe we find that a theory makes correct predictions for particles with up to 10 TeV of energy, but at 20 TeV, it fails. If we find that that happens, the theory would have to modified - or thrown away.
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None of the given answers seem to address the original question of how one might go about searching for evidence for or against such a theory. I am assuming that you mean for the theory to be experimentally tested (as other answers point out: *not* proved) in the modern world or near future.
Generally, the theory is going to need to do two things to carry weight:
1. Describe correctly all known phenomena.
2. Predict new phenomena which can be experimentally verified.
Another unnecessary but helpful property would be that it appeals to a sense of "naturalness". There is a lot of debate around the topic of naturalness, how one defines it and if it is even a desirable property of physical theories or if chasing after naturalness actually leads us in the wrong direction. There is a nice discussion [here](http://syymmetries.blogspot.com/2017/06/naturalness-pragmatists-guide.html). Also it would help the theory to gain acceptance if it makes claims about certain outstanding philosophical problems.
### Open Unexplained Observations in Physics
With our current technological capabilities we have probed everything from the structure of hadrons (on the order of $10^{-16}$m) to the everyday normal Newtonian physics (on the order of $10^0$ m) to the structure of galactic superclusters ($10^{24}$ m) to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) (on the order of the radius of the universe around $10^{26}$ m). Our current theories (Quantum field theory for the extremely short scales, General Relativity for the extremely large scales) are quite good at explaining all of the observed phenomena so far, apart from a few things, such as in [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics). A few big ones which stand out to me from a phenomenological standpoint (picked by personal preference):
* [Dark Energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy): What is the source of the accelerating expansion of the universe?
* [Dark Matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter): There are numerous sources of evidence that there is far more matter in the universe than we can see, which is hypothesized to be a form of matter which does not interact electromagnetically (i.e. with light), and therefore is "dark".
* Black holes: From a theoretical standpoint black holes are a problem, as they are points of infinite curvature. If so-called "[naked singularities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_singularity)" exist, our theories would be unable to make any predictions. Do singularities exist or is there some ultra-dense form of matter that we don't know about yet such as [quark stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_star) or some other exotic state of matter? See also the [cosmic censorship hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis).
* [Magnetic monopoles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole): Why are there no magnetic monopoles? If there were even one magnetic monopole it would [explain why electric charge is quantized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#Dirac%27s_quantization), but no one has ever detected one.
* Why are there [three "generations" of fundamental particles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_(particle_physics)) (quarks and leptons)? The lightest generation are the up and down quarks, the electron and the neutrino, all of which are quite abundant (protons and neutrons are made of up and down quarks). But there are three generations of these particles, the strange/charm + muon/mu neutrino and the top/bottom + tau/tau neutrino, which have the same properties but have considerably more mass (and are therefore less abundant).
* [Why do neutrinos have mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Mass)? Neutrinos were originally thought to be massless but experiments show that they have a very small mass (on the order of a million times less than the electron mass). Why this is is not known.
These are just some examples of what a more fundamental theory might be able to explain from the "known phenomena" side of things.
### Predictive Power
Now let's look at what might be predicted. In all likelihood a more fundamental theory would predict things which occur at length scales smaller than what has been observed so far. This means new, bigger colliders will have to be built to reach higher energies and thereby smaller length scales. Unfortunately it is thought that a fundamental theory of everything which unifies gravity and quantum field theory would operate at lengthscales on the order of the [Planck length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length), on the order of $10^{-35}$ m, which is way too small to feasibly study directly with colliders. But there may be interesting things happening just below the currently measurable lengthscales which a new theory might predict which could be probed. What might we find there? Note these are pretty much purely hypothetical:
* One possibility is that quarks could actually be composite particles with some internal structure which is too small to currently probe.
* Higher energy particle colliders could also produce heavier particles, potentially revealing some sort of new extremely heavy fundamental particle. It probably wouldn't show up directly (like the Higgs did) but could show up as a [resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_(particle_physics)) in collider experiments. A new fundamental particle (or perhaps microscopic black holes) might appear near the [Planck scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_particle), but would be incredibly difficult to detect due to it being so massive (about $10^{19}$ times the proton mass) and decay so quickly (on the order of $10^{-39}$ s). Unfortunately these scales are not really feasibly reachable with colliders, but perhaps if some sort of new technology was invented it could be possible, for example [plasma wake acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration).
* There are some forms of [supersymmetry](https://www.google.com/search?q=supersymmetry&rlz=1C1HIJA_enUS743US743&oq=supersymmetry&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l5.5109j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) which have so far escaped our detection capability, so extremely heavy super partners are not entirely ruled out yet.
* Could there be a [fifth fundamental force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_force) which has so far evaded detection? There are plenty of theories which have postulated such a thing. This would involve finding a new force carrier, or observing interactions which are not allowed by the four forces we currently know of.
* If [extra dimensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_dimensions) exist they could be discovered in collider experiments from ["missing energy" in the outcome of a particle collision experiment](https://home.cern/about/physics/extra-dimensions-gravitons-and-tiny-black-holes) (some of that energy escaping into other dimensions).
* At higher energies [microscopic black holes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole) could be discovered in collider experiments. It's fairly well accepted that black holes radiate ([Hawking radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation)). One question is what happens if a black holes radiates all of its mass away until it is about as massive as the fundamental particles? Will it evaporate completely or will it leave behind a black holes remnant, which would act like a massive particle? Such microscopic black holes remnants are one hypothetical form of [Weakly Interactive Massive Particles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly-interacting_massive_particles) (WIMPs), which could be a candidate for Dark Matter.
Alternatively, what might be predicted that could be measured at the largest scales?
* If the theory predicts multiple universes then it might yield new methods to try to verify their existence. Theories about the multiverse or "bubble universes" and the like could produce detectable [signatures in the CMB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot#Parallel_universe).
* The theory may provide new insights into [gravitational waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave), perhaps yielding a new method to verify the existence of the [graviton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton). (This mixes the lengthscales, gravitational waves are detected on extremely long length scales, but their quantum field theoretical particle form (see [wave-particle duality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality)) is called the graviton).
### Philosophical Quandaries in Physics
From a more philosophical perspective, some outstanding questions (which are related to the "naturalness" issue, also in the Wikipedia list) are:
* From a Quantum Gravity perspective, a huge issue is the so-call [problem of time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time).
* Another unrelated question about time is, if physical laws are time-reversal symmetric, why is there an [arrow of time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time)? The answer to this may lie in the [CP symmetry breaking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation) of some weak-force interactions. Many explanations have been attempted which generally involve statistics and the [second law of thermodynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics) (entropy always increases)
* What is the meaning of [wave function collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse)? What effect does [measurement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem) have on the state of a system? See [Interpretations of quantum mechanics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics).
* Why do the [physical constants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Number_of_fundamental_constants) have the values that they do? How many physical constants are there? Are they related and can their value be derived from first principles? Currently they can only be measured experimentally. Why does the universe seem to be [fine-tuned for life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe)? If the values of the constants changed slightly things like stars wouldn't form or everything would collapse. See also the [Anthropic Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) or see some points [here](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/10/03/ten-questions-for-the-philosophy-of-cosmology/).
* What happened in the earliest times in the universe and [what is the ultimate fate of the universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe)? We can only see back to about 400,000 years after the Big Bang by looking at the [CMB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background). One possibility could be if we could somehow detect the [Cosmic neutrino background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background), which would let us see back to one second after the Big Bang. Or was there a Big Bang at all or was it maybe a [Big Bounce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce)?
* [Hierarchy problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem): Why is gravity so much weaker than the other three forces? If a hydrogen atom (proton + electron) were bound by the gravitational force instead of the electromagnetic force, it would be [larger than the size of the universe](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0803/0803.1197.pdf).
* Can Quantum field theory be put on a rigorous mathematical basis? See for example [this series](https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/a-first-idea-of-quantum-field-theory/) by Urs Schreiber. Related mathematical quandries in physics are discussed [here](https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/struggles-continuum-part-1/).
### Summary
1. Take into consideration what others have said about "falsifiable" vs. "provable". The theory should be falsifiable.
2. The theory must reproduce the verified results of our current fundamental theories.
3. The theory must predict new experimentally verifiable phenomena. Experimentally verifiable is the key here. String theory for example makes predictions that could hypothetically be verified if we build a super collider the size of the galaxy, which is obviously not feasible.
4. To gain acceptance, it would be nice if the theory were also "natural" and "aesthetically pleasing". Especially if it offers a "nicer" or "simpler" or "more intuitive" explanation than currently prevailing theories.
5. To gain acceptance, it would be nice if the theory were able to explain some currently unexplained phenomena.
6. To gain acceptance, it would be nice if the theory is able to explain certain unresolved philosophical or somewhat metaphysical issues. Of course these explanations are not going to hold any traction unless the theory has verifiable predictive power.
Of course one should take into account the words of Max Planck:
>
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
> and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
> eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
> it.
>
>
>
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In order to answer the question, we should first look at what value a "theory of everything" would provide.
1. Offer a simpler explanation for things we observe in nature than the existing theories
2. Explain observations observed in nature which are not sufficiently explained by existing theories
3. Make predictions for the outcomes of events which weren't observed yet. "If X happens, then Y should be the outcome"
The first two are mostly of didactic value because they provide a better way to explain to people how the universe works. But they don't create any new insights. They only make existing insights more palatable.
The third is where we have possible applications. If your theory makes new predictions which contradict the predictions of competing theories, then there might be a way to create an experiment to test the theory.
For example, your theory says: "If we put a hamster into a particle accelerator, it should turn into a frog". The competing theory says: "If we put a hamster into a particle accelerator, it should turn into a pigeon". Nobody tried this before. So some scientists decide to try it. The outcome is a featherless, wingless, green amphibian. That means your theory got verified and the competing theory got falsified.
That means *something* got to be wrong about the competing theory. But hat does not mean your theory is *confirmed to be correct*. It only was confirmed to be applicable to this specific experiment. Does it work on *any* hamster or just this one? Does it work on *any* particle accelerator or only this specific one? Does it work *all the time* or were we just lucky? And is that animal actually a frog or is it maybe in fact a very frog-like pigeon?
A different experiment might have a different outcome than your theory predicted. That would mean that your theory got falsified just like the previous theory.
When a theory got confirmed by many different experiments performed by many different people in many different circumstances, then people might come to the conclusion that the theory is very likely mostly correct under most conditions and that it might be worth the risk to try building commercial products which work based on that theory.
And then someone's hamster-to-frog-transmuter suddenly creates a rabbit. Now the whole world is in uproar because something got to be wrong about the "theory of everything" and we need a better theory which also explains this new observation and makes a prediction about the circumstances under which this will happen again.
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One thing a "theory of everything" must be able to do is explain why previous theories have worked as well as they do.
For example, classical Newtonian mechanics are not fully correct but it is not trivial for someone to figure out where they deviate from reality. The theory of relativity matches Newtonian mechanics at slow speeds, and only starts to deviate when things are moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Deviation from existing theories is also how a "theory of everything" would be tested - as @Secespitus says, a theory providing opportunities to prove it false that don't end up proving it false is how we can gain confidence in the correctness of a theory. For example, the differences in Newtonian mechanics and relativity let us know that we needed to test things moving very and/or things with significant gravity, and when the results matched relativity instead of Newtonian mechanics we gained confidence in the correctness of the theory of relativity.
Right now, quantum field theory and general relativity together are able to explain pretty much everything, but as the Wikipedia page for [the Theory of everything](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything) states, physicists have determined that there must be a flaw in one or both of those theories. The problem is that "As it turns out, this incompatibility between [the two theories] is apparently only an issue in regions of extremely small scale and high mass, such as those that exist within a black hole or during the beginning stages of the universe (i.e., the moment immediately following the Big Bang)" In other words, it is indeed likely that a theory of everything would be untestable - not because it is unable to make predictions that deviate from quantum field theory and general relativity, but because the deviations would occur at such extreme circumstances that it would be very difficult technologically to produce the circumstances necessary for the deviations to be significant enough to be measurable.
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Well, this "Theory of Everything" would have to tick a few boxes to be even considered to be a candidate for a theory of everything:
1. Have Newtonian mechanics as a limiting case (for everyday speeds, distances and masses).
2. Have General Relativity as a limiting case (for large masses and fast speeds).
3. Have the Standard Model of particle physics as a limiting case (for low energies).
4. Have quantum mechanics as a limiting case.
In addition to these limiting cases (which boils down to the statement that it describes everything our current theories describe) it should answer all currently open questions in fundamental physics (otherwise it would not be a theory of everything, by definition):
1. How do neutrinos acquire mass and what is their order (is the electron neutrino the lightest or the heaviest)?
2. Why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe?
3. What is Dark Matter (or produces an effect like it)?
4. What is Dark Energy (or produces an effect like it)?
5. What happens at a singularity (both in a Black Hole and at the beginning of the universe)?
If it fulfilled all these constraints, people would definitely pay attention to it, even if it was not immediately falsifiable. It should however be theoretically falsifiable (as noted in the other answers).
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If the new Theory of Everything makes different predictions about something, those predictions can be empirically tested. One example of how it seems like it would need to: we don’t currently know how to reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics to get a theory of quantum gravity, so a Theory of Everything would presumably make new, testable predictions about gravity.
If the Theory of Everything only derived the existing Standard Model of physics in a new and elegant way, but made no new predictions, then it’s like the multiple mathematically-equivalent “interpretations” of pieces of modern physics. It would be a purely theoretical discovery. The paper would prove *mathematically*, not experimentally, that it makes all the same predictions. If it’s significantly easier to do calculations using the new equations, they would be adopted quickly. Whether people accept a theory like that as a more-elegant, “better” explanation would be a matter of personal opinion and social convention. Perhaps all new physicists would be taught it, or perhaps the group of physicists who use it would form a small subculture.
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To put the existing answers in practical world-building terms, if the proposed Theory of Everything predicts something unexpected, e.g., a plausible way to build something like an [Alcubierre drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) that can actually be affordably tested - even if only on an experimental scale - and if the test has been successfully carried out and later reproduced by multiple independent teams, then the theory is likely to be tentatively accepted by the scientific community as being probably true.
You might even choose to have someone other than the creator of the theory, perhaps a rival or sceptic, notice the unexpected prediction; compare [this real-world story about a surprising behaviour successfully predicted by the wave theory of light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%27s_interference_experiment#Acceptance_of_the_wave_theory_of_light).
As already explained, this isn't a *proof*, but it would be enough to explain why the theory would be taken very seriously indeed. It would still take some years before the theory entered the undergraduate syllabus as part of the scientific consensus about how the world works, but everybody would know about it and take it seriously.
Your main problem is to find a potential test that isn't too outré for the mood of your story, that preferably doesn't seem too ridiculous to an actual physicist (as many successful stories can attest, this one is optional!) and of course that doesn't interfere with your plot; though you may be able to work around any plot difficulties with the "experimental scale" loophole, e.g., yes, you built a working Alcubierre drive, but only on a microscopic scale; it will take decades or centuries to work out the engineering problems necessary to make an actual FTL starship, or perhaps the theory rules that out altogether.
(Note also that, depending on the nature of your story, you might not actually need to specify what surprising behaviour the theory predicted, just say that it did and that the theory's predictions were experimentally verified.)
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There's no *intrinsic* reason TOEs wouldn't be testable. If you want a story in which a TOE is more readily testable than is the case in real-world 2018, you just need to tweak some of the mundane practicalities that contribute to such difficulty here. Speaking as a physicist, a few examples off the top of my head include:
* The fact that the energy scale at which "new physics" occurs is so many orders of magnitude larger than what our particle accelerators can access. Maybe in your world their design is more powerful, or certain physical ratios are smaller. The Planck length is determined by the strength of gravity, but you wouldn't even necessarily need a smaller gravity-electroweak strength gap, because the compactified dimensions in string theory can be much larger than the Planck length.
* The fact that the TOEs present so many different options we can't narrow down. The string theory landscape is huge, but it's conceivable we could improve our search techniques. Just as *Silicon Valley* is about a team with a great compression algorithm, your story could feature an efficient landscape-searching algorithm that has shown all options consistent with past observations make certain predictions we can test elsewhere.
* The fact that there's only so much we can measure. TOEs typically correct certain theoretical details of black hole thermodynamics. Can your civilisation measure black hole entropy? They might be spacefaring, or they might have worked out how to make miniature black holes they can study.
* The fact that New Physics ideas have gone so long without turning up. Real data tell us that the proton lifetime, if finite, is much larger than early GUTs\* imagined; real data also tell us that supersymmetric partner particle species, if they exist, have much more mass than the "standard" particles we know of. Again, your universe might not have these problems, at least not in the same degree. (\* Grand Unification Theories still neglect gravity, but introduce a strong-electroweak unification.)
* The fact that the real world is so much more complicated than early efforts hoped for. Kaluza-Klein might have panned out, if the nuclear forces didn't exist. (Large atoms' stability would then require negatively charged nucleons, but why not? It's your universe.) One downside would be that without radiometric decay you can't date fossils, but you might decide that's a small price to pay in your story.
* Maybe your physicists have just been working at it longer. Every now and then someone proposes a more imaginative (and hopefully more practical) way to test a TOE than "get your accelerator to the Planck energy". Maybe in a century or two something will pan out. Bear in mind the theories are extremely young.
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Question: "In my world, some person invents a theory of everything. Is there a way that scientists would test the theory, to prove that its right, instead of some scrabbled equations?"
Answer:
Of course every decent theory can be tested. It must (1) agree with all experiments, and it must (2) explain what is so far unexplained. At present (2020), the first requirement is that it must agree with particle physics and with general relativity.
There is astonishingly little that is unexplained in physics so far. All issues have been mentioned in the answer by Kai, above. But in fact, the real issues are even fewer. Therefore, the second requirement boils down to explain all the basic constants of physics. There are about 25 of them. The most famous ones are the fine structure constant 1/137.03599.. and the mass of the electron (as fraction of the Planck mass). The cosmological constant ("dark energy") is one of the list. Dark matter - if it exists - should also be explained.
Here are two additional points, not made so far.
A. In a future world, the theory is not made of equations, because equations require space and time to exist. And a good theory of everything explains how space and time arise, and thus explains how equations arise. A good theory of everything thus does not make use of equations, but makes use of other concepts.
B. The theory of everything might turn out not to be useful (as it agrees with present theories), might turn out not to be important (as it agrees with present theories), might turn out not to be valuable (as it might not allow to build new machines). It thus might turn out not to be powerful, in the usual sense of the term: it does not provide power. It is more a kind of intellectual entertainment.
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[Question]
[
I don't want those annoying villagers to hurt my new friend, and so I will give him some metal plates on top of the skin on his limbs and torso. I can only think of using a metal that won't oxidize and also pinning the plates to the bones.
What complications could arise from this? Is there anything else I would need to do to help the poor fella out?
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I suggest you search the corridors of your gothic castle until you find one of these. The reason is that years of research and testing went into the design of suits of armour - there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
**Note**
If the monster is uncooperative, it may try to take the armour off. Rather than bolting it on to its flesh which will likely drive it mad, the suit of armour can simply be welded\* at the joins between major components.
\*To prevent total immobility, I suggest welding flexible steel cable across the joints to allow movement.
**Picture of medieval suit of armour**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIgTH.png)
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Mad science knows no limitations. There are no constraints, rules, regulations, considerations, or any of that other namby-pamby stuff regular people worry about incessantly.
You're making science here!
Instead of worrying about oxidation, may I suggest that the metal actually be radioactive? Why? For science. To find out if it could be done, and if it can't because physics itself disallows it (really, the only authority you obey, and then only begrudgingly) then to see what happens when it fails.
Villagers and their pitchforks are irritating, and I too wish there were a more lasting solution to the problem. While I can't solve that for you, I can tell you that they're going to fear, even be awestruck, by your radioactively-glowing metal-plated abomination. Other villagers in other remote mountainous lairs will always be a problem, but *these* villagers will get what's coming to them. Either today when their faces start melting, or tomorrow when they are plagued by horrible leukemias and cancers.
Additionally, it may even be the case that this Frankensteinian monster develops superpowers that are unrelated to, and unexplained by either his status as a reanimated composite corpse or the depleted uranium body armor you've bolted to his bones. B movie logic, what can you do? Telekinesis, the ability to breathe underwater, possibly even the ability to shoot laser blasts from his nostrils.
Finally, you do need to decide on a goal. The less utility Abominoid 9000 has in accomplishing this goal, the more in character you'll be. Perhaps you intend to drain the Mediterranean. Or colonize Venus with a slave army of uplifted wombats. How does having a Frankenstein monster help you do these things, you ask?
Mad science!
Seriously, what are you some sort of amateur. Don't ask questions like that, they are beneath us. Like bioethics, or hair care. You need to start thinking like a true mad scientist, and focus your attention on what matters. It can be as simple as world domination, or something so lunatic that it can't be put into words. Summoning eldritch beings from another dimension, upgrading humanity to a more perfect species incapable of emotion or free will, even just getting vengeance on those who have wronged or slandered you in the past. Only you can figure out the actual reason (or maybe you can't figure it out... just identify it).
Do it for science. Mad science.
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**Leave a Gap**
Do not put the armor directly on top of the skin. Have struts that extend from the bone and support plates with an air gap between the skin and the plates.
The gap lets the skin breath and sweat escape. This keeps the skin in better condition. It slows down the rust of the plates, and the rate of blood poisoning.
Bonus points you can detach the plates for repair, since you can fit a spanner into the airgap and hold the bolts on the underside.
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## Segmentation
The only thing worse than permanently being stuck in a suit of armour, is being stuck in a suit of armour that restricts your movement. I know, I know, Frankenstein's monster isn't really know for his gymnastic flexibility. But if the plates fused to his body clang together and stop him from angrily lifting a villager above his head while roaring, he's not going to be all too pleased.
Other, secondary things to consider are:
* **Surgical steel or hypoallergenic metals**. Not just to prevent rust, you also don't want him to get infections from the metal. Especially not if it goes *through* his skin.
* **Breathability**. Part of the segmentation bit, but important to consider on its own. Don't do skin tight armour, it would stop him from breathing, sweating, bathing, the lot. It would make for a short lived monster.
* **Weight**. Ol' Franky is considered quite strong, so you'd get away with quite a bit of armour. But too much and he'd get into trouble left right and centre. He won't be able to swim, walk on rickety bridges or walkways, ride a horse for too long, run out of stamina constantly, the lot.
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Muscles change shape when they flex, going from long(ish) and thin to short(er) and bunched up. Steel is a noticeable inflexible material at room temperature, and bonding it to the skin will prevent the flexing of muscles, as they will have no room to bunch up.
It would be a shame if your monster could not utilise its arm strength because it's biceps could not contract.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9J29Z.jpg)
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I'd say metal isn't the 'right' choice here. One of the common issues with 'external' implants is the 'meat'/inorganic interface tending to get infected or damaged. It also can't 'grow' with the creature
Let us ponder the [Linothorax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linothorax) - or its modern kevlar equivilent. By varying the 'type' of material' you can have 'hard' chitinous armour, fibrous sections and joints. Maybe have your new friend 'leak' a substance that seals up damaged armour. Essentially layers of materials that are organic acting as a sort of composite armour.
In fact - something like an upgraded [lobster carapace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster) would give you a shiny, metallic look, with a touch of alien-ness.
On the other hand, you need to worry about villagers with giant lobster crackers and butter, rather than pitchforks and torches...
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## Titanium or stainless steel
Ideally titanium. They are both biocompatible, corrosion-resistant (titanium a bit more so, but both probably adequate), and titanium is something like 45% lighter than steel (someone mentioned keeping weight down on the poor creature he has suffered enough)
In 2016, [researchers discovered](https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder-steels.html) a gold-titanium alloy that has 4× the [hardness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness) (resistance to denting) of pure titanium. You can't say "titanium-gold alloy" in your fiction without sounding like a fancy man, which may be good or bad for your artistic purposes. The *Iron Man* guy uses it.
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By slapping armour on your construct, you're partially to completely negating one of the great advantages that humans have over other creatures: physical endurance.
Why, might you ask, does adding armour reduce the construct's endurance? Is it the weight? No, it's because the armour covers the skin, and the skin is a human's superpower amongst the other members of the animal kingdom, that allows a human to shed in excess of 1kw of excess heat through sweating. Add armour, reduce the capacity to sweat, and therefore reduce the capacity for cooling.
Even medieval knights in their removable shells of armour compromised their ability to cool themselves by sweating, and coped with that compromise simply because they lived and used their armour in a cool climate, and they rode horses, which reduced their levels of physical effort generating heat.
So... I'd suggest putting your armour *beneath* the skin. The skin might get damaged but the internal organs would be safer. Better that than overheating.
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**Make it an Exoskeleton**. (Credits to PipperChip)
No need for separate skin. No need for bones. The muscles and organs attach directly to your armor.
You only have to figure out how to make breathing, muscle movement and temperature regulation work. Look to insects and crustaceans for inspiration.
A great advantage compared to e.g. crustaceans is that your Frankenstein’s Monster is artificially made and doesn’t have to grow, so it doesn’t have to moult or anything.
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**Simulated Magic**
Frankenstein's monster was brought to life by electricity. This was a little understood phenomenon at the time, especially by ordinary folk. Equip the monster with metal plates that are electrically charged. When the villagers attempt to lay hands on him, they will receive a powerful shock. This will create fear and awe.
The monster will need rubber boots to avoid premature discharging into the ground. If he needs to recharge, he can be provided with a hand-operated version of the static-electricity generator used to animate him. Either that or he can return to the castle and plug himself in.
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Note that it can also be used to potentially trick people into thinking it's an iron golem.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6vPnD.png)
>
> *Flee now, or I shall breathe poison death upon you all!*
>
>
>
This is a trick used in *Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Module A3: Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords*, Part C: the Catacombs, first area (published 1981).
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Muscle memory.
If any of the limbs were sourced from users with armor-preference, it's worth accommodating those preferences if possible. Using armor effectively is difficult enough, to say nothing of using unfamiliar armor.
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**Oobleck** Add a layer of this stuff between metal exoplates and the monster's body.
A non-newtonian fluid that reacts differently according to the energy of the impact. So a hard impact from a hammer will cause it to tense up and resist, compared to a slower movement, which poses minimal threat.
The outside layer of metal is there to turn sharp blades which could cut the oobleck. This could be attached, but realistically a jerkin of chainmail or plate like the samurai had could be more efficient. Organic creatures could not heat metal enough to liquify it by biological processes, and laying a metal carapace via organic methods would be like a snail growing a shell - very slow.
It may be feasible for the creature to create and replenish its own oobleck layer over time too, perhaps substituting oobleck for fat in the sub-dermal skin layer.
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1. Mobility. While weight may not be a problem, having material around joints does restrict range of motion if only by a little.
2. Thermal restriction. Your skin is now covered and now cannot use sweat to cool down. one suggestion is to teach your frankenstein how to take off and put on armor so they can periodically take off the whole set or sections to cool off. Regardless I think equipping your franky with a titanium wire woven shirt (could be interwoven with normal fibres for comfort) would provide minimal relief by conducting the heat away to exposed areas. I would choose copper threads but copper is not skin friendly for long periods of time.
3. Claustrophobia. Again you can train your man made guy but I would pay attention to field of view and breathability if you include a helmet.
4. Thermal attack. Fire, boiling oil, etc will get on your monster. While there may not be much to be done about being engulfed in it, but giving your guy a handheld shield could help them deflect incoming thrown oil or hot water, etc.
I'd suggest a couple things.
1. Inner layer: somewhat loose, comfortable shirt, pants, etc. normal thickness single layer.
1a. The titanium thermal conductive shirt. (kinda) I was thinking of having it interlaced in the 1. layer
2. Interlayer/standoff A very coarse threaded gambeson, but with a twist. Its more of a fine net kind of garment filled with brass wool, such that wind can pass though. Chainmail sleeves and coif are also attached to make this an modified arming doublet. (brass because its not armor and it needs to be corrosion resistant.) this is to allow air to pass between the plates and skin. (also this layer includes similar brass filled gambeson and chainmail for pants.
3. plate armor. Your normal knights armor. Nothing fancy. I would say better neck protection with a more pronounced throat guard etc and a full coverage helmet with a flip down visor. probably more easily removable in a state of panic so claustrophobia won't make him go crazy but that might be a double edged sword in regards to head protection (take off helmet in panic, gets attack to the head.)
edit: as for fire, I think quick detach plates would be ok to say ditch plates soaked in oil. Leather floats that inflate like airbags can also be an option for quicksand. buoyancy is key in quicksand, that and making sure you move slowly. (leather can be sewn well to be somewhat airtight and probably inflated by a miniscule black powder charge
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If the plates are "pinned" to the bone, it seems possible to first insert the pin, and then attach metal plates on top. Allowing more flexible options.
Biocompatibility is the first thing that comes in mind. It has to be non-toxic for sure. But sticking a metal in the flesh is a bit more demanding. A lot of metals, while non-toxic, would cause inflamation when burried in the flesh. In modern surgery, titanium, stainless steel, gold are often used. These metals are used for implants and artificial joints. You can also use other metals with a coating of the above metals/materials.
Similarly there is the consideration of the physiology. The metal plates/armor should not hinder muscle, bone, and skin function. This is more of the design of the plate, not just purely the material choice. armadillos seems to provide a mid way option between strength and flexibility. Their armors are not completely rigid like turtles'. So maybe a flexible metal would be nice. You may want to choose memory alloy. They are flexible, and can endure some bends and dents. Most importantly, they can return to original shape once heated. Giving the armour some way of recovery.
Then comes physical strength. As for the purpose of armour, it should be strong, and light. Which is also the main consideration when building an airplane. So like and airplane, Aluminium or Titanium alloys would be good choices.
I think Titanium is an obvious choice using currently available materials. It is biocompatible, corrosion resistant, strong, and light. But if advancement of technology is allowed, some futuristic, bio-compatible, memory alloy would be more attractive option.
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I think a combination of plates and chain mail integrated together, made from some X material (where X = the lightest of the strongest material (mithril for example) that also doesn't conduct heat efficiently.
You have to think about what the villagers will attack your friend with - arrows, spears, pitchforks, rocks, fire.
Plates to protect large areas like the front and back of the legs, the chest, the back and use chain mail for the areas that need to flex - the sides, neck, etc.
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## It might not work as you expect
I assume you're making your creature as strong as possible. Adding metal place won't make it stronger, so it will be slower. I assume you accept that tradeoff.
I assume it's far from being invincible, otherwise you wouldn't need any extra protection. Metal plates are great to protect against arrows or swords, which villagers happen not to have (normally). An armor will give you quite a good protection against bone breaking from blunt weapons such as big sticks, but still, the impact energy will have potential to damage internal organs.
There is, however, one weapon that will be quite accessible to your villagers, and metal armor might amplify the damages instead of preventing them: **the heat**.
Treated with torches, or boiling water - the metal will absorb heat very quickly, and then slowly give it back to the monster's body, slowly frying it. Think about cooling in water, and then it comes:
### Water is your creature's biggest weakness
Not only water, mud or quicksand makes also 'great' job. You created something much heavier than water, it will sink in a pond, in a swamp or anything similar. Swamps are terribly prevalent in wild forests, and it's quite impractical to be very heavy if you're going to run through them in the night.
Maybe you should really think over your idea...
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[Question]
[
A character of my story is in the following situation: He is in the middle of a forest and has lost his way out. He wants to be sure to keep straight on and not to move in a circle.
* He has no compass
* The sun and stars do not exist, just diffuse light.
* A second person is with him, they have no special equipment (I could give them some things that they have in their pockets, but no large gadgets).
* He is a scientist and very clever.
Is there a way my characters can make sure that they walk straight on for several kilometers under this conditions?
EDIT: I asked this question yesterday and since then I got a lot of nice answers, thank you.
But I decided to describe the setting a little bit better since some answers do not quite fit and there are a few questions in the comments.
My story takes place in a fantasy world. In this world sun, moon and stars do not exist. The light comes uniformly from all directions (not from the underground), so one can not use it for orientation. Weather-phenomenons also are distributed isotropically. Furthermore there is no magnetic field so a compass would not work.
The forest itself is very homogeneous. There is only one sort of trees, they are about three meters high and not very close together. There is no underwood, only grassy forest floor. The underground is flat, there are no hills or troughs and no rivers. I described it in my story as 'like the sea, always the same but always different'.
I hope the setting and the reason why even my clever charakter got lost and has problems to find a way out is a bit clearer now.
[Answer]
*This answer was in response to an earlier version of the question where it seemed possible that the story environment might resemble Earth on a cloudy or misty day.*
Navigation in dense woodland without a compass is very hard. Here are some tactics:
1. If the wood has a distinctive underlying topography, then you can follow that. For example, you can follow a ridge (easier uphill), or a valley (easier downstream). You can follow a contour line by refusing to climb or descend.
2. If the region has strong prevailing winds, then the trees may show the direction: they may have stronger growth on the sheltered side, or bigger root systems on the windward side.
3. If sun often penetrates into the wood, then vegetation will distinguish the sunny and shady directions (south and north, respectively, in the northern hemisphere). Flowers prefer to point in the sunny direction; moss prefers the damp conditions on the shady side of trees; phototropic climbers prefer the sunny sides of trees.
4. If the trees are climbable, then you can climb them and sight distant landmarks.
I use tactic (1) all the time—but it relies on knowing the general topographic layout of the landscape, for example from looking at a map. The observations in (2) and (3) are from Tristan Gooley's *The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs*. But I find these techniques far from easy to apply in practice and I would hate to have to rely on them. Tactic (4) is pretty desperate—even if you're lucky enough to find a tree tall enough to give you a view over the canopy, it's very risky.
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If he doesn't want to go in a particular direction but just wants to leave the forest without getting turned around, walking downhill is guaranteed to eventually work. Downhill is a better choice than uphill because in nature there is almost never a bowl shape without a downhill exit (due to the need for drainage), but peaks are common. In addition, civilization often clusters near water, which is found by going downhill.
Once water is found, this strategy becomes "follow the water", and there is little chance of getting turned around. Water never flows in a circle.
Here is a famous example of a girl who, after a plane crash, navigated out of the Amazon rain forest, travelling ten days to civilization, using this technique: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANSA_Flight_508>
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First person places stick where he is.
Second person chooses the direction to go to and advances, they must both remain visible to each other.
The second person stops when he thinks he has advanced enougth and signals the first person.
The first person advances half of the way and place another stick in the middle.
The first person then advances beyond the second person until he can barely see the newly placed stick.
I think you can see where I'm going with this....
In short by using the sticks they can maintain a straight line.
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I felt this would be better suited for a separate answer from my original, though it might be contrary to the criteria: **have the characters make their own compass.**
If you granted the characters a magnet and a small metallic object (such as a paper clip or needle) in their pockets, the latter could be magnetized and placed on top of a (very) small leaf or something else that would float in water. The object will then turn with the leaf and point north. The body of water would have to be still and possibly portable somehow (an uncovered thermos, perhaps?) unless you combined my other answer with this one- find north (or whatever way you wanted to go) and leave a trail.
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A method that doesn't take any equipment:
Choose two trees where one is in front of the other by some amount, and walk so that they always line up. When you get to the closest of the two trees pick two more that line up past the second. Every time you get to one of your trees mark it by peeling off some bark, breaking a branch so it hangs down, or something so that by looking back you'll be able to see where you came from.
This will help in case you somehow get disoriented and lose your chosen trees.
You'll have to stop at night, so putting several stakes into the ground to mark the direction you want to go before dark will help you find the next two trees when it gets light again. You'd also be able to look back and get a pretty good idea of where you want to go.
This will not get you moving in any particular direction, but it will take you in a straight line so eventually you'll get to the edge of the forest.
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I don't think there is a certain always works method. Trees obstruct your line of sight and make it impossible to actually walk straight over extended distances. That said people walk in forests without compass or other navigation aids all the time and mostly come back alive.
First advice would be not getting lost. This is not the same as knowing where you are, you just need to **pay attention** when walking in the forest so that you can walk back the same way you came if necessary. This basically amounts to recognizing things you passed when walking the other way. In practice people also recognize things they passed the other times they were in the same forest so that they can navigate familiar forests with ease.
So basically saying a very clever person got lost in the forest kind of assumes he thought the other guy was navigating for them. And the other guy obviously thought the opposite. In such case it is possible neither of them paid attention to their surroundings and cannot recognize anything.
Even so the goal should be going back the way you came in hopes you will recognize something. So it is generally a good idea to have some idea which direction you are going when you go to a forest otherwise trying to determine directions after you get lost is an exercise in futility since it won't really make a difference which way you go.
Assuming they know the original direction relative to either sun or wind they can try looking up. Even when the light is diffuse and the wind non-existent in the ground, the tops of the trees might have clear light and shadowed sides and so some wind. This is because the light and wind on the forest floor are being obstructed by the trees. This is probably the best bet for "something a clever guy would realize" as it hinges on realizing the reason the light is so diffuse and the wind non-existent.
If the wind is really almost non-existent it might still be possible to detect direction by using very light object. Similarly the direction of sun can be detected by using a [sunstone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_%28medieval%29). Although it is extremely unlikely they are carrying one. Still recognizing one you see and being able to use it would be pretty impressive. And many crystals have similar properties, remembering you carry one and that it can be used for detecting the direction of sun would also be pretty impressive.
There are also moss and lichen that grow better on specific sides of the tree trunk. If common in your forest this can be spotted and used to get a direction. Specifics vary, it can depend on either sunlight (north-south) or prevailing winds (east-west). EDIT: This is actually same but bit different than what Gareth Rees mentions in his answer. What I am talking about is only available in some forests, but is actually more practical to use if available since it is more consistent.
I said the tress make it impossible to walk straight. Still you can and should avoid walking in circles. Pick a tree. Walk toward it. Pick a tree behind the first tree. Walk toward it. And so on. This doesn't allow you to walk straight, but it helps avoid the natural tendency to walk in circles. If you are not sure which way to go anyway, this is good enough.
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I believe the question is aimed at a scientific 'Macgyver' solution, in this regard, consider this:
The scientist has a key-chain flashlight, by filing down (hunk of glass/costume jewl/quartz from the earth) he is able to focus the light to a point.
He removes some bark from a tree (point A), focus' his light-source at another tree (Point B), and walks to it, removing some bark from the next tree, and pointing the source away from the first tree (A), he decides on the next point to travel to (Point C).
Or, given a laser-pointer.... But that's too easy.
None the less, it uses the play that light always travels in strait lines.
This type of mechanism is often used for maintaining alignment of tunnels during mining - though on a more accurate scale.
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Your character could use a simple method that I myself have used to make safe landings on a rocky, cliffy coast at night. We used the steep and rocky foreshore at the landing site to place two light-sticks, one above the other, so placed that they and the safe entrance to the cove formed a straight line. No closing with the shore until the two are lined up!
Your heroes just take out that handy little folding saw you left in their pockets and cut enough wood to make two tall, skinny masts which they tie to separate trees using some paracord they just happened to have, or perhaps improvising rope from sliced and twisted bark. Now, they just need to keep glancing backward as they walk - if the two masts are in alignment, then they have not deviated.
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Apocryphally, moss always grows on the northern side of the tree (well, in the northern hemisphere at least).
If you actually go out and *try* this, you'll find it works as poorly as you would expect. Surveying a large number of trees you might be able to establish a side on which moss grows best. But is that because that side is to leeward, northern-exposure, pointing-uphillest, or something else?
[Edit: thinking about it, that possibly doesn't matter, so long as it's not the last option. If the moss is consistently directional, then you can use it for making sure your path does not diverge, regardless of whether you know what direction you are traveling in. So I suppose this *does* answer the question as asked, even though there are far better responses in other answers. Sadly, things like leaf direction won't tell you the direction you expect the sun to be, since the light is diffuse. This fact may also affect the moss thing: direct sunlight would make the effect far stronger.]
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If it isn't important *which* straight line you walk in, just that it's straight, then I can get you there with a fishing line and a stick.
Take your stick and draw a straight line. Have your companion hold one end of the fishing line while you hold the other. Walk to the end of the fishing line while your companion keeps the line parallel to the line you've drawn on the ground.
When you reach the limit, draw another line on the ground at your feet parallel to the fishing line. Have your companion come meet you.
Repeat as necessary.
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Grass and trees, when not wet, burn... pull up grass, find those sticks, build a fire. always keep the rising column of smoke at your back, or better, have your friend point a long stick at the smoke, go to the end nearest the fire, look for the most distant object in line with the stick's far end. keep it in your gaze and walk to it, repeat. All the they need is a lighter and long stick and dry fuel..clear a burn barrier around your fire or you may burn the whole forest down...yes this method has been used before..but not always a safe option to use!
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The Romans had a tool for ensuring roads went in a straight line. It was essentially a cross that could be mounted on a stick, in the middle, so that on each of the 4 points of the cross, a weight hung from a string.
Place a 1st stick in the ground at a point, then advance to a point where that stick is still visible, and place a 2nd stick in the ground, with your tool on top of the stick. Stand on the side of your tool, opposite to the first stick and rotate the cross, until both of the hanging strings line up, with the first stick and the centre stick of your tool (the 2nd stick), in a line.
Now have your colleague advance in what they believe to be a straight line away from the 1st stick and your tool. At some point, when they can still see you, they stop and place a 3rd stick. You look down the line of your tool, and the 2 strings, with the first stick behind you, and indicate to your colleague whether they need move the 3rd stick to the left or right to get into line with the string.
When they're lined up, you remove your tool from the 2nd stick, and go to place it on the 3rd stick. Your colleague can now go forth and line up a 4th stick. Eventually you'll have a line of sticks, in a perfectly straight line.
Clearly in the forest you may have issues, and want to vary the distance between sticks and vary your line a little to circumvent trees, but as long as you keep it as straight as possible, and if you have to deviate, alternate between left and right, you'll end up with a roughly straight path through the woods.
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Try the breadcrumbs approach.
Have them take something from the forest (rocks, bark, flora, etc.) and leave it behind them in a trail. If they happen to walk in a circle back to where they started, the trail should be recognizable to them as their own creation.
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Battery powered gyroscope. [Here's one](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3442) that's been MacGyvered. Method of use:
1. Suspend from string with axis approximately parallel to the ground.
2. Hold axis in direction you want to go.
3. Turn on, and wait for it to spin up, then let go.
4. Only walk (on average) in the direction of the axis. (You may have to go around trees and other obstacles.)
5. Except for torque similar to that experienced by a [Foucault pendulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum), the pointing should be stable to a few degrees until the battery runs down.
The torque in the last item will be very small because you aren't tall enough to have a long string and aren't intentionally rocking the gyroscope back and forth. That torque might not even exist in your setting if the "planet" doesn't rotate about some axis.
For substantially more information, read up on [inertial navigation systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Fiber_optic_gyros_.28FOG.29). Various implementations run quite a range of cost, size, and weight. However, single chip systems do exist, so the protagonist could already have one integrated into something in his pocket.
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If he only needs to walk straight, all he needs is a straight rope that drags behind him. He should aim for the rope to always be as straight as possible and the longer it is the better.
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The following method may not be super-precise because directional hearing is not as good as seeing, but could circumvent the line-of-sight problems of other solutions:
1. Person A walks away for certain distance (say, 100 m)
2. A calls repeatedly for B and B walks ahead following the source of the calls.
3. Once B believes to be somewhat closer but not too close (50 m, say) he calls A to move ahead away from his (B's) repeating calls
4. When A is at a distance of about 100 m again, return to step 2
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Based upon the updates to the question:
**Orientation**
If your characters need to orient themselves in a *particular* direction before they start walking, it will be very difficult for them. You've removed all the things that might typically be used. None of the following are available:
* Sunrises/sunsets
* Moonrise/moonset
* Stars at night
* Magnetic fields
* Natural landmarks
* Artificial landmarks
* Water features
* Predictable/persistent weather patterns
Thus I'm not sure of any practical orientation technique that would allow them to set out on a specific heading. Though perhaps that's not required?
If it is, maybe at night they can see a faint glow on the horizon in the general direction of the nearest settlement. Or maybe there are auroras or some other aspect of the fantasy world that would be usable to get a ballpark directional fix. Otherwise...I don't see how your characters can orient on a specific heading with no visual references whatsoever, unless they have a sixth sense or a very keen sense of smell or similar contrivance.
**Maintaining a Heading**
This is easier based upon the scenario you've described. The trees in your forest aren't that large or that dense, they're just homogeneous and cover a large, flat area with no built-in visual references.
In that situation, all your characters need to keep a straight heading is a bit of wire, a knife or other sharp tool for making marks (optional), and some math. Your character should make a loop out of the wire, and attach it to their headgear so that it sits in front of one eye. They can then line their makeshift targeting reticle up with a distant tree and walk towards it. They'll travel in a straight line as long as they keep the tree centered in the reticle. And they should keep a count of the total number of steps taken to reach the tree.
When your character reaches the tree, they should mark their inbound trajectory with the knife (for instance, in the ground leading up to the tree, or the tree itself). Continuing on that trajectory they should proceed to the far side of the tree and look for a new tree in the distance to use as the new reference point. Before they go anywhere, they should mark the angle to the new reference point, and take note of the angle by which it deviates from their inbound course (I'm assuming that the trees won't always allow for a perfectly straight path to be followed).
Now all they have to do is proceed to the next tree, and repeat the process. By tracking the angle of each course deviation and the distance traveled between each tree, your scientist character should have no problems holding to a straight course by making minor corrections when choosing the next reference point (i.e. if you deviated to the right by 5 degrees for 500 steps, you'll want to compensate left 5 degrees relative to the original heading for 500 steps).
That should allow them to maintain a reasonably straight heading over a relatively long distance. Or if you give your characters very accurate tools for measuring distance and angles (a pedometer and a protractor, maybe?), it should keep a straight heading essentially indefinitely as long as there are trees to use as reference points. They could even execute turns and other maneuvers to detour around problematic bits of terrain if need be, just by keeping track of the angle and distance of travel. It's essentially a poor-man's [inertial navigation system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system).
But won't work if, for instance, they get chased by something and lose track of either bit of information.
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Use a couple of sticks!
You say the terrain is perfectly flat. All the trees are the same height, exactly. There is no sun, moon, stars. Ergo, you are not on a planet thus no horizon curvature, no rotational effects, no magnetic fields, no directionality of light. All of the traditional navigational tools are unavailable.
***So use line-of-sight tracking!***
Cut down one tree. Climb another, and put the cut-down tree on top. You now have an anomaly in the forest, one tree sticks out! Using just this, keeping the tree to your back, you will walk in a moderately straight line.
If you need a more precise line, just repeat with a second tree a couple hundred paces away. Now when you look, you see two trees behind you. Keep them aligned, and your direction is set to within less than one degree of compass.
You can repeat this process each time you get far enough that the tree 2 units behind you becomes hard to see, and make a new beacon.
P.S.
This also works if the trees are unclimbable, you just need to reduce the distance to whatever you can manage at ground level. It would depend on the achievable line-of-sight. Your description of "not very close together" sounds promising though.
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In my alternate history (1800s), I have troop hiking through tropical sub-Saharan Africa. For plot reasons, I have man-killing mosquitos, but I also have a plant that exudes CO2 and other attractants. These flowering plants are placed in the room at night to attract the mosquitos away from people.
Evolution-wise, however, 'consuming' CO2 and giving off O2 is so deeply ingrained in a plant's DNA, it is hardly believable to be the other way around.
I'd easily hand-wave it away as some special scent, but the CO2 is critical to the plot. **Can a plant evolve to give off CO2?** Or rather, how difficult would that be to explain.
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Plants give off CO2 at night, when they start to respirate using the 'fuel' (glucose) synthesised by photosynthesis in the day. Check out the [Calvin-Benson cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-independent_reactions#Coupling_to_other_metabolic_pathways)
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All living things respire, and when they respire they break down 'fuel' to produce energy, which gives off CO2. A plant makes its source of fuel through collecting water, CO2 and light, the by-products of which are oxygen (output/waste) and glucose (the fuel). At night the plants can't collect light and instead they increase respiration, creating the energy needed for the night and the rest of the next day (stored in neat little packages called ATP).
Because of this, it seems you have no problem. Since you use the plants at night, they will naturally be giving off CO2, you only need to make a plant that respires heavily at night.
Of course, unless you want to hand-wave, you'll need a reason for this. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to have a fast-growing plant, maybe herbaceous. The rapid growth demands more energy, which means more CO2 intake during the day and therefore more CO2 output during the night.
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As has been pointed out, plants can give off CO2 at night. If you pick a [plant that only blooms at night](http://themysteriousworld.com/10-most-beautiful-night-blooming-flowers/), you'd have a plant that is using up much more energy at night, thus producing more CO2, and the scent of the flower could add to the insect repellent function. My mother used to grow these orchids in our home (back in my home-country) that would only bloom once every few weeks, and only at midnight and the bloom would be wilted by morning. They were so beautiful, when my mom knew they would be blooming, we'd stay up to see them.
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Follow the side effect. When things evolve, it's because some random side effect proved increasingly beneficial. If this plant of yours found these deadly mosquitoes to be a good source of food, it could have evolved to attract and "fumigate" the mosquitoes, using their dead carcasses as an alternative source of energy, making the plant less dependent on photosynthesis, causing the plant to give off increased levels of CO2, which further served to attract more mosquitoes...
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You might also look into *photorespiration*, an error in photosynthesis which causes a plant to produce CO2 instead of O2. This only occurs when CO2 supply to the plants is low, which might happen when the stomata are closed to prevent water loss. Research suggests that photorespiration might have to do with nitrogen assimilation as well, meaning a plant in a nitrogen-poor environment might be more likely to photorespire.
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> Can a plant evolve to give off CO2?
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Look at the definition of the plant. The plant is a creature that grows by $H\_2O + CO\_2 +light \to C\_nH\_m + O\_2$. The $C\_nH\_m$ part, called *biomass*, *hydrocarbons*, *glucose* or *oil* in plain English, is what constituates the body of the plant. The only way you can produce $CO\_2$ is to turn the reaction backwards. But, it will destroy the plant since the opposite reaction, $C\_nH\_m + O\_2 \to H\_2O + CO\_2 +heat$, is known as "burning" or "decay". This is what mushrooms and animals do: they decay the biomass and use the sun energy to move around.
That is, white can become black but it won't be white after that "transformation". Ok? Plant, which produces CO2 denies its "plant feature".
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> I also have a plant that exudes CO2 and other attractants. These flowering plants are placed in the room at night to attract the mosquitos away from people.
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The "plants" that exhale CO2 are called "mushrooms" or "animals". Mosquitoes hunt for the latter, I suppose. You can easily use such animals as such "plants" to attract mosquitoes away from people (I am not sure why animals would be more attractive than human though).
Ok, diverting mascitos from human to animals may be a bad idea since maskitos will proliferate on the blood. You probably could have plants that grow up to certain size and then stop growing. They will accumulate CH during the day sunbath and release all the CO2+H2O they accumulated during the day at night. But you could just cut some plants and burn them at night by feeding to the animals and mushrooms, for instance.
Hope that now my point that plant that releases CO2 is nonsense is clear. You would write about this and literate other people (I guess that majority are as illiterate not to understand this basic fact of life) because it is really important for sustainability we are talking about when build our worlds. Being illiterate, we move into the false direction. That is a problem. We build the better world by having false notion of beauty.
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I'm looking for the perfect kind of apocalypse that not only can kill great parts of the people on Earth leaving the survivors spread in little primitive groups across the world ,but can also avoid the possibility of humanity arising again too soon.
I need something that other than killing people, something that can also destroy the memories of the survivors and leave no signs of the past civilizations.
All modern buildings have to be taken down, no books remained and nothing digital, even wild tribes in Africa and isolated isles have to become more primitive than they are.
I want the few survivors to return the technological level of 400000 years ago or before hominids first started to make sharp sticks and throw them at each other.
To obtain this state, any means necessary as long as it respects the known laws of physics, the only thing excluded are aliens.
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Humanity 400'000 years ago had much lower mental capacities than we see today (as a species, we would still be Homo Erectus 400'000 years ago) and if you take any person from today and planted them in any environment, they'd already be well ahead of 400'000 years ago.
To this extent...you need something that outright attacks our intelligence. A virus is the most likely candidate, something that attacks our minds ability to process language and perhaps results in massive swelling that inhibits other functions of the brain, basically reducing humanity as a whole to the brain capacity of Homo Erectus.
The rest goes from there. If we as a people were unable to cohesively think, our society would crumble pretty fast. Being unable to maintain any of our existing infrastructure would see it crumble...and in a potentially explosive manner (not being able to maintain any nuclear power plants would eventually result in meltdowns). 100 years later, we'd live in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Not entirely sure how well these devolved humans would survive. Part of our evolution from 400'000 years ago includes our minds taking the time to stop and think as default behaviour. If you take a gorilla, it is significantly stronger than humans from a weight to strength ratio...it turns out that the more time is dedicated to thinking, the weaker our physical forms become. With a weak physical form and a badly hindered mental state, humanity might die off to competition from stronger, more adaptable creatures. It's possible our digestive systems wouldn't handle anything less than the modern diet now as well...if we can barely sharpen a stick, do we know what fire is? Could our bodies handle a diet without fire anymore?
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To dissolve every single trace of human civilisation and memories whilst obeying the laws of physics would require some nifty handwaving with what I can only imagine would be extremely futuristic/alien technology. At real-world technology this would require systematic brainwashing of survivors and the demolition of every single building on Earth, which doesn't seem too plausible without a higher motive.
Naturally, this could be achieved by triggering a mass-extinction on Earth similar to that which ended the Dinosaurs. This destroys a healthy portion of the planet and thus Human infrastructure as well as most life on Earth. Since humans are pretty much everywhere, all you need is at least one pocket of survivors who may have moved underground to escape surface extremes and toxic gasses that would arise. By the time Earth is anywhere near to settled the populations would have been in isolation for so many generations that all traces of civilisation are buried under masses of ash, rock and sediment and virtually all stories of our past have faded away and our knowledge tailored specifically for survival. Given such an extent of time, there isn't a lot to say these humans won't look a bit different than those we see today but in a post-apocalyptic scenario, environmental factors will start to play a role on us regardless and evolution will be kick-started.
Or perhaps there was a multi-generational experiment where children are reared in a large, sealed off area of the rainforest with no human interaction or innate knowledge to see if they would form a culture or to observe how our intelligence evolved. And it just so happened that whilst this experiment was in process, the rest of the world devolved into chaos.
Given the impracticality of destroying every trace of human civilisation, I would say the best choice is to bury it under sediment and I only have a vague knowledge of the how long this takes but you're not looking at anything too long when it's on a global timescale.
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# The war
In a world where fuel are resources are what dictates the wealth of the nation; peace is once again broken. With globalisation the alliances are bigger, warcraft is on a different level like never before — all people of every country in the world are involved.
# The purge
With different weapons of mass destruction in a moment of despair the losing side unleashes its arsenal of weapons forbidden by international laws: nuclear, bio, anything goes. The rich countries die from the weapons, poor countries die from lack of support and complete pollution of drinkable water.
Multiple new volcanos would form at ground-zero of some nukes thus destroying the architecture of largest cities.
# The survivors
All survivors on Earth are dead, those who survive the terror of war, escaped the nuclear bombardment, haven't died from trauma or injury would succumb to the bio-weapons such as virus (it's possible to create virus to live for X generation and have a self-destruct gene) and/or radiation.
The wealthiest of people would take to space in space-pods and live there for Y years until it's safe to return to Earth once again. Their children would have very limited knowledge about the world as the parents cannot teach everything ( and no more Internet on Earth ). The children's children would know even less.
As time goes by the technology would fade away: book rot, CD-ROM decay, hard-drives and all.
The space-pods would come back to Earth by auto-pilot but the children would be ill-prepared for life. Some would survive, most would die and thus the Earth's population is down to some 1000–5000 people with no skills and no language that would describe the world they'd have to live in.
The old technology would probably be buried by a plaster of soil and some items that could be found would be useless. Would you be able to play back a Dandy cassette if you have nothing but stones and a couple of trees?
The advanced technology of the space pod would wear out from decades (millennia) of use by the survivors and thus only durable items like hammers and crowbars would remain.
And there you have it — a primitive society.
If you want to return the people to pre Homo Sapiens state, make the bio-viruses dumb-down people but make the people to either ultimately develop an immunity or have the virus self-destruct after M number of replications.
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There are several potential means of erasing or reducing the cognitive ability of humans, but before we go there you need to consider one thing:
Stupid humans are going to die without technology. Even Homo Erectus had the use of fire and a kit of stone tools, otherwise the species would be know by a different name to the top predators of the era: "Lunch". Without the cognition to harness fire and make tools out of things like wood, bone, stone and possibly salvaged artifacts, the newly lobotomized humans will starve to death, die of exposure or be eaten by wild animals, if they are not killed by disease. *We* don't have memories or inherited skill sets to cope with suddenly being thrust into a neolithic environment unless we have had some rigorous conditioning and heavy duty training first. Tribal societies which still live in the jungles or deserts will have a much better chance of survival, but being knocked back in terms of intelligence will also adversely affect their ability to survive; the rich social, cultural and linguistic abilities of humans seems to have been evolved roughly 20,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans evolved as far back as 100,000 years ago but did not seem to have anything like the abilities which emerged 20,000 years ago.
Our pre sapiens ancestors lived a far more primitive lifestyle than the Ancestors, although the ancestors of the Neanderthal and Denisovans have been dated to this era. Their tool kits, cultural remains and so on are far more primitive than the Neanderthals or Homo Sapiens which followed.
So how do we get there?
1. A very sophisticated EMP weapon which scrambles the neural circuits of the brain. This is theoretically possible, considering the brain operates on an electrochemical system. An unsophisticated version would essentially be a giant microwave which fried people's brains, which would also kill most people outright, but people partially sheltered inside buildings and vehicles would escape with their facilities wholly or partially intact. The number of survivors will be arbitrarily low, and isolated individuals will not be able to miraculously "save" civilization. Why such a weapon was developed could be explained as a way to neutralize populations harbouring large numbers of radicals, but the concept, once discovered, turned out to be relatively cheap and simple to build, so everyone could be targeted.
2. An evolved parasite or biological threat. We have seen the *Cordyceps fungus* being used as a model (The Last of us; The girl with all the gifts), versions of *Toxoplasma gondii* are already known to disable some cognitive functions in mice, and other potential vectors should exist.
3. A deliberate release of a mutated biological vector. This allows a more tailored approach and a reason for the strain to be widely spread to the population. If you want the effect to be even more permanent, the deliberately engineered vector would bind to human DNA and prevent future generations from having current levels of intelligence.
As for the destruction of the physical infrastructure of our civilization, time and her patient handmaiden entropy would work its magic. In the series "Life after People", modern infrastructure would last for as few as 24 hr (power plants and refineries) to perhaps 500 years (concrete structures with little or no rebar). Most metal structures wold last about 200 years without maintenance, and roads and wooden buildings could be overrun by vegetarian and swallowed up in a few decades. Abhumans with the sort of brainpower our prehuman ancestors had would not be able to take advantage of any of this. Isolated survivors would nave neither the numbers or tools to make more than an isolated stand (and their work would die with them). After a thousand years, most of our civilizations would be reduced to features in the landscape.
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# Step 1: Energy Crisis
As it turns out, major corporations have been lying to us. The oil and gas reserves turn out to be completely depleted by 2017, and all sales only came from already mined deposits too keep up appearances. There is a massive push for alternative Energy, but it will still take years to actually build the required infrastructure. Huge swaths of the population are suddenly cut off from electricity.
# Step 2: Economic Collapse
The lack of electricity and fossil fuels leads to a collapse of 90% of all Industry. The divide between poor and wealthy worsens massively, with the wealthy/powerful maintaining highly protected conclaves that subsist on their own powergrids.
Starvation sets in as international trade collapses. The first world is hit especially hard.
# Step 3: Riots
Order in the streets has long since collapsed. The poor lead continuous rebellions against the rich. The rich employ more and more drastic methods to control the poor. In addition the poor turn on each other in their bid for survival. Ideologies and Religions are forged as coping mechanisms against the daily struggle; These come in two flavors:
1. Repentists, who think we are being punished for our transgression, and aim to destroy all that remains of the old world in their quest for absolution.
2. Punishers, who think that we are all paying for the mistakes of the "Leading Elite", and aim to destroy all signs of the old "oppressive" world order.
Books and heretics are burning in the streets, everyone enjoys the bonding experience. If you enjoy science or critical thought you help everyone stay warm, by feeding the bonfires.
# Step 4: Apocalypse
Now that we ourselves have destroyed most anything that could helps us recover, an actual apocalypse sets in. Let's for example say, that the automatic reaction systems in our mutually assured destruction protocols don't take kindly to neglect and laymans fiddling with them.
An atomic winter starts.
# Step 5: Decay
What remains of society is made up off those few wealthy who persisted through the riots and their guards (read: private armies), everybody else lacked the resources, protection, or organisation. As the survivors are only made up of those that were already willing to take any necessary step to isolate themselves from the world, morality of the survivors is questionable even for these extreme conditions.
The remaining societies decay into military dictatorships. Education is kept low in order to make control of the population easy.
Isolation due to the post-apocalyptics effects keeps the genepool small, and along with the radiation, genetic and mental defects become common place.
After the isolation ends, the only thing that remains of mankind are inbred pseudo-humans. The only thing remaining of the past is the somewhat militaristic seeming clan structure of those that survived.
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Here is a method that worked pretty well on the Atlantians (according to one of my stories)...
Seed the Earth's atmosphere with a colony of nanite disassemblers which target only metals, plastics, concrete and non-living wood (including paper). Then give the planet a hundred years or so, to erase not only the physical signs of civilization but also all detailed knowledge from the minds of the survivors.
Stripped of our tools and toys, our books and our buildings, most of us will starve to death pretty quickly; and those who survive will be so busy staying alive that they won't bother to teach their children anything but survival skills. In a generation or two, you will have exactly the scenario you are looking for.
There is a good chance that this technique might actually work too well. Leaving so many starved and murdered human bodies around will inevitably lead to a variety of plagues and take out even the best trained survivalists. So if you want to be generous to your victims, make the nanites also disassemble dead human bodies.
Clean up after yourself after you clean off the planet.
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Assuming it doesn't have to be on earth, one way would be to have a sleeper-colonizing ship go slightly off kilter. The previous ships (which were sent ahead to terraform the planet) worked fine, but the last ship which contains the large number of frozen pre-fertilized embyros and synthetic wombs, since this is substantially more amenable to transport at speeds near C and without having to have large amounts of supplies to keep things going during the trip also brings a computer virus that wipes out the AI modules that were intended to teach all the embryos after landing. Enough of the technology works on landing to kick off waking up the embryos and keeping them alive past the two year old stage but then the technology shuts down completely. The husks of the machines form the basis for an initial religion built around the concept of humans thinking they had committed some great sin that broke their paradise and forced them to venture outside to toil and hunt. (Once humanity relearns enough more basic technologies to relearn how to study the husks, they may be able to make great jumps back, but that's a different story). This also assumes there was some sort of event happening back on Earth to prevent later colonists from coming, at least for the duration of the story.
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My first thought was a group of luddites that land on a planet similar to Earth, leaving any technology (books, computers, buildings, etc) behind. They accidentally bring along a Zika carrying mosquito (or similar) that gives the entire first generation stunted brains. After the luddite travelers die off, you have your desired setting.
If this event has to happen on Earth, consider the option that this change is gradual.
1. Human population takes a sudden plunge from pollution/environmental toxin/genetically modified mono-culture worldwide crop failure/a pandemic/whatever - mainly have population centers be the petri dish. This toxin affects human fertility and genetics for generations.
2. Governments/scientists burn cities to the ground in a panic to contain/destroy the toxin, force healthy survivors into disjoint quarantine zones (and kill the sick, of course). Wars over "clean" resources (food, water, land) further depopulate the planet
3. Society crumbles as the population tanks and finding food and water is the only, daily activity - finding and preparing food takes a lot more time
4. Books, computers, other non-essential items do not help survival - the first generation never use them, the next generation forgets about them (and can't even read), the third generation knows nothing about them
5. Useful items will stay around a while: weapons (guns, knives, bows, etc) and tools (needles, shovels, spoons, etc) will be used until they break (or run out of ammo)
6. Eventually everything rusts and crumbles to dust, nature will return to the land when people stop building and you will have your setting - there will still be structures and technology, but nobody around knows how to build/fix or use them so they might as well be scenery.
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I believe that an EMP attack would do what you want. 8-10 bombs launched on scuds from container ships and set off in low earth orbit, evenly spread around the north and south hemispheres, would take out all the infrastructure that we depend on.
You could expect 75-90% of the earth's population to be dead within a year, the survivors spread out and isolated, living at a hunter gatherer level, and not much chance of rebuilding for a long long time.
This also avoids any radiation so no worries about leaving the land unlivable for years. Only the electronics would be destroyed.
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# Zombies
I assume you do want to keep some remnant of humanity left (i.e., very basic intelligence, just no memories etc.).
Create a virus that turns humans into zombies and that has no cure achievable by current human technology.
Make it airborn so no physical contact is necessary, but make sure every zombie also spreads it wherever it goes. Make it so that it is not obvious if someone is a zombie or not (aside from shambling around without intelligence), i.e., no walking corpses. Zombies do not need to attack humans, and should not, really. They should function simply as animals, scrounging for plants or small animals, like apes.
Make a lot of technological ways to add additional virus spread. I.e., little robots which fly around, tunneling into any tunnel (air ducts etc.) they see, releasing virii inside all buildings, etc.
All of this should make sure that little enclaves will *eventually* fall, either by airborn virii, or by eventually having contact with a zombie.
If you want to wipe out humanity completely, you're basically done. If you want to keep humanity around, just at a pre-intelligent level, then make it so that zombies can have children and have enough animal instincts left to raise them. Make it so children are automatically immune against the virus, but start out with little enough intelligence that it will take a few dozen generations for them to be intelligent enough to maybe develop high languages/writing again.
# Buildings
To remove buildings, paper, technology etc., send down a bunch of small robots or even nanobots ("grey goo") which fly around and simply physically destroy/pulverize everything manmade. Send them only after the zombie virus has zombieifed a large percentage of humanity so it is much too late for the survivors to somehome create hidden stashes of knowledge.
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The only known force great and subtle enough to destroy all of human culture and technology, while leaving anything living, is humanity itself.
This could be done using a memetic virus, a thought, [likely a joke](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbnvkMRPKM), that makes anyone who thinks it literally unable to do anything but share and spread the thought. This would be so dangerous, that every book would be burned for fear of what could be scrawled in the margins, every telegraph and phone line cut for fear of the words from the unknown other side. In order to survive, humanity would even avoid teaching its children language, as they would be immune to the now constant threat of an infected survivor's shouts. In one generation the only tech that would be left would be made of stone, the makings simple, taught without words. Buildings would crumble to dust, scavenged for spearheads, before mankind gets over it's new taboo of speech.
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Simple: **Destroy the Metal**
Introduce a bacteria that eats metal - ideally all metals, but at the least it needs to eat iron (i.e. steel) and copper, as they are the ones our society depends on. The bacteria spreads, eats all the metal, then dies out.
We have long since mined all of the surface-level, accessible deposits of metal. Without the tools (which are all constructed with metal), we will not be able to mine more, and will be reduced to a very simple civilization, with no hope of ever advancing.
You can combine this with a human-killing disaster - if you're willing to stretch it a bit, you could say that the bacteria even invades humans, eating the trace elements that we depend on for life, killing off the majority of humanity.
Then you just need to wait - eventually, the buildings will all erode down to nothing, paper will dissolve, and everything we known now will be gone. The only tricky part will be preventing humans from re-inventing things like wooden plows, the bow, or even laborious carpentry using fire and flint, but really the only way to stop that is to reduce their intelligence until they are basically just monkeys.
So, that's an alternative:
**Kill all the humans**
Just kill of everyone, have some disaster destroy the buildings, and write your story from the perspective of the monkeys. After all, if you want to dumb your humans down so that they behave like monkeys, why not just make it easy on yourself and use monkeys directly?
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The survivors of whatever find themselves in an area where they can't even read a street sign (different alphabet). Internet dead, telephones dead, unintelligible library books used to make fire. Hunger dictates to learn hunting fast, winter dictates to find warmth (fire / clothes / insulation, and don't forget shoes). Illnesses have to be dealt with (measles, influenza, malaria). Pests (rats, cockroaches, lice) also have to be dealt with. What people know perishes within one generation at the most. Imagine teaching everything a modern person knows to children growing up in such circumstances. Take into account that life expectation is drastically reduced, so there is even less time to share knowledge with the next generation.
Memories of a past civilization would be like fairy tales, no more.
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Is there a reason you need a post-apocalypse world that looks just like a pre-humanity world, instead of just setting everything a couple hundred thousand years in the past? If there is to be no sign human civilization ever existed, no sign humanity ever developed past how it was in the first days of *Homo Sapiens*, perhaps the easiest way is just to start from when that was already the case.
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For a single event the most likely candidate would be a comet or asteroid strike consisting of many asteroids or comet fragments. Think Shoemaker-Levy-9 on steroids.
Forgetting tech would need to take place over probably at least 100 years - make humanity focus solely on survival for so long that eventually everything is forgotten. If you have a choice between burning a dictionary or freezing to death you're going to burn that dictionary.
Alternatively you could say the comet contains microbes which affect our brains in such a way as to make us forgetful for a few centuries.
Or perhaps instead of comets/asteroids have a series of solar flares which affect our brains as well as frying technology.
[Answer]
What you need is an extremely virulent strain of [encephalitis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis).
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[Question]
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Jormungandr, the snakebot of doom, is no more. Its remains are lying on the bottom of the sea in the Aleutian Trench to the south of the [Rat Islands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Islands), where it was nuked to pieces by three hundred approximately half-megaton thermonuclear warheads, 288 of which were American [Trident II SLBM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II) MIRVs, and 12 of which were Russian [Shkval torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval) nuclear warheads, plus six fifty-megaton Russian thermonuclear warheads, similar to the [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) test weapon, carried to the target by [Poseidon torpedoes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_System).
However, considering the 5 to 7 kilometre depth of the water in which Jormungandr's remains lie, a civilian ship, the [*DSSV Pressure Drop*](https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/vessel/) and the deep-submergence submarine [*DSV Limiting Factor*](https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/sub/) have been brought in to sonar-map the sea floor, and send down investigators to visually verify Jormungandr's destruction. However, considering all the nukes that were detonated in the area over the course of about a half-hour, the civilian crew is worried about radiation exposure, a mere six hours after the battle. There has been a considerable underwater landslide, and the nukes have churned up the water even further. Jormungandr's fusion reactors have all shut down or have been destroyed, but are still cooling, causing thermal water convection.
So, my question is: Just how safe is this place? What is the likely risk to the crew of the *Pressure Drop* and to the crew of the *Limiting Factor* who actually go down to inspect Jormungandr's remains in the middle of this nuclear battlefield?
[Answer]
## We already did this. And oh boy, what a mess.
The target wasn't a sea monster, but the Japanese battleship *Nagato*, Yamamoto's flagship at Pearl Harbor. And it wasn't any *Tsar Bomba*, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill 22-kiloton *Fat Man*, same as dropped on Nagasaki in WWII.
From *[Operation Crossroads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads)*, the Baker\* test specifically. (they were pretty sore about having missed *Nagato* by a half mile due to sloppy bombardiering on the Able\* test.
And, the fools detonated the "small" nuke *underwater*.
Here's the problem. Atom bomb detonations emit lots of surplus high-energy neutrons. Air contains nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen (via H2O) and argon. Hydrogen and oxygen don't capture fast neutrons at any rate. Some of these absorb neutrons (argon-41 has a 100 minute half life so doesn't last long; nitrogen-15, oxygen-17 and hydrogen-2 are stable). **But salt water contains sodium and chlorine**. Neutrons turn sodium into sodium-24 - a monstrous beast with a 15-hour half life, and short half-life means extremely intense radiation.
This. This is why *you don't do in-seawater detonations*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRQIi.jpg)
Now, you didn't detonate a Nagasaki bomb. You detonated about a million of those worth. Well, OK, about 300 megatons, so about 13,000 Nagasaki bombs. That is a lot of sodium-24.
## The survey crew is already dead.
Just from *even thinking about* going anywhere near that radioactive mega-soup only 6 hours later.
Honestly, they're probably already dead simply by being within 6 hours' sailing range of it.
Fortunately, half-life is exponential. The nastiest customer, sodium-24, is down to half in 15 hours, down to 1/4 in 30 hours, 1/8 in 45 hours and 1/16 in 60 hours. 120 hours is 1/256 (that's 5 days). 1/1024 happens in 150 hours (6.25 days).
Of course you detonated *13,000 times as much* - so you'll have that much more material created in the first place. Figure more like 2-1/2 weeks to safely enter the area.
The *Nagato* took damage, but nothing that threatened its watertightness. The problem was, the radiation was so severe that it was impossible for crews to repair trivial leaks, so it sank in 5 days. The German cruiser *Prinz Eugen* sank the same way, though it took a few months (the contaminants were other elements).
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\* Able and Baker were simply the military phonetic codes for the letters A and B. Now called Alpha and Bravo.
[Answer]
Water is routinely used to store in a safe way radioactive materials like those present in a working nuclear reactor, like Randall Munroe tells in one of his [What it](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
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> Spent fuel from nuclear reactors is highly radioactive. Water is good for both radiation shielding and cooling, so fuel is stored at the bottom of pools for a couple decades until it’s inert enough to be moved into dry casks. We haven’t really agreed on where to put those dry casks yet. One of these days we should probably figure that out.
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Based on the above, I don't think it's particularly dangerous, as long as the crew don't ingest water or other substance present in loco.
Considering that in your case the radioactive sources won't be concentrated in a single place but diluted in water, water which will be hot from the radiation and thus it will move up creating a circulation, the crew could simply pad the vessel with clean water to reduce the risks. A wall of water bottles give already more than the 7 cm mentioned above. Of course, since the problem lays in the cumulative dose, they better not slack down there.
[Answer]
Frame challenge:
There is no reason to send people in the extremely confined vessels needed to survive such depths. Just send down a robot on a tether and even if it does get dangerously irradiated (as other answers have said, an unlikely proposition) it can just be cut free and join the rest of the debris.
[Answer]
Radioactivity decays to roughly 10% within 7 hours and 1% within 48 hours [https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout][1] but given the intensity of the bombardment substantial radioactivity would remain. That said the crew would be substantially protected.
The radioactive area would (presumably) have covered several square km of the seafloor to ensure a hit and due to targeting inaccuracy. After 6 hours thermal plumes would have spread the radioactive plume into a rising column and dispersed it sideways to a more limited extent. The resulting volume of contaminated sea water would be vast.
Water is very good at blocking radiation so only the tiny proportion of sea water within a few metres of the pressure vessel would present a hazard and that would be a very tiny proportion of the entire irradiated volume.
But even radiation coming from a few metres away would be greatly reduced. Alpha and beta radiation would be blocked entirely and the very thick pressure vessel would provide considerable protection from gamma radiation.
So not the sort of mission I would want to go on, but I suspect the crew would be ok. A bigger problem would be seeing anything as the fine sediment would turn the water above the sea floor into liquid mud that would take a very long time to settle.
[1]: <https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout>
[Answer]
I once stood on the edge an what looked very much like a deeper than average swimming pool and looked down at the blue glow coming from some old fuel rods. It was a bit freaky, but the people who ran the reactor assured me it was safe, as long as I didn't jump in and swim too close to the rods.
Of course, spent fuel rods are probably a lot less radioactive than the remains of a heavily nuked nuclear powered giant robot. I'd recommend radiation meters on booms extending out the bottom, front, and sides of any crewed submersibles, since "too close" won't be very easy to define in a debris field like this.
[Answer]
Frame Challenge:
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> nuked to pieces by three hundred approximately half-megaton thermonuclear warheads
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> visually verify Jormungandr's destruction
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A single nuke will not destroy anything but literally vaporise it into nothingness. A hydrogen bomb even more so. If such a warhead goes off in close proximity to you, there are zero chances of survival/escape. You exist and in a split second you entire molecular structure is catastrophically obliterated.
As such: 300 nukes/h-bombs are ridiculous overkill and there is nothing that will remain. Perhaps little metal dust, sprinkled over the ocean floor, but nothing to be visually verified.
[Answer]
## Probably very dangerous
The example of nuclear fuel rods in a storage pool has been raised - but nuclear fuel rods are **self-contained**. They don't leak radioactivity into the water.
[Operation Wigwam](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/70-years-ago-the-us-military-set-off-a-nuke-underwater-and-it-went-very-badly) seems like a reasonable comparison, with only minor contamination of personnel in heavily shielded ships 5 km downwind of the blast site 2000 feet below the surface. Nonetheless, it is *also* an incomplete analogy, because the nuclear blast had to propel its own radiation all the way to the surface.
In your case, you are setting off a nuclear bomb, blasting the fallout into a wide sphere of superheated water that starts heading off to the surface. Then you propel that with *another* blast beneath it, and another, and another, all churning up and mixing seafloor sediment and nuclear material, and creating a plume of hot water pulses moving in a train toward the surface.
You can *get* the crew to go down and check, by telling them the reactor pond story and gimmicking their Geiger counters, and the shielding of the sub should help them get some distance down, but make sure they hurry to send that data up a communications link!
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[Question]
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I am writing a story about an extreme meritocracy that applies artificial selection and eugenics to humans. This society (called Sophia) views intelligence as the most important trait to have. Almost everyone in Sophia does whatever they can to maximize the knowledge, brainpower, and wisdom of themselves.
The Sophian Government has a highly elite reproduction program. All children at the age of 9 have to take a comprehensive test that measures IQ and other intellectual capabilities. Only the top 10% of boys and top 70% of girls are expected to pass the test (there is a different target score for each sex). All the boys who didn't pass get chemically neutered; all the girls who didn't pass get chemically spayed. The sterile boys and girls are effectively a new *gender* societally speaking and do all of the less valuable jobs in Sophia. Physically demanding jobs that are too hard for eunuchs or women are handled by either robots or farm animals. The breeders get all of the leadership positions and valuable jobs. The highest performing breeders and sterile folks are part of a political circle that determines how the country is run.
The breeders who do pass the test sexually reproduce during their teens and 20s; afterwards they use IVF to maximize reproduction. All offspring are raised by hospitals, then daycare centers, and finally boarding schools. Many children have no idea who their parents are.
Adults in Sophia do whatever they can to become pioneers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and art. Events similar to the Nobel Prize are the most important ceremonies in the country. Anyone that makes a great invention or discovery or magnum opus gets immortalized in a national hall of fame. Sophia is supposed to be the most technologically and mathematically advanced nation in its world. Sophia has a command economy ran by oligarchs. Sophia has mostly modern technology, but they're more advanced than real life Earth in a few areas (like having artificial wombs and advanced AI).
So my question is can a hierarchical society where humans are selectively bred similar to animals (only worthy specimens reproduce and the rest are sterilized) to maximize intelligence, function without fatal biological or sociocultural flaws?
[Answer]
## No the society would be doomed to corruption and scientific stagnation.
This has been tried multiple times and the results are always the same, it becomes an autocracy of the test writers. Your system is anti-science not pro-science. Science can be practiced by anyone it is a methodology not an ideology. see late imperial, China or the USSR as examples. Science cannot function if it is exclusive to elites. Test based meritocracies always fail because test taking is not merit. So you are not even breeding for the right thing.
**Science is messy**
To get the most scientific advancement you want science being practiced by more of the population not few "elites". Many of the most influential scientists in history would have failed out of your system and been denied access. They disagreed with the standing consensus or were ignorant of it, they specialized on one field and were ignorant of others, they had horrid literary skills or struggled with math. You also have how important argument and debate is in science, science is not about memorizing the correct answer it is about discovering the most correct answer, can you jury rig a method when there is no good method not can you solve the same example problem you have solved a million times. Science is messy and requires the ability to fail and encourage new approaches. Using the known approaches only gets you the known answers, it can't innovate. Innovation comes from people thinking outside the box, which you can't test for, worse if you try to you just create an autocracy. people who know the "correct" out of the box answer advance and people who actually think outside the box fail.
**You are falling for the myth of the lone genius scientist and its just not how science works. The more people you teach science the faster it will advance.**
Lets also consider how many scientists have atypical neurology and classifiable learning disorders. More scientists leads to more advancements in science, excluding such people would just reduce scientific development. A million mediocre scientists can do far more than ten elite scientists. Even better a thousand specialists can advance information faster than a thousand generalists, more scientists allow for more specialization. There is a lot of trial and error and collective action in science. Science is a collaborative action, and you need more people. Ask a scientists and they will tell you their science lack bodies not quality. There is also a lot of experimentation in science , more scientists means more and different experiments. many advancements in science were accidents but even those that were not were the product of many hands.
[Answer]
No... But for a different reason then what anyone else has suggested.
This will lead to a lot of dead babies. And other serious problems... But not interestingly enough because of inbreeding or genetic problems. Something similar-ish has been done before. In Romania.
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### Hospitals
I think it was Romania that tested this out. They had a perceived population shortage, so the government started encouraging people to have babies, and then stuck all of those unwanted babies the parents couldn't afford into orphanages to raise the future generation by the state for the better of the state.
A large percentage of the babies died, because they were not held enough. An even large percentage were severely impaired because they didn't have the interactions between a mother and her child that are required for brain stimulation and growth. (An aside the increased rate of non-maternal care corelates strongly with the increased rates of autism.)
The caregivers I assume are going to be made up of the population that has been sterilized? They will likely be extremely abusive towards the children (The Romanian nurses/orphanage staff were at least). Which will teach the older children that survive to be physically abusive to the younger children.
If I wanted to create a dystopian hell that lasts one generation as the second one is a horde of feral, psychotic , and mentally impaired young people, this is one of the ways that I would do it.
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Your system would make people who are maximally adapted to the system.
Sophia is effectively implementing [hill-climbing optimization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing). Eventually the system itself becomes the limiting factor that hinders eg. variance that is needed to avoid getting stuck in [local maxima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing#Local_maxima). You would be getting one trick ponies, smug ones.
Freer societies without such fixed goal and strict selection would eventually surpass Sophia as they can better avoid this and develop novel features that sometimes start with subpar performance.
[Answer]
To address just the question in the title: "Can selective breeding maximize human intelligence without major complications?" - no, not with the setup you've suggested.
Selection for *any* trait is highly likely to also select for undesirable traits. For example, selective breeding for red tomatoes also produces worse tasting tomatoes. No-one wanted those bad tasting tomatoes but consumers liked to buy nice bright red tomatoes, so that's what sold, so that's what breeders produced. If you breed for intelligence only, you're likely to co-select for a host of negative traits. In the real world, in order to deal with this you have to carefully track lineages and select pairings to breed out these negative traits and breed in the traits you want but, in your world, society is deliberately destroying lineage information.
And, unless you're selecting for exactly what you want you're probably not going to succeed: for example, in your case you're not actually selecting for intelligence, you're selecting for *intelligence at age 9* rather than intelligence. The best way to produce that isn't being smarter as an adult, it's developing faster as a child; and those may well be opposing traits, as well as being likely to produce negative side effects in terms of skeletal development, etc.
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I think the societal complications would be more dire than the biological ones.
I get it- you just want to focus on the biological health complications. However, Major Complications is pretty open phrase. Yes, I think neutering 90% of the male population and spaying 30% of the female population would lead to major societal complications.
1. Like the 60 percent of the population told that they couldn't have kids because they were "too stupid", eventually trying to overturn the government.
2. Parents would do anything to make their kids succeed in that system, and that would lead to desperate actions.
3. The way you describe Sophia seems to push towards a fairly narrow definition of intelligence, I am not saying this definitively, because you say "philosophy, and even art". Just generally speaking you seem to want only scientists, mathematicians and engineers in this society. As much as I admire the accomplishments of these groups, I think it may result in an imbalance.
(I have a slight detour to go on with my answer.
Generally society would want to foster intelligence to be as broad as possible. One of the reasons is we haven't yet defined everything that defines intelligence.
So far Eugenics movements, have probably resulted in more intelligences being discriminated out of the picture more than they have resulted in them being nurtured. Great scientists and thinkers were forced to leave Nazi Germany, for example. Einstein is the prime example.
In a book called "Neurotribes" I came across some interesting facts. The author intended to talk more about autism and the approaches people have had to it, and societal perceptions about it. He pointed out that some famous scientists such as Henry Cavendish who innovated precise measurement devices to calculate the Earth's mass and density in 1798, could not tolerate social company. In fact, Cavendish's idiosyncratic behaviour was probably somewhat ridiculed in his time, and wouldn't have been entertained were he not a) well-off b)and a great scientist. I think what the author Silberman was pointing out, is that we don't always identify correctly what is intelligence in society. He pointed out that Asperger, the foundational figure that studied autism in children, understood that high functioning autistic kids had completely unrecognized talents, and were about to be exterminated by Eugenics. However, the idea that intelligence often goes unidentified because we define it one way or the other- that goes for whether it is a scientific contribution or some other field.
Obviously Cavendish is only one type of genius, and it is hard to say whether he would succeed in all types of intelligence tests. It illustrates the point, which goes equally well for the "humanities" or the "art" genius, is that intelligence is unpredictable. Obviously social and emotional genius exists as well. People like that push conventional definitions.
I personally agree with the premise that if the definition of intelligence behind your eugenic system is too narrow and judges people too quickly, it will eliminate potential. )
That doesn't mean your idea for a story won't get into some complex issues, as long as you address the problems. Maybe Sophia would have a resistance movement?
[Answer]
# Standardized testing is not effective at measuring intelligence
The entire premise of this society is eugenics based on [standardized testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardized_test). A quick read through that article should tell you why that is an unworkable idea; not just all the problems with making sure the test is truly "fair" to takers from different backgrounds, but simply measuring something like "intelligence" through one narrow means is not possible.
But there's a second, even bigger problem.
The oligarchs are the ones writing the test. They are also the ones with the most resources to educate and coach their children to pass it (you say that the children have no idea who their parents are, but ruling-class parents certainly would). Something as simple as preferential funding for the creches in the rich parts of the country where the oligarchs' children are assigned would tip the scales more every generation.
Your advanced society would be better off nurturing the intellectual development and opportunity of all its members, rather than attempting to crudely select the "best."
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I see no reason why it shouldn’t work.
Sure, it could lead to uprising of the suppressed second class and other social problems. Sure, you are only selecting for performance at a test while 9 years old (not actual scientific accomplishments, problem solving, working capability (in a team) and the like). Sure, you’ll probably have some negative traits like bigger heads which makes natural births more difficult and risky. In a state like the one you envisage other unavoidable negative traits like having a higher resting metabolism probably won’t matter.
But just look how much humans changed lots of species in just a few generations. Dogs, tomatoes, canola, corn … Suddenly a few points more on an intelligence score doesn’t look all that difficult.
[Answer]
## Inbreeding
Apart from the problems others have pointed out, there is one very serious problem that is going to undermine any other advantage your system could have (and I think it has very few advantages).
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Let's say that when this policy was first implemented, you start with a normal reproductive pool. You then remove 90% of boys and 30% of girls via chemical castration from the pool. Next generation is going to be born from a much smaller pool of parents. Then you again remove 90% of boys and 30% of girls from the already smaller genetic pool. And so on, every new generation.
By the way, if your eugenics program is supposed to produce smarter population, why aren't higher percentages of boys and girls passing the test? Or is the test getting harder each time?
Anyway, even though your population may be stable, your genetic pool will be constantly shrinking. Pretty soon you will be getting serious problems from inbreeding (including problems with intelligence) that will far outweigh any benefits you could otherwise get from this system.
The problem could be offset from influx of fresh genes from intelligent immigrants into Sophia, but I imagine other places in your world will have different values and I doubt many people will find the idea of moving into a country where their children are taken away from them at birth very appealing.
So your country is either heading towards a complete collapse, or a major social unrest leading to the abandonment of the system.
[Answer]
#### Unlikely
Intelligence is a combination of personal abilities and education. Even the widely used IQ test in the style of [Mensa](https://www.mensa.org/) are greatly affected by the quality of the education. So much that when the quality of basic education made a great improvement between the '30s and the '70 the scores of the tests used in that period had to be regularly adjusted. In such a society all the parents naturally would do anything they can to provide their childer the best education. This could cause two problems. The result would be skewed depending on who can afford the best teachers. The children would be put under pressure even more than what happens in the Chinese society.
Intelligence can have a lot of different characters. Children and also adults learn best when an argument catches their fantasy and their attention. Only when all the conscious and all the unconscious processes in the brain are put together to work on something we can produce some good insights. But this attention is not something you can get by force, it is spontaneous and different for each person depending on the attitude and the existing memories. Different arguments trigger different attention and different intelligence for each person. Measuring intelligence is impossible. In such circumstances the development of the society would not be determined by intelligence as a quality, but by the way they decide to measure intelligence. I mean that the measurement method itself would be more important than the measured quality.
Conformism. Given what is at stake the members of such society would be afraid of looking stupid if they said something that does not match the common opinion. Creativity would be suppressed and progress would be slow or non-existent. Well actually here you could put a plot twist. Those who think they have an established position and feel safer may also become eager to speak their mind. So the unusual feature would be a society were the old people are the most creative.
Super intelligence is unlikely. Evolution is slow. Simply rewiring the instincts built in our brain should be one of the traits easier to change. Humans began to live in cities about 10000 years ago. More than 3000 years ago the majority of the population was living in cities or villages with a population of at least 100 individuals. But our instincts are still tuned for the creatures who lived in small tribes. If instincts take more than 3000 years to develop you can easily imagine that super intelligence would require at least 10000. Usually societies reach their decadent phase much earlier.
Final thought. The usual conundrum of nature against nurture. We really don't know how much is owed to one or the other. But I can bet that we owe to nurture a lot more than what you think.
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**No**
As other users pointed out the selection method is error prone and on the long term it could backfire in many different ways. Too many different ways. Would a society of intelligent people choose such a blunt and rough method? Doubtful, very doubtful.
Chances are that those who chose to shape a society in this way were not intelligent, but obsessed with intelligence. Their offspring selected in this way would have the same feature, more obsessed with intelligence than intelligent. Thus they would not be able to maximise intelligence.
[Answer]
Yes and No.
On the Yes front - you've got for example the Ashkenazi Jews - who on *average* are a whole standard deviation smarter than the average person. This is a rather contentious topic - but some theories put it as a combination of factors:
* Jews tend to date/marry other Jews
* There have been a number of events that have put, shall we say, 'evolutionary pressure' on Jews - for example Mid-century Germany and Russia - and therefore only the smart survived.
* Strong, two-parent families and a culture of excellence.
So - from this point of view, yes, I think it is entirely possible that your society would produce intelligent offspring.
However - this line:
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In my opinion would absolutely undo all that genetic work.
Now, I don't have the scientific data to hand to back this up per-se and I'm inferring a lot from a number data sets and combining it with my own experience as both a child and a parent.
I do not care how good your daycare system is, there is a biological and emotional investment that a Parent has in the wellbeing of their child that a stranger quite simply does not have.
Children know that on an instinctual level and as a parent, you know it too - because your children are part you. There are aspects of your personality/psyche that only you are privy to, that you can see manifest in your children and allows you to connect with them in a way that other people simply can't.
Then you have the issue of knowing *who* you are in the world. A bunch of super-smart people with an existential crisis about who their parents are - that sounds like a recipe for disaster - I don't think you can create a cultural or legal prohibition against this strong enough to deter it.
Case in point - in countries where they throw people off of buildings for being Gay, there are still people that are Gay.
As a parent, when my daughter was struggling to learn to read - yes, the Teachers were doing all they could - but a Teacher is responsible for 20-30 other children. It was Me, the Parent who is only responsible for 1 other child (at the time) that sat down every evening for an hour or so, making my child read - I did it because I want the best for my child - and I can assure you, whilst the best teacher also wants the best for my child - it's like comparing the hunger for your favorite food between someone who just ate and someone whose been starving on a desert island for a week.
My level of investment in my child is **SIGNIFICANTLY** higher than any institution or job or 3rd party can ever produce.
So - to recap:
Yes, I think that the premise of high-IQ people being paired with other high-IQ people to produce high-IQ offspring is reasonably sound (with a real world example to point to) - the disconnecting of a child from their biological parent will, IMO, be contrary to the desired outcome.
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[Question]
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Overall setting -- "loosely future Earth," say a hundred years from now, with plausible levels of realism (doesn't have to be perfect, but should feel familiar and match intuition). Climate change was not averted, sea levels rose, technology fell back somewhat (due to reductions in population, social upheaval, and so on) but the living memory of what was, still remains.
But this story takes place in Miami FL (or some other coastal city with similar characteristics). The median elevation of Miami, according to google, is about 6 feet -- so if we get 30 feet of sea level rise, the ground is underwater, but most of the taller buildings are still "dry," with only the bottom few floors submerged.
We'll handwave and say something was invented to treat the concrete in those buildings, so they're still standing, although everything in them was ruined. But I want to use these handwave credits as rarely as possible.
Now what I really want is for a small population of people to live in the upper floors of these skyscrapers, doing light aquaculture and basically just having a new and peaceful start, including the little society being stable enough to raise children. I think I understand how they can get fresh water (solar still) and keep out of the elements, but what I'm stuck on is the predators.
Pythons fill the Everglades and are just completely terrifying. I think I could believe that alligators can't climb stairs, but pythons can climb anything, swim for miles, and are just completely silent until they're, you know, eating your kids in their sleep. Not great!
So, uh, how do I keep pythons out in this situation? The "housing" is more or less open-to-the-breeze, since the windows and so on would be completely blown out decades ago, so I wouldn't think you could physically keep them out. I could hand-wave and say a snake repulsion system was invented, but it doesn't seem as plausible as "the concrete was hurricane-proofed and strengthened" and I'd rather come up with something more plausible, and preferably something that can be done in a straightforward manner by the people currently living there.
(I will say pythons is what I'm most worried about, and to a lesser extent other snakes, but there are plenty of other pests that could conceivably take up residence in these buildings and make them hard to inhabit for a peaceful human society)
[Answer]
What's the actual problem? It doesn't sound like these are mutant super-pythons, just regular ones. Hundreds of millions of people live in areas with lots of deadly snakes. Consider rural India. They do just fine. If there's a deadly snake in your house, you run away or you kill it with a shovel or something. Or a pet mongoose. Occasionally someone will die to a snake, but that doesn't disrupt their way of life. Also, doors exist, and you can board up windows or nail chicken wire across them. Or build enclosed snake-proof houses inside the skyscraper.
Sure, snakes *can* climb the skyscraper. If they're really motivated and all the windows are blown out, they can coil around the open window frames (assuming the remaining shards of broken glass in the frames don't stop them). But it's really high and a lot of work. And why would the snake go to that effort and trouble, when there's plenty of prey down in the wetlands, and not much in the skyscraper until you get to the humans on the upper stories, who will actually just kill the snake? Probably not too many snakes would bother to go up that high.
[Answer]
## Pythons are a total non-issue.
Human fatalities from non-venomous snakes are exceedingly rare, on the order of single digits worldwide annually. Many incidents involve captive snakes, that is, people who are killed by snakes that they are purposefully in close contact with. In the US, you are many times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a non-venomous snake.
[According to the USGS](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/us/pythons-florida-invasive-species.html), there is not even a *single* documented case of a human being killed by a wild python in Florida. The notion that a wild python will slip through your window and eat your kid is complete fantasy - you're trying to prevent something that has literally never occurred.
Living in a flooded, dilapidated skyscraper in a setting of post-societal collapse, you have far better things to worry about than snakes. It's not even worth addressing, you're probably more likely to die by trying to board up the windows and getting a cut that becomes infected.
[Answer]
# Ammonia
First I'll echo other answers in saying that pythons aren't really a threat to people living in a partially submerged skyscraper. This is because:
1. Pythons are slow ambush predators. This is quite easy to guard against when the humans control the terrain.
2. The pythons would need other prey nearby to have a reason to try to infiltrate the buildings in order to be a problem. While they could climb the building, doesn't mean that they will.
3. Only the largest pythons could be successful in eating even a small human.
4. Being aware of the danger will be sufficient to protect the majority of the population.
All that being said, snakes hate the smell of ammonia. Just having a floor where the humans soak the rugs with an ammonia based cleaner will be enough to get most snakes to go somewhere else.
[Answer]
## Hunt Them
A large python will weigh over 150 lbs.
Feral pigs are also endemic in Florida and eat basically anything.
Hunt the pythons and feed them to the domesticated pigs you have living a few floors above you.
(or eat them yourselves - in the US people eat rattlesnake all the time. I don't know how it compares to python, but it's probably similar.)
[Answer]
**Dogs**
A pack of dogs would be very unhappy with any snake that turned up and would try and kill it.
The snake might get one dog but a pack will get the snake.
At worse, the pack will tell every human around where the snake is.
[Answer]
This embeds some interesting questions about post-human ecology.
1. What would the landscape look like after sea level rise?
2. And would Burmese pythons be common?
3. And would they come into conflict with people?
4. Why are pythons terrifying?
---
1. There is an interactive online map of Miami under sea level change from NOAA. Florida becomes a chain of small islands surrounded by a shallow sea, presumably with a lot of mangroves.
<https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/6/-8235844.974374185/3252795.60132913/5/satellite/none/0.8/2050/interHigh/midAccretion>
2. Pythons would thrive. The exotic Burmese python is doing well in Florida and apparently thrives in mangroves and saltwater.
<https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/study-finds-everglades-pythons-like-saltwater-mangroves-as-much-as/2227312/>
3. Would they come into conflict with people? Would there be much prey around the buildings? They might be attracted by pets and livestock. People wading through aquaculture ponds might trigger an attack. Lower levels of tower blocks might be used during storms as refuges and routinely as basking spots and to digest. However the chances of an attack seem very low, compared to risk from venomous species such as the Florida cottonmouth and the dusky pygmy rattlesnake.
<https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-large-constrictor-snakes-such-burmese-pythons-able-kill-people-what-risk-would-be-wild-or>
<https://www.captainmitchs.com/venomous-snakes-in-the-everglades/>
4. So why do (your/our) humans find pythons terrifying? The thread dips into a primeval fear of snakes - Ophidiophobia. This is psychological. How are the future views of snakes shaped that make them so terrifying?
Are pythons revered as oracles as in Greek mythology and the legends of Delphi? <https://mythopedia.com/topics/python>
Or are they the creator of mankind as per the San people and Tsodilo?
<https://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2006/python-english.html>
And how do you react when a real snake enters your home or ....?
[Answer]
## Which critters?
The event that destroyed the town not only sunk it, it also left the place a horrible toxic wasteland. Maybe the closeby chemical plant turned the basin into a caustic brew that eats whatever is in the water. Humans with their tools can adapt and just bridge over it and clean the water, but animals and critters would need to be transported into the town that uses the skyscrapers as stilts and foundations.
Because the contaminated water does not let snake-food critters get to the skyscrapers, and it kills snakes, there will be no snakes in the ruined skyscrapers.
[Answer]
Pythons can swim, true, but they have barely enough buoyancy to stay afloat.
This means that if you manage to cover enough surface of the water with something less dense, you could keep them under water.
Probably the most useful substance would be some oil, and you would need to create a sort of floating fence to keep the oil around the places you want to protect. In this way:
* the layer of oil would keep the python submerged, where sooner or later they would suffocate
* the oil sticking to the body of the python would make climbing a wall much more difficult
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[Question]
[
On earth, most animals live decades, and only a handful over 100 years. What has led to such a 'short' lifespan across the board?
Assuming there may be other carbon-based life forms similar to that of earth on other planets, would they also be limited to shorter lifespans, or is it possible to have a species that might live 100,000 or even a million years? Is there anything theoretical limit/reason that might prevent this? Let's say 'years' in earth years for convenience.
**EDIT:**
When I said life forms, I really meant 'animals'. In other words, multicellular, complex, macro organisms such as mammals.
\*\* EDIT 2: \*\*
Adding some more context. Initial description wasn't detailed enough, that's on me, but here goes. I'm thinking that in a universe that FTL travel isn't possible (no wormholes, hyperspace or what have you, you're just limited to travel through space good old style), the only real way for interstellar travel is generation ships, OR, if animals can live a long time. So, in that context, I mean 'animal' in the sense that a species that's not stationary like a plant but something that is intelligent and can move about and do space travel.
[Answer]
A problem with such a life form: how would it come into existence? Evolution requires production of new generations with varying characteristics and selection of those characteristics by environmental pressures. Even if individuals are biologically immortal, they must be competing with their progeny. Such an extended lifespan would suggest that they're an evolutionary dead end, either no longer reproducing or unable to produce offspring more fit for the environment than they are.
You might get around this with a colonial species, where the colony has an identity separate from that of its individual members. A colony could maintain a distinct identity across so many generations that its members become a different species.
[Answer]
## It's a plant
The entity you are looking for will in some way be akin to trees on earth. Redwoods and oaks are known to be able to get older than 200 years, and with the right circumstances, such an organism could grow for about a millennium or way more in perfect conditions. Plant-based lifeforms have a lot of benefits that non-plants don't have: they don't need to consume other lifeforms to feed themselves, and they only require soil, carbon-dioxide, and light.
If the metabolism of our tree is right, then it consists of hundreds of thousands of trees that are symbiotically linked and share - not just nutrients and sugar, but also possibly memories. Such a tree-hive might swap its constituting trees, but as a whole stay the same mental being!
Or... in other words: [Welcome to Alpha Centauri, where mind worms want to merge you to the planet's mind.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri)
[Answer]
In theory there is no reason why a very long life span should not be possible from a chemical perspective. It should be possible to create an entity that has sufficient repair mechanisms to repair any damage done by radiation or other forms for degradation.
However although theoretically possible such a repair mechanism would come at a high cost and would not in practice occur.
The primary issue being that living organisms are subject to death by accident, such as falling off a cliff, drowning, being eaten by a predator etc. This means the life expectancy of an organism is limited and genes that provide an advantage in youth but a disadvantage in old age would spread though the population. This is simply because there will be so many more younger organisms.
So in principle it should be possible to create a body that has sufficient repair mechanisms to live to a great age, but in practice these repair mechanisms are likely to be weeded out by evolution that will prefer the younger body that does not have the "expensive" repair mechanism overhead that can efficiently reproduce before death.
[Answer]
# Age limits because of limits
Life, ageing and dying all revolve around limits.
First of all, any animal has a limited amount of adaptability to it's environment. This is important, as over time the environment changes. They can easily die off if they cannot adapt, or adapt quick enough to such changes. To reproduce (and die) is thus a great way to stay current with these changes.
Second is resources. We see that in nature a delicate balance emerges. There's fewer tigers than antelopes for this reason. The antelopes have less limits in food and foraging area than a tiger. If we couple the resource limit with needing to stay current with your environment, it makes sense to remove older less adapted creatures.
We can cheat a little for longer lifespans. If for some reason the metabolic rate is much lower, we can increase the lifespan. Imagine a complex lifeform that needs to wait a month for the next piece of food. Or one powered by sunlight like an intelligent tree. As life would be slower on average to survive, so would the amount of time given to reproduce.
If we plug in the formula we can reverse to the point of longevity in complex animals.
They need to be highly adaptable, able to adapt their environments to a huge degree, or able to adapt themselves. That way any changes in environment or themselves can be overcome. This reduces the need for reproduction, which reduces the need for dying to make space.
They need to reproduce incredibly slowly, or basically not at all. As mentioned, spawning new generations makes that you hit limits in resources. Something has to die if such limit is reached. If you hit this limit much more slowly you can live much longer.
As an extreme example, imagine space faring humans. They go from planet to planet gathering plenty of resources. They create their own environment wherever they go, while they use DNA technologies to adapt their (partially) biological form for the rest. Adapting seamlessly from long 0g space flights to the high gravity of a super Earth. They have little need to reproduce, though they can over time. They could live thousands of years without hitting limits.
# Conclusion
You need creatures that are able to adapt their environment and/or themselves to a high degree. If this is reached, the rest will follow over time. Less reproduction and less need for death to keep everything within limits. Or to quote a fictitious purple alien: "Perfectly balanced, as all things should be."
[Answer]
This may also depend on what you count as an individuum.
Just as we outlive our indiviudal cells, an ant colony outlives its individual ants (Douglas Hofstadter once played in "Gödel Escher Bach" with the idea of an ant colony being an intelligent individuum whose opinions may diverge from the opinions of its constituents). And if we consider ourselves "cells" of the "individuum" homo sapiens, then the life span is already quite long. At the extreme, you may consider "Earth bound carbon based life" as "individuum"
[Answer]
### Qualified yes
The primary thing that's keeping humans from living forever is actually a molecular clock. If we can re-bind our telomeres, then we could theoretically live forever, except ...
#### Molecular clutter
As a side effect of our chemical processes, a lot of clutter accumulates in our cells. The worst case of this is Kuru (laughing sickness), where a protein gets bent in the wrong way, then starts recruiting other proteins to do the same thing. Our systems don't know how to clean it out, so fingernail-like plaque slowly fills up your brain cavity.
There are a LOT of things that build up in our cells. Sci-fi usually deals with this via nanotech or teleportation, but that involves intervention.
A natural way to avoid this is to have a high rate of cell division, diluting this clutter faster than it can accumulate. This involves a very high metabolism, and requires that ALL of our living cells duplicate, including the brain and bones, and that we have some mechanism for flushing the worst of them.
#### Gene police
Your creature would need a gene police to make sure it stays the same creature. This is similar to how we currently eliminate most encoding errors, which would otherwise result in cancer. We get cancer because our genetic auditing isn't adequate, and sometimes the cells find loopholes.
#### Phenotype regeneration
Just because your cellular structure can survive indefinitely doesn't mean that your spine would stay straight, or that accumulated damage to your knees won't cause bone spurs, or that your skin won't wrinkle. You'd need some chemical mechanism to ensure that your cells stay in a comparatively static shape, beyond mere regeneration of limbs.
So, overall, there's a lot preventing it, but for story purposes, it's nothing compared to overlooking the laws of thermodynamics, and that's endemic to most fiction.
[Answer]
Unlikely, simply because if you take away natural causes of death (aging, disease), you still have the unnatural ones (accidents etc.).
This [blog post](https://www.r-bloggers.com/2022/03/how-long-would-you-live-if-you-were-immortal/) I found estimates that if you made humans immortal, for example, the average life expectancy would "only" be about 2000 years. Obviously there would be outliers living far longer, but it would be very unlikely to have a million year old.
[Answer]
# Yes thousands, [generally not millions of years.](https://www.r-bloggers.com/2022/03/how-long-would-you-live-if-you-were-immortal/)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rRqra.png)
This is a graph of humans if we didn't die of age of diseases. Accidents are common enough that they'll wipe out most people over 10000 years.
Animals are likely to be more at risk of death from accidents, predation and such over a long period of time, and bad luck from weather is likely to spike the death rate at times.
As such, even assuming they are very disease resistant and can regenerate perfectly, they're likely to die before 100,000 years.
[Answer]
The question "what limits human aging" is an incredibly open question with all sorts of theories, ranging from telomere shortening to collective apoptosis.
Quote [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging),
>
> At present, researchers are only just beginning to understand the biological basis of ageing even in relatively simple and short-lived organisms such as yeast.[65] Less still is known of mammalian ageing, in part due to the much longer lives of even small mammals such as the mouse (around 3 years).
>
>
>
That said, [yes.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7387439)
[Answer]
Maybe not.
One reason suggested for limits to life spans of large animals is bacteria.
Consider that the DNA of a large animal is, very nearly, unchanged during its life. Thus, its immune system (or whatever it uses in place of one) changes minimally over its life.
Bacteria have a much shorter life span. While a human goes through one life, the bacteria around that individual goes through many thousands of generations. This means the bacteria evolves to better penetrate the immunes system over those thousands of generations.
Twenty thousand human generations is roughly 500K years. This is a substantial time for evolutionary purposes. It is getting us back close to the start of homo sapiens as a species.
The change in bacteria over a period of twenty thousand generations would be comparable. It is highly likely that an individuals with extended life spans would encounter bacteria that could simply brush aside their immune system.
With shorter life spans, it is an arms race. The large animal evolves along with the bacteria. Each generation of the large animal produces a re-shuffling of genes, and produces a whole new set of barriers for the bacteria to get over. Even if the large animal's immune system is not drastically *better* it is *different*. The bacteria that were busy adapting to Great Uncle Fred's bodily systems will suddenly encounter his niece little Frederica's systems. The protein coating on this is different, and the pH levels on that are different, and the temperature range of the other is different. So the bacteria can't get through. At least not right away.
An additional bacterial consideration is co-evolution of less severe versions of bacteria and viruses. When a new pathogen arises it is sometimes very lethal. Only a small number of hosts live. But this means that the more lethal forms of the pathogen wind up getting shut out by killing their hosts. So, with shorter life spans, hosts that can better fight off the pathogen come to be more common. And pathogens that don't kill their hosts become more common. This only works with life spans that are not too long. If the population of hosts does not reproduce, it simply gets used up, reduced with each passing plague.
So, for animals, life spans drastically longer than 100 years are a big challenge. You might get a few hundred years. But thousands is difficult indeed.
[Answer]
Well, yes and no.
There is at least one complex animal on Earth that may well be immortal: [Turritopsis dohrnii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii), aka the immortal jellyfish. They achieve this by being able to return to earlier stages of life, effectively winding back their biological clock under significant stress or old age. They revert to a phase analogous to a gamete cell and begin their life cycle over from there.
This reversion to a prior developmental stage isn't entirely unique, and there are other longevity mechanisms - such as DNA repair and increaded telomerase production - that we've observed in various animals from microscopic hydrae to some lobsters and even certain types of whale, all of which enjoy greatly extended lifespans compared to other similar animals. But "greatly extended" seems to have limits measured in centuries rather than aeons.
>
> What has led to such a 'short' lifespan across the board?
>
>
>
Well, that's a big question with lots of possible answers depending on which mechanism and species we look at and very few answers that we can definitely say are *true*. There are some trends we can look at though.
Long-lived species tend to be juvenile - i.e. incapable of breeding - for longer periods of time compared to short-lived ones. Replacing individuals lost to predation, accident or age is generally a more difficult process.
Not only that, but long generational delays - the time between birth and sexual maturity - means that any significant change in the environment results in much lower survival probabilities for the species. Where short-lived species can adapt via mutation and population diversity, long-lived species would have to be capable of extreme individual adaptation to remain viable.
And finally - on the reproductive viability list at least - long-lived species cannot expand to take full advantage of short-term resource blooms in their environment. Where short-lived species like mice and locusts can multiply their numbers and produce viable adults within a couple of months (for locusts) or 3-6 months (for mice), humans take well over a decade to reach first reproductive function. If we have a massive increase in resources it'll take us *decades* to expand to utilize it... by which time the billions of mice bred during that time will likely have consumed the resources.
And that's just one factor.
>
> Assuming there may be other carbon-based life forms similar to that of earth on other planets, would they also be limited to shorter lifespans, or is it possible to have a species that might live 100,000 or even a million years?
>
>
>
Odds are good that we're going to find vastly more short-lived examples of alien life than long-lived... and the chances of a non-engineered carbon-based life form with a natural life span exceeding 1,000 years seem fairly slim to me.
Why?
Well, we're talking about evolutionary processes here, so you'd need to find a significant survival advantage to such a life-span... and evolution appears to favor short-lived life. The vast majority of Earth's fauna have lifespans better measured in months or even days than years. Bacteria have life spans measured in hours, plankton in a small number of days, bees in weeks, ants can survive for maybe 2 years... and so on. Very few species have natural lifespans of more than a century, and only a handful of animal species (like, maybe 2 or 3) routinely live for more than 500 years.
So is it theoretically possible for a naturally-occurring quasi-immortal to arise from natural evolutionary processes? I guess so. But is it likely? Nope.
---
Oh, but wait... who says that it has to be natural? I present to you: [The Bandersnatchi](https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Bandersnatch). These beasties were created as a weapon in an ancient war against the Thrint Slavers several thousand years ago and are both exceedingly long-lived and genetically locked, incapable of change. They reproduce by budding, creating clonal copies of the original parent with no genetic differentiation: every Bandersnatch is genetically identical to every other.
[Answer]
## Yes
Fundamentally, living things live as long as they need to in order to maximise their fitness. On Earth this is usually very short, but can last a few hundred years. What drives this is rate of input of energy (and possibly other elements), body size, and the ability to successfully reproduce later in life.
What you need, then, for an alien lifeform to be exceptionally long lived is for it to be a large creature living on a world with low energy input - for example a world further from the star.
[Answer]
I can not comment, but multicellular, complex macro includes many more beings than mammals, which are a rather short-lived kind of animal. Also, we would possibly not have "animals" on other planets, as this is only a small branch of life which is defined biologically or how close those species are together/what evolutionary history they have in common. Out of the three kingdoms of *Bacteria*, *Eucariota* and *Archea*, animals are one small subset of the *Eucaryota*. We are closer to fungi than they are to plants -- and both are already rather complex kinds of life.
So what is your meaning of "animals"? We could easily imagine plant or fungi-like organisms acting on their own behalf, and especially fungi can grow very old. Also consider the immortal suberite, which is a complex animal **here on earth** that lives millions of years -- but is far from the behaviour of a mammal.
If you are thinking about the organism's interaction with the environment, also think about the timescales of this interaction. It could be that we are just too short-lived to perceive the agenda of fungi ;). So those two cents on behalf of the hypothetical exo-biology; for worldbuilding, we could clearly imagine everything, but if it were animal in the taxonomical sense, they have a common ancestor with the animals we know.
[Answer]
Well, during such long lifespan, even if the creature manages to avoid predators, accidents, diseases, starvation, etc., radioactivity, high-energy radiation, viruses, random copy errors, chemicals, etc. all contribute to corrupt the DNA (or similar replicator) bit-by-bit until the accumulated damage eventually take the toll.
Even if the creatures can live for such long periods, evolution would be much slower than it already is on Earth, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the species to adapt to environment changes.
[Answer]
Yes it is **entirely possible**. This can be a result of **Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity**. Basically it states that **time slows down for an object moving at relativistic velocities, or for an object in a massive gravitational potential.**
So for a planet near a **black hole** (and by near I mean outside the **event horizon**), or for a planet moving at **relativistic velocities** compared to Earth (in the first case, the gravitational pull is massive, and in the second case, the planet is moving at relativistic speeds compared to Earth), **time slows down for that planet compared to Earth**.
This is also true for our Solar System, where for **Mercury** (which is **closer to the Sun** and hence the **gravitational force is more** for Mercury compared to Earth) **time passes slightly slower** on Mercury than on Earth.
Another example is for **satellites moving at high velocities** in Earth's atmosphere. The relative velocity of us humans present on Earth is **less** when compared to the **satellites moving at very high speeds**. Hence for a human present on the satellites (the ISS for example) time passes **slightly slower** compared to humans present on Earth (although the difference is very minute because the velocity of the satellite is not relativistic).
This can be easily extended to a **planet** which is just outside the **event horizon** of a **super massive black hole**. The gravitational pull of the black hole is **much more** than what us humans experience on **earth from the Sun**. Hence time will pass **very slowly** for any civilisation that might be present on such planets. (Although the only caveat is that the life present on such planets should have evolved to withstand high amount of radiation.)
Another possible scenario could for a solar system in which the **planets are moving at relativistic velocities** compared to earth. Hence for life present on such planets, **time would pass much slowly**.
In both the above cases, the **biological/chemical processes/ageing** for life present on such planets would proceed much more slowly and hence when compared to us humans, they would outlive us. Maybe for thousands of years or hundreds of thousands. It all depends on how **massive the gravitational pull** is or how **fast the planet** if moving.
This is a proven theory and experiments have been done to calculate what the time dilation would be if an object is moving at relativistic velocities. The only thing I am unsure about is whether time dilation also affects the ageing/biological processes of carbon based life forms. I think it will slow down the process but someone can correct me.
Anyways this is the only way I think a civilisation can outlive our life time. Forget any other civilisation, even if some humans escape our solar system at relativistic speeds and come back after some years, we would have long gone and they would come back to Earth where our off springs would greet them.
**Cheers!**
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[Question]
[
I'm writing a story at the moment where a griffin has imprisoned a lord while taking his castle as a new roost. Almost all the lord's men and servants have been disposed, therefore any kind of government in the region collapses. The griffin doesn't establishment any rule or government of its own, it just claims the castle as its territory.
**How would this affect the people, the villages and farms in the region?**
I know it sounds very story based but I'm trying to flesh out the area as much as I can and need help. It's set in the medieval era.
I have a few ideas so far but I need more.
* Bandits harassing and terrorising the people.
* The griffin threatening the farms for their livestock.
[Answer]
I would imagine that the neighbouring lords, weary themselves of being deposed by griffins, would want to nip this situation in the bud as soon as possible, and send a band of knights to the castle to slay the griffin and install a legitimate successor to the fiefdom.
As for the effects for the population on the ground, I would be cautious about immediately assuming a collapse into lawlessness and banditry. Certainly this is sometimes the result when government authority disappears, but it's actually far more common for communities to band together and provide mutual assistance to one another in times of uncertainty and hardship (this isn't me being idealistic, this is well borne out by proper historic analysis). In feudal societies, peasants owed tribute of agricultural produce and other services to their lords, and, frankly, got very little back in return. With the lord gone, it's very possible the population would find themselves in a much better position, and might even be motivated to band together to defend the griffin from any outside threats.
[Answer]
## During this time - villages were mostly self-sufficient, communication was poor, and farms were family business. The effect would oddly be minimal.
The medieval period, although we read of kings and queens, armies and conquest, was in essence a quiet, stable and traditional period for 'the ordinary folk'.
The authorities in England did not even know the assets, property or even a census of people until a momentous undertaking was ordered [such as in 1086 when William The Conqueror ordered the first census](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book) (so much work that it was never to be done again [until 800 years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_Owners_of_Land,_1873)).
Health was a major concern, eating, daily chores and farm-work was likely what you were concerned with. As such, your immediate local cultural environment was largely self sufficient.
Keep in mind too that you do not have the modern communicative ability as today - Literacy was terrible, most did not read nor write. Messages and news were verbally transmitted, sometimes by horse rider other times just by word of mouth. Considering this though, people were resourceful: If something broke down, they would fix it themselves - if they needed something built, they would build it.
One would imagine, although the news of your absent government would be interesting to hear, your day-to-day working might not be significantly affected.
[Answer]
**Bandits normally arose from two groups- displaced soldiers and nobles. Since both have been eliminated, banditry won't be common.**
People didn't normally just randomly mug people here and there. The primary danger to travelers and such were nobles and their armies mugging people. There's a fine line between paying a toll and robbery, and many local lords extracted a lot of cash this way. Bandits could arise other ways, like when an army was displaced and needed to supply itself, or when there was major social disruption, but none of that is happening here. You wouldn't expect bandits.
This is because people can band together and kill bandits. Without major firepower backing a group, they'll get wiped out. This is worse than usual, because there is a griffin going around eating people.
**There are several power blocks outside lordship that may take power.**
The church. Monasteries were tough, often fortified buildings. People loved holidays and often trusted the church. The church could organize the villagers, using their buildings as forts, and seek to make the area a stronghold.
Guilds. Local guilds were often economic power houses. If the area was wealthy enough they could hire mercenaries to protect themselves.
Veterans. Peasant levies were common. The local veteran soldiers could take over, promising protection
Nobles. As others have noted, a nearby lord could annex the land.
**The villagers will probably fort up and try to survive.**
There's a rampaging foe around. They'll probably try to harvest the fields, and slaughter their herds, and prepare to hide away from the griffin. They'll seek to get protection from anyone, and fortify core locations.
**They probably begin slaughtering or burning any food sources for the griffin.**
If they can starve it out, they can survive.
**They will consider fleeing with all the wealth of the local lord.**
Nobody wants to die.
[Answer]
**Power vacuum**
Instead of there being no government, you'd have a power vacuum that the villagers would work to fill. You'd expect to see self-organized groups of different kinds, either based on location (i.e. neighborhoods) or some other form of group identity (race, religion, occupation, etc.). [Modern motorcycle gangs](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6505941/) could give you an example of how well these non-governmental groups could be organized:
>
> Outlaw motorcycle clubs might be more able to act collectively than
> more informal groups because they are organized bureaucratically.
> Within chapters there are specialized roles for members and a
> hierarchy ranging from hang-arounds and prospects at the two lowest
> levels to a president at the top. Positions immediately subordinate to
> the president generally include a vice-president, a sergeant-at-arms,
> a secretary/treasurer and a road captain. The clubs usually have
> written rules including a club constitution.
>
>
>
Some of the groups that arise in the absence of a central government would be benevolent and work toward the common good (a la [the French resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_networks_and_movements_of_the_French_Resistance)). Others would be bandits. And plenty of groups would fall somewhere in the middle.
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For the purpose of this answer I am going to assume that you are not interested in the quite likely scenario that the king of the respective realm would simply grant the lands to other lords adjacent to the lands in question, but in the scenario of sudden and long lasting anarchy in a medieval setting.
The answer is, that you would basically rewind the social clock for some time, until it sooner or later reverts to its former state.
Humans are pack animals, our natural state of society is tribalism. Medieval peasants essentially lived in communities consisting of extended families. The loss of the central authority means that they all are now essentially tribal once more. There wouldn't be a sudden breakdown of public order because their communal structures are already in a self sufficient and natural social state.
So for a time things would improve for them: No longer do they have to provide labor for their lord; they can completely focus on themselves. No longer are there laws which forbid them to hunt wildlife or regulate their interaction with natural resources provided by forests and rivers. Life is good.
After some time however, certain problems will arise:
The peasant communities have enjoyed their newwon freedoms, cultivated their lands and did, what humans like to do most, namely procreate.
Young men are growing up and reach the age, at which they can start families of their own.
Before the griffin, most of them would have had to assist their father or their oldest brother as farmhands, ask the local lord for permission to marry a woman and hope that they are allocated a piece of land for them to cultivate on their own; otherwise they would have had to stay farmhands or ask for permission to go elsewhere.
Now, however, things are different. There is no longer a lord which is responsible for allocating the available land and enforcing the current allocation.
So the men happily stride out into every direction looking for new land to settle on... of which there is only a limited amount, if any. You can guess now in which direction we are going...
While the tribal structures, the peasants are living in, are most likely peaceful and stable INTERNALLY, their interaction with other tribes is not. At some point they will revert to what tribes have always done: warring with each other over resources.
The catalyst for the inevitable violence to come can be several things...
As mentioned before, maybe there are simply too many men who want their own land to cultivate...
Maybe there is local drought, flood or other natural disaster, which ruins the harvest for some communities. Without a lord to enforce the redistribution of food to the communities in distress and with other communities unwilling to share, things are bound to spiral downwards...
Maybe some communities resent being stuck with the more barren land and decide that things can only get better by taking someone else's land.
The possibilities are endless.
Basically, over time you will see history repeat itself: Tribes fight each other. Multiple tribes form clans to increase their power. Out of necessity they start allocating resources to a permanent warrior class, which is responsible for protecting their lands and conquering new ones.
The now extant warlords plot against and battle each other until one of them manages to subjugate all the others, at which point he decides to put on a fancy hat and grants himself a nice title. If only he hadn't forgotten about the griffin that doesn't like fancy hats and nice titles...
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No law enforcement means that it's not just a matter of bandits harassing the people: the people become bandits. Every man against his neighbour, every grudge and old score settled (on a personal, family and village basis), and you can take away anything you can carry with no risk of punishment.
Bad news for baliffs, tax collectors and other unpopular officials, probably bad news for the church and those famously overfed monks, and the prompt collapse of Society As We Know It.
Note also that the large proportion of people who are serfs now have nobody to keep them in order, and may either steal and plunder, simply stop working, or take advantage of the situation and flee to another area. They are certainly not goingto carry on working like good little slaves.
((And as a far-from-minor point, lords were frequently in conflict with their neighbours, occasionally involving bloodshed. Expect adjacent territories to shift boundaries and take over any rulerless villages they can snaffle 'to keep the peace' 'preserve good order which our neighbor has failed to do' etc ))
The whole economic basis of the region is undermined. Those trades which supply the local manor house or castle collapse; those trades which rely on the lord for protection (or their monopoly) go out of business, and then the ones that depend ont hem, and so on.
Of course, nobody is collecting tax, so there's no road or bridge maintenance, and whatever infrastructure there is will start to fail.
Everything might fall apart. Or the people might just decide they prefer it this way and reorganise themselves in a traditional medieval anarcho-syndicalist collective.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aHBBL.png)
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[
So, I decided to change subjects... for a little while.
I also have werewolves (they don't transform, though) in my meta-setting. Now, they're very much humanoid, though more wolflike in other areas than what you usually see in horror movies, especially their heads. Think of something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tgQd7.jpg)
Werewolves possess considerable strength (on par with [Alexander Zass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass)), but they're still limited by their size (190-200 centimeters tall) and mass to human levels.
Now, there is a move that can be employed against frenzied werewolves (aka: werewolves whose minds have temporarily regressed into an animalistic state). This move can only be practiced by the most badass characters as it involves shoving your arm down the creature's throat, but at least the maw. On paper, canines shouldn't have that much bite force, compared to hyenas and crocodiles, so with rigid plate armor it shouldn't leave a mark. The move was supposed to trigger a gag reflex while also constraining airflow.
However, as werewolves are still people, this move is only supposed to incapacitate or help with incapacitating them when they're feral, as fully sapient ones wouldn't try to bite.
**But would this move be less-than-lethal?** I mean, it has to be done with strength and I'm not sure how high is the risk of something vital breaking in the process.
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### Can someone survive a fist down their throat?
Yes. How do I know this? I googled really nasty pornography. If you need proof feel free to do the same. I decided against linking to any directly.
You need an arrow head shape made out of fingers with the thumb tucked into the palm. Trimmed fingernails are also a must.
Doing this in a hurry is also really dangerous, and with dry hands also seems really dangerous. Wet your hands (ideally with an oil or lube of some kind) before doing this to get some lubrication.
### Will it subdue them?
I doubt it, if anything it will probably enrage them.
Note just like the videos, the werewolves will be able to breathe through the nose with an arm down their throat, I don't know if it's a factor of depth or hand shape but it seems unlikely to be able to asphyxiate someone this way. They'll probably throw up or be able to pull away from your fist.
Even if you cut off their airway completely, they still have 10-15 seconds to pull away and free their airways. Unless you're pinning them down at the same time they can escape pretty easily.
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**What you'll have is one honking pissed-off werewolf**
Ignoring the fact that it's your world, I'll assume that the mechanics of the werewolf's jaw are similar to terrestrial wolves such that something as large as a human arm will force the back of the jaw apart, robbing the jaw of the strength needed to bite down and critically injure the defending human. By "critical" I mean loss of the arm. In other words, they'll not only survive, they'll probably keep the arm.
*But, honestly, now what?*
You're standing there with your arm down a werewolf's throat and you're looking at him... and he's looking at you... and the one thing you're absolutely sure of is that you have your arm down *one honking pissed-off werewolf's throat.*
It put's a whole new spin on the idea of having a tiger by the tail or a wolf by the ears. You know... you really can't hold on forever *but you're scared to death to let go.*
So, unless the defending human has the ability to grab hold of something vital and rip it out, instantly disabling the wolf... this is a *really bad idea.*
---
P.S. I really only looked at this from the perspective of the arm-down-the-throat. @Dragongeek's right, that doesn't stop the werewolf from whipping the defending human around like a rag doll (don't just think tug-o-war... think alligator death-roll). I'm also ignoring the fact that the wolf has four claw-laden paws that are now in close contact with the human and the human has basically nothing due to the loss of balance and the fact that the free arm is on the far side of his body, away from the wolf. No self-respecting werewolf hunter would ever let themselves get caught like this. It's a noobie mistake (which is why there are very few noobie werewolf hunters).
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**I don't think it's a good idea**
If you look at a video of canines eating a carcass, you'll note that their tooth and mouth structure isn't designed to bite off pieces but rather tear away pieces that are big enough to eat and then swallowing them. [In this video where wolves are eating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo3aEunJ6WE), you can see that they often engage in tug-of-wars with the meat they're trying to eat and twisting their heads to rip off pieces of flesh.
I think putting anything fleshy in a wolf-like creatures' mouth might trigger those eating reflexes and cause the creature to bite, twist, and pull instead of gag or be subdued. Unless your hero is very strong, they'd likely end up getting dragged around by the arm or end up with their body being the rope in a tug-of-war.
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It depends if the werewolf is fully transformed into a wolf. Against a wolf, that's a good form of defense. However a werewolf can pull your arm out because he has hands, so it's impractical.
Werewolves are often bestially strong, and their hands are more likely to have claws than blunt nails, so the werewolf can scratch too, he has more weapons.
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Okay, so I actually was recently researching this exact thing for a story I was writing also with a werewolf character. Ultimately, I went in a slightly different direction, but what you’re suggesting would probably work. Since your werewolves are closer in the mind to wolves than people, when you stick your fist down a wolf’s throat and cut off its airflow, the wolf will probably back off and decide you’re not worth it. You can also just put the wolf in a choke hold, tho, which isn’t as glamorous, but it is less slimy. Wolves, if killing for food, need to kill something that would give more energy than is lost during the searching and handling time, so if they see the human as a prey item, it fighting back would dissuade them. If it is attacking in order to protect itself or its pack, it might be harder to dissuade, but the wolf won’t benefit from letting you kill it.
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From personal experience, it works on dogs.
You just have to stick your hand about as far in as the back of the mouth and they will start to gag and immediately let go. It doesn't even have to be that hard (especially if you are not trying to hurt them, but just trying to get them to stop biting).
The operation of most animal mouths (especially the teeth) is such that its hard for something to pull out, but much easier to push in. So generally speaking, once the hand is in, its not too hard to move it to the back of the mouth. Once your hand is back there, you mainly just need to feel your way into a good seal with the throat to trigger a gag.
If you don't have any armor you may get some scratches from the teeth. But the reflex from a dog that has something lodged in its throat is one of immediately pulling out rather than trying to bite. You also need to be quick about getting all the way in, because you don't want your hand chewed as you linger.
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From a fight mechanics perspective:
The werewolf can still breathe, according to @Ash's claims above. However, it can't get as much air as normal, so its' cardio abilities will be limited. But that probably doesn't really matter, as at this point neither of you are going to be running.
Whilst the werewolf lacks the jaw strength to tear your arm off, it can still embed its teeth into your arm. You're going to be bleeding, potentially fast if it has been lucky and hit an artery, but it's not going to be pretty. This will have a negative impact on your ability to fight, increasing as the fight is prolonged
You're going to struggle to get it to release your arm unless it wants to. If you struggle, its canines are going to bite deeper into your arm, worsening the above; this will also be extremely painful.
If you hit it in the head, you're going to drive its teeth deeper into your arm. If you hit it in the body, you'll jerk its body, making its teeth bite deeper.
You have one free arm. The werewolf has two. It can use one arm to imobilise yours, and the other to hit you.
This is assuming you can get your arm in quickly enough. If you don't it'll bite down on your hand early, and you won't even have the advantage of reducing airflow. Dogs hunt by biting and hanging on until the prey loses strength.
If you trigger a gag reflex, you might have a brief advantage; but we don't use this technique commonly in fights against humans, who lack all the big teeth, so it doesn't seem to be a significant advantage. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a martial text say "if they open their mouth wide stick your hand in"). Furthermore, whilst a wild beast may have a strong gag reflex, a frenzied werewolf seems like it probably won't care that much, so this seems like it might be less effective against werewolves than humans or dogs.
The utility of this move seems dubious at best. I can't see any sources on "how to defend yourself against wild dogs" which suggest sticking your hand down its mouth. If this was effective, Police Canine units would see it used against them.
The werewolf appears to have the absolute advantage in this situation.
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That's an essentially human opponent who probably has the same weapons as you.
Why is sticking your hand down someone's throat a smart move? Yes, you can kill them that way, but it's not one that is taught and is fraught with problems.
Treat them like a human opponent and go for the obvious vulnerable areas. The only difference is that they probably bite worse so the mouth is the bit you want to avoid.
Their ribcage may be much more vulnerable if they are actually wolf-like though -- and an attack on the sensitive ears will definitely distract them. In fact, have you thought about a powerful dog whistle?
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[
I am currently building a world where one of the most powerful countries/kingdoms is much known for its exploration and architectural culture. To be really short, exploration is a noble profession for its citizens, and they organize trips regularly. The ruling family puts a loooot of money in those few-month trips (to the detriment of lower classes, but that a whole other point that I don't think is relevant here).
I have read books about exploration and did some research, and each time, it seems that the main purposes of these explorations was to expand the country/religion, conquering, doing slavery and/or seeking for wealth and fame.
The thing is (maybe I am being naive), I don't really want what happened with the Maya and the Aztec, for example, where almost all the cultural wealth was destroyed and the cities plundered by Europeans conquistadors.
I am aware that I can't create a feasible world where those things never happened, but for the sake of some part of my world's cultures, my question is : **could a country/kingdom do world exploration but only for commercial/be-the-first-to-complete-a-world-map purposes (or any other non-destructive reason) ?**
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Exploration as such has rarely been destructive, and when it was destructive is was mainly due to unforeseen side effects.
The main motivation behind great exploration efforts has almost always been purely commercial. Prince [Henry the Navigator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Henry_the_Navigator) put a lot of capital behind Portuguese exploration efforts because Portugal needed a route to India bypassing the Muslim monopoly over trade between the India and Europe. For the same reason, [Ferdinand and Isabella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Monarchs_of_Spain) backed the voyages of Columbus. The quest for new markets and new suppliers motivated [Hanno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator) the Carthaginian and [Pytheas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas) the Greek.
Religious or scientific motivations, or simple plain curiosity, were behind individual exploration efforts, such as those of [Ibn Battuta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta) the Muslim or [Livingstone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone) the Scotsman; such efforts are good stories, but they rarely resulted in significant effects.
With few exceptions, destruction of native cultures happened, when it happened, *after* the exploration was done. Whatever motivations the explorers had, no matter how pure, when they came home with news of new fertile countries, rich in minerals and timber, populated by dirt poor savages, it was human nature that some enterprising entrepreneurs would attempt to take over the land and timber and minerals.
Columbus went west in an attempt to circumvent the Muslim empires which blocked trade between Europe and India. *The motivation was commercial.* He failed, but returned home with stories of an entire new world, rich beyond imagination, and populated by people who were very very far behind Europe in technological development. From that point on it was unavoidable that *somebody*, if not Cortés and Balboa and Pizarro then for sure other adventurers, will arm expeditions trying to make themselves masters of that alluring new world.
Exploration rarely did more than put two different human cultures in contact; what happened afterwards is what always happens when different human cultures come into contact. If one of the cultures is clearly much more developed than the other, the weaker culture will wither and die. If the two cultures are at comparable levels of development, then they will adapt and influence each other, with the stronger culture having a stronger influence on the weaker culture than viceversa, but they will both survive in some form.
For a contemporary phenomenon of the same nature, consider the continuous [Americanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanization) of the world. The Americans do not have a goal of cultural domination of the world; it just happens, driven by impersonal forces.
Indian culture survived the renewal of the contact with Europe, because India was a rich and developed country; yes, India was behind Europe in technological development, but the difference was not all that great. The Aztec and the Inca empires did not survive contact with Europe, because they were thousands of years behind in technological development. Cortés conquered the Aztec empire, and Pizarro conquered the Inca empire with a few dozen horses and a few hundred men; such expeditions were well with the capacity of ambitious individuals. Trying to conquer India would have required enourmous resources, and no European power even tried.
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**They are passionate about natural history.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yalpJ.jpg)
<https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/mary-treat-biologist/>
The Victorians were exactly that - super excited about insects, shells, fossils - all sorts of things. And not just exotica - they got into the things that were in their own back yards. I shed a wistful tear, marveling at a world where middle class folks attend lectures on biology and go out bug collecting with the family on weekends.
This is the situation for your country. The ruling class has phenomenal zoos and museums and they actually have each carved out niches for themselves - an insect museum, a shell museum, a fern greenhouse, etc. The king and queen have an aquarium which is the most expensive and incredible. The people can visit these places and this serves as "circus" as in "bread and circus".
Like our current voyages to the sea floor or space, the voyages of exploration are to learn about amazing new things and bring back specimens for study and exhibition.
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**Trade**
Exploration to establish new trade can be very profitable and was the main cause for exploration during the Age of Exploration. Many European countries opened more trade stations than they established colonies. Spices and tea were especially popular, but also silk, artwork, chinaware, and more.
**Knowledge**
New ways of doing things are always in high favor. Many inventions were imported to Europe from China, including paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. Medical remedies and knowledge may also be valuable imports.
**Prestige**
Families and countries can gain fame and prestige for their discoveries. Discoveries may be showcased in zoos, museums, and private collection. Being the first to plant a flag on mountaintops or poles also carries a lot of prestige. All this can also be seen as a display of wealth and power.
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One thing you need to understand is that, for the Spanish and English in the colonial era, the "three Gs" (God, glory and gold) *were* noble causes. The notions of the "divine right of kings" and the continuing Great Commission of Christianity painted these men as not one iota less than the missionaries of God, charged by His Anointed Kings with spreading the Good News to all who would listen (and eradicating the unfaithful so that the faith may flourish), obtaining the preordained dominion of men over the land given to them, and glorifying God and His Anointed Kings with tribute of material wealth as the fruits of these missions.
So, you always have to take a subjective quality like "noble" in the contemporary context to the use of such a term. The expansion of religion, the conquering of land and indigenous peoples, and the exploitation of nature's bounty of material wealth were *absolutely* noble reasons in the 1500s for the actions of the conquistadors and the English colonialists.
Today, much of humanity has a very different set of principles, and a similarly different view of societies other than our own. Modern historians have heavily "de-romanticized" the notions of European exploration and colonization of the Americas, now aware of the true horrors visited on the indigenous tribes of the Americas by the Europeans. The "conquest of the Americas was seen as exactly that - an invasion of the New World - and the slaughter of the millions of native people living here is quite rightly seen as the textbook definition of genocide.
The fact that this term wasn't coined until 1944, to describe the actions of the Axis powers in Europe, is downplayed by modern scholars, as is the fact that the act of killing every man, woman and child that you view as your enemy was considered by all sides as a totally valid tactic to win a war. Keeping noncombatants in your newly conquered territory alive and productive under your control was a purely economic decision until about the 1800s, with the Hague Declaration being a very monumental piece of international law in that, for basically the first time in human history, there were "rules" of war both sides were bound to follow.
These contextual semantics are downplayed, because our "moral calculus" has evolved over time. The worth of a human life has increased in the general case, and as such we tend toward the deontological over the relativist when looking at actions resulting in human death, especially a lot of it. We retroactively condemn these actions as criminal, and that's not wrong, but that's not how it was viewed at the time or indeed for decades or even centuries thereafter. In the interest of evolving the collective human conscience beyond such barbarism, we teach these events as examples of what not to do (the whole "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it"), but IMHO the omission in many studies of the contemporary context and worldview of those involved make it that much more likely that similar atrocities will be committed, because while we will know what others did, the subtleties of how and why things got to that point will have been lost, leaving us that much less able to realize what we are about to do until "too many wheels are turning".
Anyway, the connotation behind the concept of a "higher purpose" has also changed dramatically in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Modern human society is much more secular than it was even 100 years ago, because we've found that a zealous belief that you are right because your religion says so has been a primary cause of human death for most of human history. Today, explorers "come in peace for all mankind", even though they still leave the flag of their home nation wherever they've been. The purpose is to be able to say, for yourself, for your country and for humanity, "I/we did that". You pushed the boundaries of human experience or ability, by being the first to do something, thus writing yourself into the history books of humanity forever.
Who knows; in another 200 years or so, we might look back on such "self-centered drives to accomplish" as being totally against the spirit of humanity as we understand it in the 2200s. While we like to think that what we do, we do for everyone, let's face it, having your name remembered forever by your posterity for what you did is a powerful drive. We might, in another 200 years, shift our moral calculus again toward the truly selfless, and such "selfish" acts as Neil Armstrong's will be deromanticized as thoroughly as John Smith's have been today.
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As you said the ruling family puts a lot of money in to it...if it costs money it has to make money or it will eventually collapse in on itself. So if conquest or religious taxation is out of the question the only solution would be trade.
If your people are reluctant to use violence they could instead make trade deals with lesser evolved civilizations. If the setting would be a fictional one, something in the area of two empires forming a symbiosis would be a possibility.
One peaceful as you describe, who don't care for war or religion but instead focus on fair commerce. And one that is more militaristic (Viking like) who offer protection to the peaceful ones as a means of securing easy and cheap resources (Because why conquer it if somebody else can just buy it for you?). A form of tribute that was sometimes used by vikings in the old days.
Your people would then become a cow of sorts. As long as it gives milk the farmer keeps it alive, when it stops killing milk it will get butchered. This would be incentive for them to seek out more trade to make sure they will always have enough milk to give. (Might sound unfair, but the only way pacifists survive is because they are able to provide a service to those who are willing to fight.)
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## Strange Tidings and Lost Cultural History
These things are easier to overplay the more you lean into fantasy - though they can played in more mundane settings as well.
On the strange tidings front, a sufficiently prosperous nation could be inclined to investigate disturbing rumors from abroad. For instance, from a medieval European perspective the far east was an unknown place despite the fact that European countries traded with them for exotic goods. If rumors spread of some strange or catastrophic event (or even an invitation or declaration of tournament) beyond the sight of your nation, an expedition could be funded to investigate.
On the lost cultural history front, if your current kingdom did not originate from the land it currently occupies it may be interested in where it came from. For example the original inhabitants of Britain had a strong tradition of oral history. By the time the Brits started writing the oral history down most of it had been forgotten. I could see a race of prestige between noble houses to follow an uncovered trail of the kingdoms origins.
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This sounds to me like the [Ming treasure voyages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages) by China from 1400 to 1430. First, the voyages where never intended to start some conquering or colonizing of new found lands. Instead they intended to project unrivalled power, technology and wealth (they succeeded). Several of the countries visited become tributaries to the Chinese empire so there is a little bit of 'conquering' involved.
Secondly, only a few years after these voyages internal Chinese politics changed and no further exploration was done. So for several of the visited countries, they had these super powerful explorers show up once and then never heard of them or their civilization ever again.
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If wealthy people are investing heavy in exploring, make sure it's because they get a return in their investments. To be able to call "dibs" in a new and exotic market can mean both a reputation and an economic boon.
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The problem you are up against is that in a society made up of individuals who are distinctly unique, any motivation can potentially be subverted to darker aims. Monopoly is a board game, its designed and intended purpose is an evening's entertainment amongst people who (presumably) want to have fun...and yet games of Monopoly can potentially devolve into bitter strife if the participants get competitive and have to "win".
You've set aside the goals that are inherently destructive of the contacted culture (conquest, spread of religion). That still leaves a host of different possibilities, all of which CAN degenerate into destructive behavior.
If the aim is commercial, it could start with the best of intentions. We'll trade good X for your good Y. Everyone comes out ahead. But what happens when the contacted culture says they've got enough X for now, but the people back at home demand more and more Y? Someone is going to start taking Y by a shady means, because the demand for it is high, and your race/country/culture is made up of a broad spectrum of individuals, presumably at least some of which are of shady character.
If the aim is scientific, and discovery for the sake of learning more about the universe is the goal, it could start out with the best of intentions. We're here to learn from you. But...do we share our knowledge with you too? Does our more advanced culture contaminate and destroy the culture you already had in place? Also...the people back at home...they want to start studying the artifacts first-hand instead of just seeing reports and analysis...so things start to go missing, and we're in the same scenario as the commercial one. The acquisition of Y becomes the end, and someone is willing to use any means to get it.
I think about the closest you could come to what you're asking for would be a hidden scientific study, with an extremely strict cultural taboo about discover and interaction. I'm reminded about a few different Star Trek episodes, and particularly the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, where the goal was to observe the civilization without interfering or disrupting it, without being seen or heard at all. And, of course, each of those episodes (and the movie) go horribly wrong in the process...either a technological failure, or because of one of the scenarios described above.
[Answer]
Some nice real-world examples such as Ibn Battuta or Zheng He have already been mentioned. Some others might be:
* Your civilization is under attack by mysterious outsiders and you
need to urgently make peace/find allies/learn as much about them as you
probably can. This is what motivated e.g. [Carpini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_da_Pian_del_Carpine) and
[Rubruck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Rubruck)
* Because your kings wants to go on a spiritual journey to learn about some new foreign
religion, as seems to have been the case with some Japanese explorers of Europe in the
[16th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_the_Japanese) and [17th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasekura_Tsunenaga) centuries
* Because there are some really intriguing geographical questions, such as whether there
is a [Northwest Passage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage) or whether [Cathay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay) is really just another name for China
* Because you are looking for other lost explorers, e.g. the [Laperouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_de_Galaup,_comte_de_Lap%C3%A9rouse) or [Sir John
Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition#Early_searches)
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The question is answered, but I'll add my two cents because I don't think all the answers separate enough the explorers from the backers who fund the explorations. Among the individual explorers there were some people motivated by greed as much as the conquistadores, but also scientists or people just seeking to enrich their culture. You see that most of the past explorations ended with the exploitation of the explored lands because in the past exploration was expensive and the funds were in the hands of people with a not so altruistic mindset.
Nowadays the technology dramatically cut the cost of travelling, but there are so many people willing to explore that the only unexplored places are remote and expensive to reach, like open space and the bottom of the seas. Therefore those who share the spirit of the kind of explorer who's just willing to expand their culture mix up with common tourists.
In the context of the advanced civilization mentioned in the question I think that all the exploration should be self funded as much as some tourists today are willing to put a big chunk of their savings in some trips that they hope they'll be worth remembering for the rest of their lives. They are the best proof that exploration does not have to be motivated by greed.
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**To show off for other countries**
Space exploration has been mentioned, but I think it deserves more attention, as it's probably the best modern example. For a few years, NASA used over 4% of the budget of the USA (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA> ) and your country could perhaps spend even more with similar motives, even without nukes in the picture.
One option would be too keep the knowledge about the world secret, and only show off the results. If your country can start selling exotic peppers, or rare shades of mother-of-pearl to competing countries, this not only generates a profit, but it shows everyone that you're a force to be reckoned with. This would perhaps be particularly relevant if your country is fairly closed to the outside, with neighbours not having an all too clear picture of it's real strength and level of technology, but cold probably be a factor anyway.
Maybe this isn't quite as noble, but without knowing more about your world I thought it might be worth considering.
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Isn't this the entire premise of Star Trek (OS & TNG)? To seek out new life & new civilisations, not for conquest or exploitation but to culturally & scientifically enrich society through discovery and diplomacy.
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You have not placed on the table one important (very important) piece of information:
>
> How technologically advanced is your civilization?
>
>
>
If the U.F.O phenomena is "really" about advanced extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth it looks like they do not intend to destroy our culture.
Even the fictional fierce aliens from the *Predator* franchise <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predator_(film)> are not motivated by a desire of colonization. They want to hunt some of us :(. But they keep themselves hidden most of the time.
An advanced civilization could make world exploration without destroying a newly visited less advanced civilization. May be it has been done by the mythological "Atlantis" from *Atlantida*. According Plato's information they were very advanced, but they never influenced other civilizations.
] |
[Question]
[
Starting from 435 A.D., a race of sea-faring giants has made land-fall in Eurasia and is raising hell. Due to socio-political pressures in their island homelands in Polynesia and Australia (constant warfare over limited land, internal displacement, overpopulation, etc.), these giants have emigrated west en masse, immediately coming into conflict with the human populations. In a first wave of migration between 435 A.D. and 460 A.D., around 50,000 giants trickle into Indonesia and South East Asia in bands numbering 100 - 1000 in size. In a far larger second wave, 500,000 giants land across the Indian subcontinent and East Asia as far north as the Korean peninsula *per year* from the earth 500's to the late 900's A.D.. They are organized into kin group bands of mostly young men (~60%) ranging anywhere from 3,000 - 7,500 strong, with the very largest being 30,000 strong. These giants are physically superior to H. *sapiens* in every way, being
* ~9ft tall on average
* having a bone strength *6 times* that of a human being
* [double muscled](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myostatin#Double_muscled_cattle) making them disproportionately stronger than humans, and in all 7 times stronger than a human adult
* 50% faster than a human, being able to run 25 - 35 mph on average
* acute senses of hearing, smell, and taste, being 3 - 5 times that of the average human
* cranial shock absorption in the form of tissue lining the interior of the skull, preventing falls from causing concussions or brain damage
This comes along with a host of giant-specific mutations that negate the negative effects of gigantism.
These giants also come from a warrior culture in which marshal prowess is the acme of human virtue, and thus have highly refined skills of archery, slinging, wrestling, boxing, melee combat, etc. drilled into them from an early age. Worst of all for humanity, the reproductive potential of these giants is several times higher than that of man, meaning a greater capacity to replace numbers and occupy conquered territory.
Luckily for man, these giants have no large domestic animals (dogs, cats, horse, oxen etc.), and are late adopters of iron technology, making their iron implements more rudimentary than the invaded population. However, their arms are by no means primitive, and can be largely modeled after [ancient](http://www.mythichawaii.com/weapons.htm) [Polynesian](https://www.armymuseum.co.nz/blog/maori-weapons.html) [weapons](https://www.new-guinea-tribal-arts.com/tongan-clubs/).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pAwEH.jpg)
And *unluckily* for man, the migrations/invasions occur around the first millennium, meaning no guns or cannons shall be aiding mankind. On top of this, giants have great prejudice against people below 7 ft tall, perceiving them to be unfit, and thus are inclined to enslave and massacre any human populations they conquer.
Ideally these giants would replace some human populations and stalemate others, but given the physical superiority of these beings, it is entirely likely that they may entirely outcompete mankind, doing to us what we did to Neanderthals.
**Question**
Is there anything that would or could prevent humanity from being totally destroyed by giants?
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First and foremost, disease would be the best weapon to employ against an enemy that outclasses you in all physical respects. Giants like to fight and are great at breeding? Good, they'll be in physical contact with each other more than enough for one good bug to tear through them. There are plenty of examples in history of why this is so effective and attractive an option, the most prominent being American history during colonial and expeditionary times.
Tangent to this idea is the prospect of chemical warfare. The Persians were capable of this centuries before the earliest date you gave and it can be employed with relative ease. The only trick is delivering enough of the harmful substances. Two good methods stand out, though. The giants are large and need to breathe very high volumes of air to keep their muscles energized. With this in mind, all one would need to do, is put a slow-release source of harmful gas upwind of their camps, where they train and spar almost constantly. Their bodies would be poisoned over time and their biggest and strongest would be crippled, dead, or going mad before any of them even knew something MIGHT be going wrong. With the primitive culture and world views of the time, they might even jump to conclusions of supernatural or divine nature and not even consider they've been under attack. Actually, even enough wood or grease smoke would be a hazard for creatures that large with such high respiratory demands. I can imagine an army tricking the enemy giants into occupying a building or narrow pass and either smoking them out to force them into an unfavorable position, or simply suffocating them. The second chemical weapon that springs to mind is acids. Unless there are magical cures for severe dermal erosion, the loss of enough skin would be almost a death sentence for any warrior, no matter how jacked you are or how deft your sword arm. Disease and rot WILL get through that most crucial of barriers to the circulatory and lymphatic system, especially in those early times of poorly understood biology and primitive medical sciences.
Social destabilization is another method to work around the enemy's physical superiority. A disorganized enemy isn't much harder to defeat than a pack of wild, even if very formidable, animals. Humans have been making and using recreational substances for a very long time. With our smaller bodies, a small amount of a substance could be enough to 'enjoy', but would have almost no effect on something significantly larger. Get the giants hopelessly addicted to something with little supply and the overwhelming demand will destroy their social order pretty quickly. Governments have been using this tactic to cause disorder in enemy communities for ages, dating back many centuries.
Starve them out. These huge bands of giants 100-1000 in number would have disproportionately large energy demands that would require very high volumes of food consumption ESPECIALLY if they're constantly sparring and training due to their culture. Humans, on the other hand, prefer and value leisure so we can get by on some very sparse food supplies. We're endurance specialists, after all. Scorched earth policies can be taken to ensure that even if giants encroach on human territory, they won't have the momentum to keep pushing the advance. Their troops will be taking barren land and fighting humans who are retreating into greener pastures and ready supplies while we whittle down their flagging forces with guerrilla tactics and disease/poison traps.
Use other animals. Humans have been using other critters in creative ways since the dawn of civilization, namely honey bees. Honey bee venom contains a substance called melittin that causes red blood cells to burst. This causes dangerous dips in blood pressure in humans. Much like heat dispersal requirements, oxygen requirements for mammals increase faster than volume does, so something that interrupts our ability to breathe and process oxygen would have an even more catastrophic effect on larger mammals and it would be harder to recover from. The amount of venom required to achieve lethality or be capable of incapacitating the victim wouldn't even need to be much higher than our own. Far less than what a single honey bee is capable of injecting, anyway. Giants might be big, but they'd have just as much, if not more, difficulty dealing with an angry swarm of bees that showed up from the sky while everyone was sleeping.
[Answer]
**They have several disadvantages.**
1. **Attrition**. Larger animals take longer to breed, it takes time and calories to grow. That means humans can replace their population faster. The number of babies is immaterial, most offspring die of disease or famine anyway. It took us several thousand more years to actually produce our actual reproductive potential, you need medicine and industrial farming first, your giants may have a higher potential but they won't be able to exploit it if anything they will be even less able to exploit it. What matters is maturation rate, especially with their higher caloric demand. And there is no way around them taking longer to reach breeding age. Over time humans will dominate more and more (consider they already start at a distinct advantage). Your giants also need to be eating a huge amount to keep up those abilities, nothing in biology is free, everything has a cost, stronger muscles means more they need more calories. Stronger bones require more minerals and slower growth. Your giants have completely wiped out any efficiency advantage size might give them, so humans have an even larger numbers advantage. 1 unit of crops are producing drastically more humans than giants. This gets even worse when you realize all the human spears are right at crotch height for the giants.
2. **No livestock**. This is a big one. Being big and strong does do much good when a horse bigger, stronger, and easier to replace. Humans have cavalry. Worse without livestock they food is less portable, humans can sustain fighting for much longer just because they will have better supply lines. One major weakness the Aztec had was corn has a comparatively short shelf life, they could not sustain war year round. Even better humans can use livestock for labor freeing up even more of their numbers for combat or more likely to build defenses, walled cities were common for a reason.
Sure their sense of smell might be good but it will never be as good as a dog's, so the humans have that advantage. Plus war dogs can bolster the humans' armies even further.
3. **They are a warrior band culture**, which means they suck at fighting actual wars. Tribal warfare is small scale, brief, and often for show. But the war your giants are walking into is a game of logistics, who can produce the most food, who has the best craftsmen, who is the best organized, who can sustain soldiers for longer. Your giants make for good raiders and poor soldiers. They are not fighting tribal bands of humans, in 400AD they are fighting empires. Humans have incendiary devices, ballista and stone walls. Humans can sustain war for years without stopping. War bands mean small numbers, tribal bands can't collect in large armies for long, they start to starve, humans, on the other hand, can field armies of hundreds of thousands.
4. **Smell**, A better sense of smell may actually work against them, humans will be able to use rotting livestock as both psychological and biological warfare.
5. **Size is not always an advantage**. Wait until they get to forests or jungles where size becomes a hindrance. Humans can also better utilize water, humans boats will have shorter drafts meaning they can travel shallower waters, meaning humans forces will be more maneuverable on the large scale. One of the biggest advantages Vikings had was they could show up anywhere at any time, they could sail even the shallowest of waters. Snow will be even worse, giants will be big and heavy and even strong snow will not support their weight. Not to mention armies of giants will have trouble feeding themselves in cold climates.
6. **Inflexibility**, double muscles animals are very inflexible, those muscles get in the way of each other. Giants may be faster on the straightaway but humans will be able to run circles around them up close. Giant will get surrounded easily, and will not be flexible which means they will worse even worse at climbing and traveling through forests and jungles.
7. **endurance**. Double-muscled animals have far less muscular fat, meaning they have drastically reduced endurance. So even in an individual battle humans will be able to fight longer than giants, they can simply wear them out.
[Answer]
## Not enough females.
They can't replace attrition losses. The humans have figured this out and are going for the balls, which are, incidentally, at a very convenient height.
Once sufficient males are gelded, the remainder are too busy trying to keep their numbers up to worry about conquest. The gelded males tend to lose interest in further conflict in the immediate aftermath, while shortens their life expectancy severely. Those that survive are driven from their clans by the mocking from their peers (the perils of a jock based society) and end up as mercenaries or pets of human overlords.
[Answer]
**Bigger giants!**
It was not food pressure or warfare that drove these giants north. Like the Goths being driven before the Huns, **your giants are chased out of their ancestral home by larger giants!**
These 20 foot tall giants originate to the south, in Antarctica. In the first wave, 8 megagiants trickle into New Zealand. In the far larger second wave 5 million of these monsters move in to Oceania, displacing the entirety of the minigiants north into South Asia and China.
The Antarctic giants are physically superior to the minigiants in every single way.
* 20 feet tall average
* Four armed (some of them) and four breasts (most of them).
* 50% higher vertical leap than mini giants.
* Flexible bones and thick layers of fat, allowing enormous damage resistance.
* Born knowing the art of savate.
This is all true just for the females. The males look like ordinary sized dudes but everyone is cool with that.
Plus they are culturally superior - these giants have a bonobo like culture, held together by bonds of grooming, consensual sex, back rubs, and long extemporized songs about the beauty of nature and how awesome other individuals in their culture are. The one exception to their gentleness is in regards to minigiants, whom they rip to shreds on sight and then eat the shreds raw. Sometimes they challenge them to feats of strength first, and when the minigiants lose (always) they are then ripped to shreds and eaten raw, or with a little pepper.
These Antarctic giants (ok, giantesses, with regular dudes along) keep coming, relentlessly extirpating the minigiants everywhere except for their mountain sausage party hideways where they pout and grouse and continue their manly wrestling warrior cultural ways.
Fortunately for regular humans, the big sexy giants dig what we do! Regular sized humans are considered entertaining and attractive, especially if they can sing. Megagiants quickly assimilate into the human population. Megagiantism is a recessive trait and by the year 1000, the only trace of this wave of polar saviors is the occasional birth of a girl who grows up to be remarkably tall and has 4 arms.
[Answer]
First think about the message of your story; what you choose should depend on what you want to say to your audience. I can think of 6 categories. For historical realism and story depth, I'd suggest picking several causes, from more than one category.
**An inherent human strength:** this says, "humans are magically wonderful"
* mental (tech, smarts, wisdom, risk-taking, adaptability)
* physical (speed, agility, stamina)
* emotional/social (cooperation, leadership)
**An inherent giant weakness:** this says, "at least you don't suck"
* mental (stupidity, ADHD, OCD, stubbornness, laziness, migraines, insanity)
* physical (food/oxygen/heat/etc needs, poor longevity, poor vision, can't jump, kryptonite, moonlight makes them were-ducks, etc)
* emotional/social (low stress tolerance, poor communication, cultural problems, leaders' mistakes)
**A greater power appears:** this says, "everyone is powerless"
* disaster (I vote meteor strike)
* disease (no... please, don't)
* another race or creature(s)
**Humans gain a strength or overcome a weakness:** this says, "you have magical potential"
* they nuke 'em
**Giants gain a strength or overcome a weakness:** this says, "nope, it's just you that sucks"
* they become disillusioned with war
* they become more interested in some other venture
* they develop kindness
**A choice:** this says, "it's up to you"
* in a situation of matched wit, one human makes a wise decision or sacrifice
[Answer]
So these giants arrive in Eurasia in droves, driven by hunger. They land in coastal settlements taking everyone by surprise. But as they move inland news of their arrival quickly spreads and armies are readied to meet them.
Sheer numbers will get them quite far, but likely at heavy losses. This will be for several reasons.
**Horses**
A lack of horses provide a massive disadvantage. Organising groups of giants without mounted messengers is going to be a lot slower than organising humans who do have mounted messengers.
Horses also allow humans to move stuff around a lot easier. Food armies, weapons, armour, siege engines, etc.
Horses use in actual fighting will also be a factor. Mounted archers can close any advantage giants have with range quickly and decent heavy cavalry will make short work of combatants with iron age weapons.
**Tactics**
Judging by where these giants have come from, it's doubtful they have had much experience of siege warfare or warfare in large open areas.
These giants need to eat a lot, so pin them down anywhere and they will quickly starve. Plus, because they are so big, they are more likely to be susceptible to siege weaponry. Their size is going to make it difficult to occupy existing defensive strongholds and it takes a lot of time to build suitable stone defenses. Wooden structures aren't going to be much use against trebuchets and ballista.
On open ground they are going to meet a tactic they probably have never seen, a shield wall. A well formed shield wall of sufficient depth can stand a charge from heavy cavalry, so these 9 foot giants aren't going to be much of a problem, especially if they don't attack/defend in a line with suitable shields.
As humans withdraw from invading giants they take all livestock with them and scorch the earth behind them leaving no food for these giants who must need a lot to eat.
**Weaponry**
Steel is going to be a major advantage for humans. From spears, arrows and swords to armour and embossed shields, the humans will have the advantage in the weaponry department.
**Infighting**
If they are leaving their homelands because of internal strife, they will not all be from the same faction and will be as likely to fight each other as they will be to fight humans.
**Cannibalism** (maybe)
If these giants have been struggling for food for a while, cannibalism may be acceptable to them. So any time they eat one of their own, there is one less to fight.
On the flip side, this makes it much more likely that humans will be a viable food source for them.
**Outcome**
These giants won't last long anywhere humans can get a decent sized army together, but on difficult terrain, they are likely to have an advantage. This is where I foresee them settling, but food needs will make it difficult to sustain large numbers in these areas.
It won't take long though for an ambitious Warlord/King/Emperor to decide to train and arm these giants so they can fight their enemies in exchange for food. Give it 50 or so years and these giants will have overcome many of the disadvantages listed above.
[Answer]
**Disease**
This really did for the Native Americans; the Europeans had brought a bunch of the plagues and diseases from the old world with them. They were fairly resistant, due to repeated exposure. Whereas the peoples of the New World had never been exposed to the diseases at all, so they did not cope well at all.
**Infighting**
The giants value martial prowess. They aren't likely to back down from a fight with other giants. If one group of giants starts messing with another, the likely result is a war - instead of one group deciding 'screw this', in which case they might pick up and move.
Thus, after the initial displacement, the giants may be willing to sit on their new lands, or expand only slowly. Giant culture may well avoid large numbers of giants getting displaced into human lands by conflict with each other. They could view this manner of retreat as a coward's way out: sure, it's easy. Too easy, and it means you run when you should stand and fight.
Likewise, they might be more inclined to look to expand their territory into other giants' territory, rather than human territory. Why attack puny little scrawny things, that are so easy to kill you can't even really call it a fight, when you could be fighting a fight worth having against some giants who are worth respecting?
**Food constraints**
These giants will need quite a bit more food than humans. There will be plenty of places with marginal food production that can support human populations without much trouble, that would support a much smaller giant population.
[Answer]
When they've landed:
I would like to add another potential advantage which wasn't much considered so far: fortifications and machinery.
I would suspect that given their warrior nature, strength and size, the giants are not that used to large fortifications in war. They would need to invest a lot more resources and be better architects to make them work for their size, after all. Either way, human fortifications will make it difficult for the giants, simply because they are not built for their size.
Imagine a human attacking a dwarven stronghold - you can't even stand up straight!
Even if the giants have access to siege machinery, the humans can fire back, and the constraints on siege machinery are not really due to the size of their builders, but technical considerations, so both would be on even footing. Having steel available will very likely help in that regard, though, as does experience, so I would give humans a clear edge here.
Combine this with a scorched Earth policy, moving as many resources as possible into the castles and fortresses, and you may end up having a decent chance. Castles walls were quite sturdy, even if the giants are strong and tall, that doesn't help taking them down - they still need engines, or they have to storm the castle, exposing them to shot or more brute things like burning oil or scalding water ( more skin to burn ).
These defenses were, by the way, already established generally speaking, so would need expanding more than building in most places.
Since the humans have steel, consider also machines like the Roman scorpio or ballistae, which were powerful. They could crush human spine at a distance, I doubt a giant would fare well being hit by one of those!
Very importantly, though:
I would immediately go on the counter offensive where it matters most: the giant's supply lines. Given they are supposedly on a similar, perhaps lower tech level, the Ships they use cannot really be that much better than human ships. But they must carry Giants, and a much larger amount of supplies. Build warships and attack them at sea. This will dry out their ( pretty impressive, perhaps unrealistic ) numbers of reinforcements, and make the whole invasion more manageable.
Which reminds me of another (East) Roman / Byzantine invention: Greek Fire. Giant ships burn just as well, but I would suspect given their size, they cannot build as many as easily: wood will quickly get sparse.
While giants would perhaps have an advantage boarding ships ( maybe not, with their size, they may be outmanouvered ), this does not count for much in naval warfare if you can attack the Ship itself.
[Answer]
I think this can be as simple as guerilla warfare, Vietnamese style. Humans dig networks of tunnels and hideouts. Too small for the giants to enter.
Humans try to lead the giants into dense forests or jungle where the humans can take advantage of being small. Inside the dense vegetation the humans can leverage their knowledge of iron by using machetes to cut away only the low vegetation. This will cause the giants not to have a good overview of the battle grounds. Booby traps will also be efficient in this scenario.
[Answer]
Perhaps you should read "The Mad Moon" by Stanley G. Weinbaum where the protagonist gets in trouble with six inch tall ratlike intelligent beings called slinkers by human and spends much of the story desperately trying to escape from them.
<http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604211h.html>[1](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604211h.html)
Another factor that would help the humans in south Asia and Southeastern Asia in their fight against the invading giants would be the many giants in their armies even bigger than the invading giants.
Giants?
Yes, war elephants much bigger than the humanoid giants. There would be tens of thousands of war elephants at any one time in Asia during that time period and several times as many tame elephants used for civilian purposes.
War elephants were sometimes armored. War elephants sometimes had long blades attached to their tusks and were taught to use them in battle. War elephants sometimes held huge swords, or long iron chains, or other weapons, in their tusks and used them on enemies. Wild and domestic elephants sometimes throw rocks or tree trunks.
Elephants have carried giant crossbows, machine guns and small cannon on their backs, and could carry small trebuchets on their backs.
Circus elephants have been trained to do many unusual things, so if someone invents some sort of repeating crossbow or repeating trebuchet I can imagine elephants trained to turn a crack to constantly load and fire the weapon while humans aim it at giants.
Even cow and young elephants too small to fight the giants hand to trunk would be strong enough to power various long range weapons to shoot the giants with, if the humans are smart enough to invent them.
[Answer]
## Starvation
The main reason why evolution doesn't favor much larger primates than us or gorillas is the core issue that lifestyle two individuals who each need 2000 calories/day can get more food than a single individual who needs 4000 calories per day, no matter if it's gathering, hunting, herding or farming. These giants are physically superior to H. sapiens in every way except the most important physical thing that counts which is calorie efficiency. There's a good reason why we're evolved to not grow extra muscle unless absolutely neccessary (exercise) and a large calorie surplus is available; it would be a trivial genetic change for humans to be much stronger, but there's evolutionary pressure *away* from this. For hominids being much stronger is generally an evolutionary drawback, not an advantage, because of the calorie cost of building and maintaining that muscle.
A 9ft tall, 7 times as strong, 50% as fast individual has more mass and a faster metabolism than humans do, they need five or ten times the food as humans do. They might be able to defeat a human population five or ten times their number, but if they exterminate them, then they can't farm as well as that population (a giant would be better at farming/herding than a *single* human, but worse 5 humans), especially without livestock, so they can't live off of the conquered land. At 435 AD, there's barely any food surplus already above what's needed to sustain the current human population, so they can't live off of tribute from conquered populations, not in numbers as large as this. Perhaps 1 giant could be fed from tribute for every 100 human farmers? But can they sustainably stay in power if humans have a 100-to-1 numerical advantage?
Let's suppose they land in Korea and exterminate the local human population. What next? The number of giants needed to do that can't possibly survive in Korea, their lifestyle can't sustain a population density nowhere close to that (for that matter, Polynesia and Australia can't possibly supply enough food to grow 500,000 or 50,000 new giants a year, not at this technology level). Which is the key point - given your description of the giants, they would always have the inferior armies, because if a giant is as good in combat as 10 men, then the same amount of farmland that's needed for that giant to make food for himself (taking into account that such a giant would be much worse in food production than 10 men, the "physically superior" combat aspects don't help him *that* much) would supply 20 or more men.
And what do they do when they reach the steppes of Central Asia? Without livestock, it's a food desert for them; they can only make expeditions through it with stored supplies unlike nomadic humans who can live there in large numbers and raid their supplies.
The same argument as with Neanderthals would apply. They were stronger, smarter and more technologically advanced than us, but homo sapiens were more calorie efficient. So in the long run, we outcompeted and assimilated them, not vice versa. The same would make sense for the giants.
[Answer]
If they don't intermarry so their offspring inherit immunities, then disease will decimate them and the survivors will be mopped up fairly easily. Whole villages and even Islands in the Pacific were depopulated after European contact due to disease. Others when disease on another Island disrupted essential trade supplies.
[Answer]
espionage and spies
Sneak a human in at night and kill war chief A son with war chief B's axe.
Now they kill each other.
Any rumors or information they can plant suggesting giant group 1 will attach group 2 with fabricated evidence as needed.
Kill a small group of them with overwhelming numbers from group 1 and leave the weapons/armor for group 2 to find. (or plant it on them) Then everyone else will think group 2 killed group 1 and not you. A 3rd party attack them for killing group 1. Its all about kill giants that will be missed, and trigger revenge attacks.
[Answer]
After a crushing defeat against the first fleet of giants, humans collectively retreat and give up control to the giants. The humans still exist, they are far larger in number after all and they just live as an oppressed people. A giant may eat all of one villages livestock, a group of giants may drive out the humans in a specific area to control the land, but humans as a race would still be around and plentiful, just suffering a lot.
I imagine this would go similarly to any colonization ever, except perhaps because of the giants overwhelming strength the humans may give up any resistance even faster. If there are small scale fights, massacres, last stands ect this still works fine since you are talking about such large numbers. Just because a colonizer can commit mass genocide on the native peoples does not mean they will.
*"But the giants are a warrior race and it will be unnatural for the worldbuilding if they just decide not to fight the humans"* - Well, I think by making the giants so much stronger than humans you have created a convenient out for this one. Just by establishing that the giants view humans as inferior (in terms of combat) a social idea that humans are not worthy opponents and there is no "honour" or whatever in defeating a human it makes sense that they would not constantly want to fight humans. Why should they? For an analogy, the [Mongols](https://www.britannica.com/place/Mongol-empire) were pretty famous for being combat-oriented. But they did not go around taking up arms and duelling every goat they came across because why would they? obviously goats are not a big enough issue for the Mongols to bother about.
Basically, humans don't have to be able to win fights to survive utter destruction. An unpeaceful and oppressed co-habitation is entirely plausible.
[Answer]
Well it is my understanding that for a giant race that is hell bent on killing humanity(I am assuming they are not be killing humans for sale of keep fit excercise routine , and also not because they are jeleous of our good genes and beautiful looks as against there ugly deformed ones ! No Sir... It is obvious it's because we as a food source as meet food are absolutely delicious... Do you see they might kill a good number of us every day but it won't be to finish us justtocook us and eat us.. the rest you can understand dears.
[Answer]
Cold
Humans could be forced into colder areas. These giants come from Australia so they are used to warm weather thus their immune system is weak against cold, not to mention how much heat moving their body is producing. They also have weak, light armor which doesn't protect them from cold. They would also leave areas that are cold in the winter and warm in the summer alone as there is no point in colonizing a land which is not habitable half of the time. This land could be used to allow giants to interact with humans through trading in summertime or it could be a war zone which humans have to protect so they can grow food for the winter.
[Answer]
In my world regular humans like ourselves have been fighting and trying to keep a race of 10 to 12 foot giants from wiping their existence completely out for the last 100 years.
What stops the fighting between the two is the sudden appearance of a larger and even more violent race of 15 foot giants known as titans.
Once this happens the smaller race of giants and the humans must join forces to stop the menacing and devouring titans.
] |
[Question]
[
A professor of mathematics is sent back in time to a post-Neolithic farming village. They accept him as their wise man, and he spends 30 years teaching them all he knows about mathematics until he dies. The ancient people preserve most of this knowledge in stone carvings and baked mud tablets, and continue to teach their descendants the secrets of basic and advanced mathematics.
Now, the question is... how greatly might this advanced mathematics change history? There is no need for a precise answer, but I would like to understand just how big a difference something like this could make.
Or, would we see very little difference, in terms of technology and culture?
[Answer]
I think the knowledge would simply be lost in time **unless they actually have use for it**.
A tribe of post-neolithic settlers have very little use for differential equations and stuff of that level. And even simpler stuff like linear algebra would not be helpful to them.
**Basic math** is easily applicable in everyday life. Even in simple non-currency-based trading. Or in planning, etc..
So there is an obvious use for it.
**Teaching math is hard**
Anybody who ever took a class in advanced mathematics at university level will have seen that a decent chunk of educated people studying to become engineers, mathematicians or other scientists can struggle really hard to learn that. And they spend most of their time doing that. Tribespeople do not have that much free time.
If you assume these tribespeople have almost no basis before that you will not get far in teaching them math.
**Advanced math needs applications to not be forgotten easily**
If you were to teach them very basic physics with the use of math, you might inspire early engineering. Have people built simple mechanism if the natural resources allow that.
Helping them understand gravity, force and all that could be very useful for them - **If you show them the usefulness of this knowledge**.
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**Conclusion:**
It is of utmost importance to make use of the knowledge. Post-neolithic tribes have very little free time. Spending a lot of time and energy on studying something that does not help them survive is a waste of time and would cause trouble for the tribe in the long run.
**You might inspire early engineering**, but not with just abstract math. People need some physics education, too. (An average mathematician should be well educated enough to do that.)
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**Addendum:**
Because of a discussion in the comments I felt like it is worth to add this.
Richard Dawkins originated the word *meme* in the context of evolution in 1976. He proposed the idea that like genes, ideas that benefit a population (like the crafting of specific tools) will persist throughout the generations. He referred to these ideas as *memes*. *Memes* will persist throughout the generations only if they continue to be useful.
If an idea is useless or even harmful in regards of survival it will not spread as well and eventually die out. Sometimes long useful memes become replaced by better ones in the ever changing situations the enviroment forms.
So the knowledge your professor brings them requires to be useful for that reason. There is no time and resource to be wasted on a luxury that does not benefit survival if those are not expendable. And the ideas will only reliably persist as *memes* throughout the generations if they continue to prove themselves as useful or they will soon be discarded
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A math professor is not a math exercise book, then why would he limits his help to math? He most likely also knows a good amount of physic and informatic.
He could obviously store some of his advanced math theorems and physic theories (carved rocks), for the times when some people will actually be able to understand them and use them but i think that's not the most relevant change that he will provoke.
He can introduce the concept of "zero", the Pythagorean theorem, and all the milestones we usually teach in our child/teen-age math classes but also these efforts won't be the most relevant ones.
Way more important for neolithic humans: he likely also have a lot of general scientific knowledge that will allow huge, tremendously fast bootstrap from neolitic tech level to a something at least similar to Middle Age.
He can introduce the neolithic people to some tech like:
* Metal casting and coal production
* Gun/black powder
* The existance of America and general world geography
* Basic hygene precautions and antibiotics principles
* Crop rotation and animal trained plow
* Modern sailing in which the sail is actually an airfoil
* Darwinian evolution (useful for both farm and animal breeding)
* Architectural devices (cranes, leverages), and architectural solutions (round arch)
* Steam
The tech development is not linear, is exponential, therefore a "small" tech jump happened thousands and thousands of years ago will result in a huge difference in the today tech level. Since we are not talkin about a simple or small jump but rather a huge leap instead, the today tech won't even be close to the current one. It's not relevant that the person sent back in time is a math professor, every scholar person will surely provoke such a huge leap that is impossibile to foresee where will it lead to.
We can only be sure that the difference would be gigantic.
ps: is not required to have a detailed knwoledge about a concept or a theory. Also knowing that "something works this way" will provide something priceless, for future scientists, and even a simple hint that points the right path/theory could help tremendously (see antibyotics, or vaccines).
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The most impact would probably be his knowledge about basic physics.
There are no archeological proofs that post-Neolithic farmers had **cranes or pulleys**. But these rather simple tools are an enormous help in constructing buildings. He could revolutionize their **irrigation** system (or introduce them to irrigation if they still relied on rain exclusively). He could show them tools like the **plow, scythe, wheel barrow, wind mill or water mill** and improve their design of the **wheel**.
The simple knowledge of the **three field crop rotation** would make this one tribe be the most powerfull community all around.
The (for us) simple act of converting thoughts into symbols that can later be converted back into thoughts and knowledge could result in another parallel development of **script** (there were several of those throughout history). As a math professor he has a vast range of symbols to choose from, but realisticly he would choose the hieroglyphic approach instead of phonetic writing.
The thing with all these great, yet simple, accomplishments of human history is that you don't need mathematics to use them. The villagers would probably think that the gods gave this wise man visions of godly tools. After his death, they would either replicate his designs as exactly as possible or begin to experiment with slightly different designs and maybe find improvements by accident.
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He's a mathematics professor who *really likes tea*. This leads him to start making infusions of various plants, boiling the water and seeing how they taste. The key here is that he drinks boiled water, which is many times safer than (non-alcoholic) drinking water and would have a dramatic effect on the lives of any tribe once they started enjoying the tea too.
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Here are some fields that could be jump started by your scenario:
Astronomy: Accurately predicting seasons, defining a calendar to mark dates to sow crops.
Geography: Accurately measuring land and making precise maps.
Navigation (resulting from both above): Maps and calculating speed and time makes long distance travel far more reliable.
Architecture (needs some physics): far bigger and taller structures even without new materials
Trade, Taxation and other administrative tasks would cerainly profit
and all sorts of discoveries that result from applying the above.
Other than this, I doubt early Farmers could immediately gain from advanced mathematics. But you could also try to look at the historical rise of math to pick other discoveries that suit low-tech society.
Long term changes would depend on how society handles these changes.
As a sidenote: Today's science is highly dependent on our modern society,
especially the more theoretical sciences like math or theoretical physics.
A history professor specialized in your timeframe might be your best bet if you want a high impact on the society, because he could start a more "natural" advance.
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# Worldview matters
If this math professor is like many that I studied under, he probably doesn't know anything about metallurgy or agriculture or a host of other applied fields in any practical detail. He probably wouldn't know about crop rotation or how to domesticate corn or how to carve wood with stone tools or how to start a fire or how to knap flint.
But, what a math professor would have, is a scientific and modern worldview.
He would think in terms of a spherical earth in a heliocentric solar system containing other planets in a big galaxy full of stars in a bigger universe of finite age. He would see mountains and valleys and oceans in the context of plate tectonics. He would know the basic concept of what a volcano was and would be aware of the possibilities of meteors and comets. He would see rocks as assemblages of certain kinds of minerals.
He might not be good at predicting weather, but would understand that it flows from chaotic deterministic systems, that air is a mixture of gases, and that water evaporates, is carried in clouds and produces rain when the temperature and pressure are right.
He would have a germ theory of disease, a crude Mendelian concept of genetic heredity, and understand the concepts of atoms and molecules. He would have a sense of how predator-prey models work and the basic mechanisms behind evolution.
He would naturally think in terms of currency, the time value of money, and supply and demand. He would recognize core concepts like the non-zero sum nature of economic interaction. He would be alert to the possibility of domestication of plants and animals.
His natural philosophy would be more Aristotle than Plato. He would understand the scientific method and be able to advocate for it.
He would know instinctively what kinds of social organization and etiquette and diplomacy lead to productive interaction and which do not. He would know how to teach people to operate productively in much larger groups than they had ever imagined.
He would have a good knack for distinguishing what kind of investigations and new ideas were likely to be fruitful and which were not.
For example, wheels were used in toys by the Sumerians and Aztecs for centuries before anyone thought to make an industrial scale version with economic advantage, but our professor would see those opportunities to generalize existing knowledge that might seem like dead ends to others.
Also, the math professor would be literate, would insist on training children to be literate from a young age when it is easiest to learn (in the real world people didn't start to learn to read and write for the first time until middle school or high school age and these skills were restricted to a narrow class of scholars until the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, the Minoans and earliest Chinese dynasties, for example, had no literate elementary school age children). This technology could provide huge advantages.
These worldview differences wouldn't have direct application, but would set his band of people on a straight and narrow path towards unprecedented progress relative to those of people with a muddled and inaccurate understanding of the big picture of how the world worked.
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Mathematics is probably the most complicated, but also the most basic type of science for your scenario. Knowledge in mathematics appears worthless to most people (ask high school students!), unless they see an actual **application**. A professor of theoretical logic or number theory will likely have no influence teaching his field. A high school teacher used to teaching mathematics to a far less educated audience than the university professor would likely have more influence, if he sticks to very practical examples for every day usage of the tribe(all this is ignoring the language barrier which increases the difficulty of teaching illiterates). An **expert in teaching** will actually be **more valuable** than an expert in advanced mathematics.
This leads to the question, what knowledge is founded on basic mathematics, which is relevant in ancient ages:
**Geometry** is one of the most ancient disciplines of maths, because independent of number systems (including 0 or not) it helps in measuring and also partitioning farming plots and regulating the distribution of land between the inhabitants, e.g. if a father dies you can now calculate how to split the farmland between his children according to his will. The ability to draw plans helps with creating larger buildings, planning ahead construction time and material cost, making actual larger constructions works more feasible to actually realise. Inventing the wheel, planning carts and contructing vessels, such as sailing ship, galleys and so on.
Introducing **currency** by calculating a common value for the loaf of bread, the chicken and small tool is one of the most valuable things, as it will allow for easier exchange of goods first within the community and possibly also with neighbouring communities, once traders start appreciating that they do not have to carry all their goods along with them all the time. Teaching professional merchants and exporting the idea of currency could actually make the community one of the first trade hubs and greatly increase their wealth and living style.
**Functional relations** and the idea how to quickly **solve certain equations** have been a large challenges for mathematicians for centuries. Bringing back the knowledge of approximating some behaviours with a linear process to be able to predict what will happen in the near future and providing the ready made soltuion for quadratic equations and showing the physical processes like **gravity, acceleration, speed**, ... where these are applied could spark interest in at least a few to learn the 'more advanced' ways of the wise man.
**Vector geometry** is a simple visual way of illustrating certain natural behaviours such as **currents in the sea or river** and how they **affect sailing ships**. Also **redirecting rivers** for better irredation or flood prevention might fall in here.
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**The Scientific Method**
A lot of very interesting answers here.
The most useful skill, on the long-run, would be to teach the scientific method: base everything on observation and the confirmation of those observations through falsifiable experiments. Question everything, do not trust blindly in any superstition/witch doctor/shaman/spirits etc.
This, if ingrained deeply in their culture, will ultimately lead them to be greatly successful over a long period of time.
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**Short Version : You need an expert in Manure, not mathematics.**
In such a post-neolithic world (e.g early bronze age), your mathematician starts of :
* Probably older than everyone else - [average life expectancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) would be about 25 at that time and even a new graduate in mathematics would be about 22.
* A babbling idiot who could not communicate in any locally recognizable language
* Potentially lethal to the locals as his body carries diseases internally their immune systems would be very vulnerable to.
* Incapable of feeding, clothing or hunting in the way the locals do (if at all).
* Socially inept to the point that they he cold easily cross a local social or religious taboo and find himself dead (or worse). Such a culture would be essentially unrecognizable to a modern human and they would be lucky to navigate through it socially without disaster after disaster.
* Repelled by local drinking water. Ever actually look at a glass of water from a river ? Don't drink it unless you're feeling lucky - no clean tap water in those days.
So your mathematician would start out, not as a wise man, but as a useless, incompetent misanthrope and fool.
And as survival was a day-to-day struggle and charity a luxury at that time, I'd say the odds of your mathematician surviving long enough to learn basic survival skills and communicate with the locals is very small.
**But lets say they do ...**
What can they teach the locals to gain their respect ?
Not bloody mathematics that's for sure !
Useful skills to neolithic cultures :
* Manure Science - what can you do with manure ?
* Maybe basic hygiene practices - can you mathematician make basic soap ?
* Calender skills - can your mathematician remember enough basic astronomy to help the locals predict the seasons accurately (useful for agriculture) ?
* Maybe mapping and surveying skills.
* The use of a plumb bob.
Ancient cultures has little or no practical use for mathematics (note that the concept of a number zero did not appear until about 300 BC and negative numbers were not developed until about 200 BC).
Again remember that survival is the *only* focus of day to day activity and long term planning means crop gathering, planting and rotation and the storage of grain and other food.
Lets say your mathematician strikes it lucky and comes to the attention of the equivalent of scholars of the time and gets to show some skills (area of a circle, geometric proof processes). He might get to teach some basic skills in symbolic algebra and maybe elementary calculus. But again remember that *applying* these skills is not the same as knowing them. It's quite possible he could teach e.g. twenty people these (for the time) very abstract and esoteric studies, but would they have any impact long term ?
It's not like he could write a book.
**Books !!!**
Now we're talking.
Your chap comes to the attention of high and mighty and, more to the point, the early equivalent of bureaucrats, and knowledge that you could print in a structured way (typeface) would be *really* useful them.
If your chap forgot the maths and simply got around to explaining how to print and keep records on paper (how do you make basic paper) or even on cloth, your chaps would bring the printed word (and the ability to educate and organize and record) to the world very early on.
Woodblock printing did not appear until something like 200 AD, so if your mathematician got that going in the 4000 BC range, it would certainly have helped speed up development of many things (like the invention of taxation and revenue collection - yay !)
Now assuming your chap helps develop printing he's also now in a position to plagiarize the work of every mathematician he can remember and pass it on to what would become a very different (but probably equally bloody) history !
**Another Mathematician becomes a Bureaucrat**
Your chap will now follow (eh, precede) Issac Newton as a government employee par excellence by helping them become better (the first !) paper pushers and probably also help the local head honcho realize the benefits of a sound economy based on tax collection (and the need for regrettably violent punishments for avoidance and tax exemption for senior government figures and researchers in science and engineering).
And this is a good thing from your chaps point of view as he'd starve to death otherwise !
**A Ripe Old Age**
He could live as old as 35, maybe even 40 if he plays his cards right.
But only if his health care reforms (like soap and cleaner-than-mud drinking water) come into vogue.
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He probably would not teach them advanced maths. As we know from the [XKCD Purity](https://xkcd.com/435/) strip you can have all the things thanks to math.
So he would probably advance them in the field of building: the angles, the structural strength which lead to: materials (weight, density) which lead to: chemistry (after all, Avogadro and atomic number are maths). Also he can help them come up with the sextant, the watch, boats and carts.
He may help build them build tools (calculating the best surface to apply the least amount of force to get the best result).
The rest is just speculation about what knowledge the professor should have to think about furnaces, metallurgy, cultivation. Depending on whether he remembers and can come up with a way to calculate best buoyancy with best sail surface. Or how to make a propeller. Or Archimedes' screw.
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"he spends 30 years teaching them all he knows about mathematics until he dies." Assuming, for the purposes of this answer, that he teaches them mathematics, as opposed to doing the practical thing and becoming the engineer that they could probably make most use of in the short term:
I think that this largely depends on where he was, and which post-Neolithic people he fell in with. I say this, because in order to make use of the mathematical tablets and such, there would need to be a leisure class, since, if one spends all of one's time hunting and gathering, there isn't much time for mathematical pursuits.
However, Let's suppose that he were to travel back to, say, only-slightly prehistoric Egypt (too long ago and the tablets would likely be lost). As the dynastic periods begin and certain classes begin to have time for scholarly pursuits, it is likely that some smart fellow or another (sorry ladies, this *is* ancient Egypt we're talking about) would find these tablets, and begin to piece together their meaning and the oral traditions surrounding them.
Now, it is well known that mathematics, and especially basic mathematics tends to be easily extensible to real world applications. I imagine, therefore, that this same smart fellow would soon realize that the whole geometry thing was actually *useful*, would decide that the remainder of the tablets on analysis and what have you might therefore also be useful, and a whole engineering discipline would arise on the shoulders of the mathematics.
(side note) OTOH, a lot of our knowledge of the real world and practical implementations in it comes not from mathematics, but from science. The scientific method, as we know it, was not exactly common knowledge in the ancient world, AFA we K. As much as I think ancient civilizations would be able to create from some mathematical teachings handed down, essentially, from the gods, I think that simply teaching them the scientific method would produce WAY more advancement, more quickly. Bonus, it wouldn't require 20 years to do it, it could probably be accomplished in an afternoon, maybe a week to really drill it in there, and maybe a month to cover most common pitfalls. Indeed, hunter gatherers could start using the information right away to discover, for example, that human sacrifice actually DOESN'T make it rain, despite the fact that it rained when ol' Tommy Stabbington killed poor Bobby Holeysides just before that hurricane came through....
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Modern math is the result of thousands of minds working over thousands of years, each standing on the shoulders of those that went before. Even a tiny bit of knowledge that survives past a few generations compounds tremendously over time.
You premise would change absolutely everything. Every culture would be different than it is today. National boundaries would be different, languages would be different. We might even have become a spacefaring species by now.
Wherever this neolithic village was, it would become more prosperous than its neighbors, which would invite jealousy and war. Which would compel the development of military sciences, which would in turn compel the development of material and medical sciences, and your off to the races.
So your question is pretty much the same as: "Where will we be 2000 years from now or more?", because I believe that is the kind of effect it would have.
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It depends where he is.
If he lands with the bronze age beaker trades of Europe then nothing he says is going to get through, nothing, that culture got the chop from invaders coming out of what is today Mongolia and Northern China some time in the 1200s BC.
If he's anywhere in the Americas he might have some impact on those cultures and they may advance and expand, crossing the Atlantic in the other direction. But the math will be the least of his impact there, his knowledge of history would be the key, pointing the locals at industrialisation and the use of their abundant mineral resources.
Ancient China may or may not benefit from such a man, it would depend entirely on exactly where and when he landed and precisely who he met, he may have been accepted by the locals only for them to be overrun by their neighbours a generation later or he might have laid the foundations for a dynasty that lasted hundreds of years and spread without opposition China's history is chaotic enough that it's pretty impossible to know.
The [Eurasian Steppes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Steppe) might be the one place from which his teachings would have a good chance of reaching much of the western world, there is a very long history of large migrations out of that area as populations outstripped their local resources. Math used for systematic logistics and siege warfare would almost certainly spread out with such groups.
The long term impact anywhere in the west is questionable, after Rome and the following dark age we lost a lot of what we used to know, the Renaissance was an age of *re*discovery as much as anything else.
It occurs to me that while no trace of the man and his teachings need ever be found some of the great works of the ancient world may be down to his presence, Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids may in fact be his doing without anyone ever finding a trace of him.
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**Cryptography**
If he's a mathematician that knows cryptography, teaching a simple RSA to the world is going to change EVERYTHING.
Of all times, nation sent encrypted message to one another - and of all times, those message were 'cracked' by the enemies to take advantage of the content. With a simple encryption method that everyone can do with a little bit of effort (~10 min), but which is impossible to decrypt (at least with our current knowledge today), the whole world is going to change. The war of information would take a different face (starting with the Roman empire) and lots of dark plots would never be revealed to the light.
*Sorry for the lack of examples. Since they were already load of answers, I thought I would just throw out my idea quickly without minding too much the details.*
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I strongly second Dhara's idea. Basic mindset could make a great big difference.
Beyond that, developing a religion around mathematics that priests teach to young priests, probably requires a city. If he finds a neolithic city then he has a chance, maybe....
Maybe he could teach things that are immediately practical. If they don't already have pottery, he could teach them that. They take downed wood (because cutting down trees is hard unless you have good tools) and make pottery, and they already have everything they need to do it except the knowledge.
Do they have a source for salt? Salt is valuable, if they can get it.
If they burn wood for pottery, they can get soda ash or potash from the ashes. That's useful. They can make glass.
It's a big effort to make stone axes to cut down trees, but that effort can pay off. Quartzite etc for tree-cutting axes takes entirely different skills than flint etc for meat-cutting axes. He can teach them how (if he knows how). The time to do that is maybe after they are running out of down wood because his pottery is using up too much of their fuel.
At this point they are rich with a lot of hard work. They have pottery, glass, natron, potash, and I hope salt which they can trade. They can cut down forests on flat land to get firewood, which incidentally gets them new cropland. This might take his lifetime, but if not they have wealth and plenty of work available, they might accept immigrants and their population goes up to the point that epidemic disease matters. (When population is low and there isn't much trade, the diseases tend to come from other animals and not from other humans.) He can promote city hygiene, which was not needed before.
If they find coal, they can do a lot with that. But it isn't available everywhere. Similarly gold, copper, etc.
Do they have good leather? But then he probably doesn't know how to make good leather. Does he know how to domesticate baby cows etc? Castrate them, raise them to pull tree trunks to the kiln? Breed them for today's miniature size? Keep an auroch bull to impregnate his cows? It's a whole lot of work and a whole lot of skills. Probably too big a jump.
A lot of stuff is too big a jump. But if he can increase the prosperity enough, he might be able to create a priesthood that knows some math. They can be an elite, and volunteers get judged by how well they can pick it up. They can do proofs, and learn the most teachable proofs, and gradually expand the amount of math they can hold onto. Someday it would become valuable. The important thing would be to make sure the mathematical elite have enough children. If he manages to create a celibate math elite that creates a selection pressure against the ability to learn those skills, that would be very bad.
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[
So hypothetically, what would be the best "hiding" locations for societies/organizations that seek to avoid contact with the rest of humanity? In other words, where would be the best place (geographically), on Earth, to place an isolated, uncontacted, and unknown society?
Assume that any technology realistically available to "us" (us being mainstream society) within the next fifty years is already accessible to this society. All else (satellites, ships, radar, etc.) remain the same - in other words, whatever technology the US currently has to potentially find this society should be accounted for.
EDIT: To clarify - let us say there was a country among us "irl" - but one that is concealed in such a way that "we" (as Americans, Europeans, etc.) are unaware of its existence. What would be the best way or where would be the best place for this country to remain hidden? What technologies would be appropriate?
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## Rural Russia
The Russians abandoned many remote factories and industrial facilities when the USSR collapsed. We can see them; what we didn't know (or care about) is that they seem to be occupied by someone. Probably just drunks.
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I am seeing potentially two options:
#### Hiding under the Ocean
Oceans provide a cover from human civilization as most of it is unexplored.
To generate power for this society, we can use lava vents.
#### Hiding under an Ice cave in Antarctica
The thickness of the ice in Antarctica is 2 km. We can have a ice cave that opens up into the ocean.
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## 'Hiding in plain sight' is your only chance.
There is google maps. There are printed world maps. If a society is on a land marked as wilderness, someone will want to climb that mountain or cross that desert first, and write about it. Stopping them will cause stories. If the land is marked as ocean, some boat will sail there and detect land. If it is made to disappear, there will be stories about a 'Bermuda Triangle' and someone will look. So the society has to appear on maps, either with a 'legitimate' answer why people cannot visit, or with a facade to deceive visitors.
Perhaps your society can infiltrate a country, and make them designate their hiding place as a military base. (A couple of decades ago, a nature preserve would have worked, but then came recon sats. You might put the transition from one cover to the other into the back story.)
Or they are a country, and deceive the rest of the world about **what** they are. A 'closed society' like North Korea, with better deception.
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>
> in the modern world? with satellites and Google maps and all they'd literally have to be underground .. no other way unless you fancy the dark side of the moon for this bunch or you want Atlantis and fish people, and not just any old Atlantis there for that option, you'd have to go deep, real deep .. ü§î Hmm, hang on, I do see one other option.
>
>
>
The Amazon is a possibility.
With certain restrictions and provisos.
Your society can't be an industrialised one, it can't even have metal working or a lot of medieval level tech, anything that will produce any kind of footprint or deforestation visible by satellite is something they can't have.
Even any particularly large population centres aren't going to be possible for them to remain undetected into the modern era.
What that means is a more or less stone age society for tech of loosely affiliated and likely widely dispersed small village settlements that provides no more visible evidence from above than those 'lost tribes' we already know are to be found there somewhere deep within the Amazon, but with a centralised authority (king, ruling council or what have you) binding them together into an effective and cohesive but nonetheless otherwise largely decentralised 'society' and culture.
The lost tribes we do know of would be on the outskirts of this 'nation' not part of it and unaware themselves that any villages belonging to it that they did know about were part of a larger whole.
So any of their villages that were seen from above by either satellite or plane would simply be taken for just another one of those small independent native groups already encountered at the edges of the Amazon that have already been encroached upon.
They would probably need some form of written language to help account for their ability to remain bound together as a cohesive whole but that wouldn't be in and of itself one of the techs that would reveal their existence if it's not shared with the 'wild' tribes on their borders.
But I'm guessing that scenario likely won't fit with your requirements?
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**tiny**
$ $
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/n5adO.png)
The society lives on the South face of a grain of rice. Grain of rice or mustard seed. Your choice. The seed is at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is well hidden.
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**Physical Remoteness is Not Going to Work**
With the tech of today, and for any society more than a few dozen people, it is not possible.
Living underground or under the ocean or under Antarctic ice is simply not going to fly with today's tech. It is possible to live in those places, but it would be a major undertaking that is simply not possible to do it unobserved.
Consider that you would want a power source. Consider what you would need to stay alive under ice. You need heat, and protection from the ice. You could build steel reinforced walls that would resist crushing. Then provide heat, light, greenhouse food, and such. But for more than a very small number of people this would be quite obvious. You would need to either create these items on-location, or ship them in.
Shipping thousands of tons of stuff to Antarctica is going to get noticed. Setting up a factory is going to get noticed. If for no other reason than you would be spewing out CO2 where none had been released previously.
So, unless you are prepared to limit your group to about ten people, it will physically get noticed pretty much anywhere you put it.
**Secret Society**
Secret societies are a challenge. There are lots of social groups that have tried to stay secret. But we know about them. If you have more than a few people moving in a larger culture, there will be people who spill the secret. It would take quite extraordinary methods to keep such a secret if your group was, say, thousands of people or more.
Even having a combination of physical remoteness and a secret society is highly unstable. The deepest secrets of such folk as The Mormons or The Masons are available on line and in parody musicals. When a group is more than a few people, people will leave and take those secrets with them.
One imagines a town "in the wilderness" where everybody is a member of The Club. Then some ordinary disagreement arises. Some couple has a rancorous breakup and one of them storms off to parts far-far-away to get away from the ex. And then he is outside the safety of the town. And wants to form new relationships with people outside The Club. And every day he has temptation to spill the secret for a variety of psychological and social reasons. This has happened for many groups.
**Non-Humans**
Suppose your secret folk are, in some manner, much smaller.
Another answer already suggested that they might be small enough to live on a grain of rice. It would require quite radically different biology to what we experience. Organisms that small cannot be as smart as humans if they are based on DNA-carbon type life cycles. There is not enough room and there is not enough energy. But if they were aliens, who knows?
Consider a VR device that occupies some such space as a football-field sized area. It could easily be added to an underground layer under some mundane structure such as a parking lot. The servers could be secretly diverted from a number of mundane projects. Say, every time Amazon or Google sets up a local server farm, 10 or 20 servers walk out the back of the facility.
Provide some electricity, and maybe some air flow for cooling, and your entire society is on-line. They might have an internet connection that allowed them to sell intellectual property such as stories, engineering designs, etc.
They would need a very small number of human assistants to keep things going. Maybe one family that owns the land the VR rig is under. They could handle things like being the literary agents for the IP produced. And keeping that parking lot from being excavated. Because their income depends on the secret staying secret, there is a possibility it could be stable.
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Hide in large mega cities.
Who will notice if everyone in a specific skyscraper is part of a single group if the group isn't known?
They can even dig down and have underground paths from one building to another. they just have to make those tunnels out of old materials that are easily collapsed. this is easier in Europe where the cities are older but it would work in US cities also. It is just more work to explain underground bits tunnels where the city isn't built in so many layers and has better documentation in its early history. However, this would still work in New York City, if you can dig down and not hit something important (it's a mess down there).
How many people are going to notice or think it strange that they don't actually know anyone in building X? The police have more things to worry about than a building that's never a problem.
There would have to be some interaction with the city government to keep things hidden but once things are hidden long enough, it becomes "the way things are." So, the burden of hiding would get less and less over generations.
[Answer]
**Welcome to SE!**
A few good answers have been posted here already, but I'd like to chime in with some more science-oriented comments.
To me, you can somewhat divide the possibilities based upon whether your society is ok with living an essentially subterranean existence, or if it requires at least some time on the planet's surface. But in all cases, heat, in one way or another, is a big problem.
## Above-ground
The biggest hurdle to avoiding detection is heat. This is less complicated if your society subsists entirely on foraged foods and sashimi and wears nothing but leaves and animal skins. But since you say modern technology is available to them, I'm going to presume they indeed want to make use of that knowledge. That will require energy, and generating energy means generating heat.
For the foreseeable future, technologically modern societies require electricity to function. While living in a remote area is a good start for several reasons, even something [as small as a campfire](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-tracks-wildfires-from-above-to-aid-firefighters-below) isn't guaranteed to escape detection out in the open. Even if you ensure all your heat sources reside indoors to some extent, that heat needs to go somewhere.
Let's consider some possibilities for generating power:
Solar panels are probably not your best bet. Although the technology continues to improve, solar power requires a large amount of space for a relatively small gain. You might be able to come up with some clever ways of camouflaging them from a distance, but in the end, massive arrays of warm, reflective surfaces would be extremely difficult to hide. Maintenance and disposal of broken-down panels [is also an issue](https://www.cfact.org/2020/09/18/solar-panels-generate-mountains-of-waste-and-heat-the-planet/).
Hydroelectric is much more appealing, in my opinion. Instead of having a massive dam and plant facility, you could construct a system along a waterway that blends completely naturally into the landscape.
Relatedly, recent technology is getting better about not letting byproduct heat go to waste, and one notable usage is in water purification. This isn't limited to hydroelectric systems ([e.g., this](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/294790-new-solar-panels-use-waste-heat-to-purify-water#:%7E:text=As%20the%20panels%20pull%20in%20solar%20radiation%20to,to%20evaporate%20and%20re-condense%20as%20clean%2C%20fresh%20water.)), but it obviously meshes well with hydroelectric infrastructure.
Nuclear power is also a good candidate. First, it's completely clean. If you do have to replace some spent fuel, it wouldn't be insurmountably difficult to dispose of a lump of radioactive metal in a covert way. Second, nuclear power plants can (and do) use water for coolant. In simplistic terms, reactor coolant is piped around in a loop; it absorbs heat from the nuclear reaction and transfers it away, cooling off as it travels around the pipe before getting back to the reaction, over and over. It's certainly conceivable to construct a large underground network of piping to distribute the heat absorbed by the coolant water in a sneaky way. Such a facility would likely be more difficult engineering feat, however.
Another issue is, of course, food sources. [You can certainly grow a lot of food in a small area](https://www.freightfarms.com/), even with a complete lack of natural light. This, too, requires a lot of power and generates a lot of heat. But if you're able to hide your power generation facilities and mask the waste heat they put out, you can definitely do it with your food production methods.
Finally, there's the basic matter of "hiding" in itself. A good environment for staying hidden *and* one that lends itself well to our concerns is a jungle/rainforest biome. Jungles are [excellent at hiding things](https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/mayan_ruins.html). There are large swaths of unsettled rainforest/jungle across the planet with a) thick, natural cover from foliage; and b) watercourses traveling through rocky, uneven terrain (including caves, rapids, waterfalls, etc.). It's the perfect environment for disguising a technologically advanced society and the trappings it needs to maintain their standard of living.
## Underground
A society living deep underground could be very difficult to detect. Again, thermal and electromagnetic energy can be perceptible from great distances and hard to hide. In theory, if most of your infrastructure is underground, it would be easier to mask your presence with the additional cover the ground above you provides, and the basic lack of physical evidence of your existence out in plain view.
But for the most part, a society living mainly underground would in fact have all the same concerns as laid out above, with some additional considerations.
First, the obvious point: humans weren't made to live in subterranean conditions. It's simply [an inhospitable environment for us](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42461-021-00532-6).
Here, again, there's issues related to heat. While [temperatures below ground increase the deeper you go](https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Geothermal_gradient), this won't *too* be much of an issue if you don't plan on living miles and miles below the surface. Suppose your society plans to live in buildings that are still fairly deep -- let's say, a quarter mile/0.4 km below ground. In that case, the temperature would be about 20 °F/11 °C warmer than on the surface. That's a notable increase, but not insuperable.
The biggest problem is simply that humanity lacks the technology to build huge structures extremely deep underground. Material science hasn't progressed far enough for us to construct reliably sturdy buildings to support the immense weight of the rock that would be above them.
How deep is too deep? Well, currently the deepest man-made construction in the world is [a research laboratory in China](https://underground.sjtu.edu.cn/cjpl). It's roughly 1.5 miles/2400 meters below ground. Note that this complex was carved out of a mountain; the image on that page shows how initial construction occurred horizontally, which is much easier than vertically. Just something to consider, if you decide to go that route.
Edit:
I should have mentioned this in the above paragraph: When considering what might constitute "too deep," I purposefully cited that laboratory rather than the various ultra-deep mines or research boreholes because that laboratory is an actual structure of some size. A robust building like that is the kind of structure you'd envision an entire population living in.
[Answer]
# 1KM underground
Being deep underground gets you away from the first issue of having a hidden city in the information age, global imaging satellites. Being underground does create a of other issues, some of which are easier to overcome than others.
## Temperature and Energy
Although these might seem like two different issues, they go hand in hand. According to [this research](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Temperatures-at-1-km-depth-and-b-at-10-km-depth-c-Depth-map-of-the_fig4_282831586) the temperature range at a depth of 1km is between 30°C and 70°C, in that range you'll need cooling for your citizens to function. Luckily you can use that exact heat to power your cooling and the rest of your city. By using that heat to power your city and dumping it back into the earth you avoid revealing your society through its thermal output and take care of the need to seek out a way to power your city.
## Food and Oxygen
The largest issue with feeding your population is that most of Earth's food chain relies on the Sun adding energy to the system, we'll need to substitute in our geothermal energy to replace the solar energy. The "simplest" way to do this is to convert the energy we have into electricity, then convert that electricity into UV light using LEDs. Once we have photosynthesisers working and creating oxygen we basically have a normal earth lifecycle.
## Water
We'll need a source of fresh water. If its a fixed amount we'll need to create a water cycle to reuse it. If it is constantly being added to we'll need to find a way of removing it, which leads into the next issue. If its salt water and needs to be deslainated when need to find a way of getting rid of the waste product.
## Material
This issue is twofold and probably the largest blocker to our hidden underground city. We lack the ability to simply go and find materials so everything we need must be produced and found by ourselves, additionally we lack the space to dump materials we no longer need. This is where our technology has diverged from what the rest of the world will achieve in the next 50 years, when they're "catching up" to us. Given its abundance and usefulness we will use carbon for many purposes as it is common in the crust and multifunctional. By using it in most applications, from construction, to batteries, to our heat sinks for the geothermal power/cooling we can avert the need for more exotic elements and make use of what we have.
Now the issue of where all these tunnels have come from is a greater one that can be solved in a few ways depending on the needs of your world, different solutions providing different hooks:
### Natural cave system
Easiest way to solve the issue, the caves were already there, and the people just moved in. Doesn't seem likely geologically and doesn't resolve the issue of where the waste material goes for expanding the city.
### Natural fissure
With an unknowably deep fissure near the city but completely underground we solve the issue of where the material goes. Some digging will have needed to be done at some point to reach it, but once you have anything further can be done completely in secret. This also doesn't seem likely geologically and creates more issues for your self-contained ecosystem and thermal control.
### Fixed excavation
By excavating enough space pre information age, and therefore pre satellite imaging, to build your city and room for it to expand, you solve the issue of having to deal with realistic geology but put a fixed limit on how large the city will ever be. With this limit in place, you have to put constraints on your society so that it will never grow beyond these limits.
[Answer]
## Disguised as (human-sized) nonhuman animals
A human brain may be hard to beat energy-wise: [Lindauer's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) limits the efficiency of computers. Biology doesn't *have* nanotech, it *is* nanotech. No technology can make atoms any smaller. Thus the human brain may be basically as small as it can be without sacrificing intelligence.
So lets live in the amazon as Jaguars. 50 years [after we put human neurons in a mouse brain](https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/human-neurons-take-root-living-mouse-brains/#:%7E:text=Chimeras%20on%20camera%3A%20Human%20neurons,to%20a%20new%20study1.) we can transplant a whole human brain in a Jaguar body (its a *bit* of a tight squeeze in that skull but much more realistic than insect-size).
## Small-tech
A large industrialized factory is so (early) 21st centaury. What does a society need?
1. Food: Jaguars can do that at Jaguar-level intelligence. High-tech human-brained Jaguars will have no trouble staying fed. Wear hidden AI cameras and the Capybaras are toast.
2. Safety: It's hard to say how much of the Amazon will remain and what poachers will do. Thankfully, poacher tech is designed to catch Jaguars, not cyborg-enhanced Jaguars with passive radar and other detection methods. Artificial pelts and [lab-grown meat](https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/lab-grown-meat-cleared-human-consumption-by-us-regulator-2022-11-16/) are much easier anyway.
3. Opportunity: 2070 will have such exquisite virtual worlds a society can live a life of computers and tech. For work as well as play: you can design everything virtually with 2050-level physics engines. There is "no" need to build massive infrastructure until all your "take-over-the-world" blueprints are ready.
**But my computers?** Thankfully, photolithography reached the "well-funded garage" level in [2020](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxz_ENnmgtI), so by 2070 a basic fab can be carried in a backpack. Feedstock materials and spare parts are a problem, but they can be (laboriously) prepared with furnaces and other [low-tech methods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spP-L-RuGY). It's far less efficient but its enough to barely self-sustain a tech industry. Moores law died around 2025 so being "two decades behind" isn't much of a loss, even with the underclocking and material choice you need to keep the chips alive for ~20 years.
## Don't blow your disguise!
Humans in 2070 are aware that mind-downloading to animals is possible but it is rarely done: it is easier to [replace organs](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/07/04/198110553/scientists-grow-simple-human-liver-in-a-petri-dish) or even whole bodies. And most who do so aren't in a secret society, they are just oddball people in our society being odd.
Although humans are not eagle-eyed for animals with human brains, they will begin to get suspicious with enough odd behavior, more so those who know how animals are supposed to behave. Humanized Jaguars have a natural quadruped gait, but spacing out into a virtual world is not really a Jaguar thing. Also your paws look [strange](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/human-origins/understanding-our-past/living-primates/the-grasping-hand). Most items are carried inside the mouth or swallowed to look innocent, with larger items assembled like a well-machined jigsaw puzzle at destination. Furnaces and other infrastructure is disguised as a disorganized rock pile (and placed at the base of cliffs where rocks fall into talus piles anyway), etc. However, a close inspection by a human would reveal what it is. So stay safe, stay hidden!
[Answer]
This might not be a good answer if you are looking for a place geographically on Earth for a country that seeks hidden physical location. This answer is intended for a hidden society/group of people that seeks secret living/gathering spot away from the rest of the world.
Behold the **Internet**. Yes, the [Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet) we're using.
There are already a few known secret groups that make a place for meeting online via some secret accessing methods that only known to the members of the group. Some of the used channels are the [Dark web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web)/[Deep web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web) that when used with a browser that makes the user anonymous such as [Tor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)) plus some proxies can make the action difficult to track. An example of this kind of group is [Anonymous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)).
The group can have its own hierarchy system, currency system, and any other systems that can be processed online. Recruiting process will have many options ranging from private invitation or public registration (for those who can find a way to access this secret group in the first place). The group can have its own currency for trading online using [Blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain) technology much like [Bitcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin) but created by themselves and only known and used by the group members. Some assets can be minted and purchased/sold online much like [NFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token). The transactions (with customized algorithm focus only on anonymity) will be untracable. Group members can virtually meet each other or even arrange a large meeting online much like how we do online meetings nowadays. There are plenty options ranging from a customized software for virtual anonymous meeting something it like Zoom (but anonymous) or with [Virtual Reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality), like [VRChat](https://hello.vrchat.com/), to just secret group chats like [Telegram](https://telegram.org/) or internal email system. People can join and leave the group anytime since the condition to join and access the group can be customized to keep changing (depending on how secret and difficult you want in order for the new people to join in).
Now that the secret place is established. The hard part is how to make it unknown to the world. People come and go, and they bring the secrets with them. We can assume that someone will eventually share the group's information to the outside world; so, how to keep this group unknown even the group named Anonymous is still known by the world? Well, this is not that difficult if what the group does is not going to affect the outside world. Therefore, no one will notice or even care about what other people's doing because it does not affect them in any way. To think that we only know some groups from the Dark/Deep web. Chances are there are still some groups that have been established for a long time and still until now have not been known to the outside world. If that is the goal of your question then it should be acceptable.
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Are 'they' in contact with 'us'(but not reverse)?
If answer is 'yes'?, this opens a lot of options like taking partial control of one of existing countries.
So.. they just live in Sibiria and use they tech to infiltrate Moscow leadership , provide some services to them and get official cover. Are you really sure that remote military base or that remote settlements in Sibiria are NOT theirs? Your spies will be killed if they go near (official explanation will be 'don't go near secret installations'). Russian leadership changes? Not a problem. They also need our services.
So...they just leave under one of mountains in USA(gone here in XIX/XX centuries after it become clear they couldn't hide in plain view anymore..their traditions are too strange) but they do provide some services to RICH people, including politicians. Illegal (per our current laws but not theirs). Like..training ponygirls from kindap victims :). Those services helps them escape too much attention.
[Answer]
## Through a Portal
Modern technology requires a modern population. You can't make smartphones, satellites, etc. unless you have a consumer base in the 10s of millions to spread out the cost it takes to make the factories and supply chains you need. You also can't make many modern marvels without taking resources from all over the world and bringing them together into one spot to put them all together.
In other words, you can not hide a modern society in one place. It MUST be big, and it must be in contact with a significant portion of the world to function at all. There is nowhere on, or inside the Earth a civilization this size could hope to stay both hidden and out of contact with the modern world which leads to the conclusion that it cannot actually exist "on" or "in" this world.
That said, you don't really need to hide this civilization on THIS world, all you need to do is hide the way there. If you were to place some manner of hidden portal to another world, then what lies on the other side could be just as sprawling as we are here, and you'd never detect it with any seismographs, satellites, etc. because there is nothing on this world to detect. This portal could be a Star Portal to another planet, Interdimensional Portal to a parallel version of Earth, a Time Portal to the distant past or future, or even some sort of Hell Gate/Hedge/Looking Glass thing into some magical other place that is nothing like our own reality.
What ever the nature of this portal is does not matter. What matters is that this Portal is the one and only one way between here and there, because a single Portal could be hidden in any number of places that man rarely ventures.
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[Question]
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I'm worlbuilding a low fantasy inspired by the dark ages something like 6th to 9th century in our world. The geography is completely different with one supercontinent containing almost all the landmass. And plenty of states & tribes inspired by those in our history: Phoenicians, Mycenaean, Han, Dravidian, Scythian, etc.
I have a person that travels a lot working as a mercenary cavalry, caravan guard & trader. In his travel he brings back many "technologies" to their tribe, such as blast furnace, Archimedes' screw, ballista, improved plough, silkworms, rice, composite bow, water buffalo, ostrich, writing system, etc
The new "technologies" remain in use only in his clan, while the rest of the tribe views them as a mere curiosities.
Is it possible for the tribe to ignore useful technology?
[Answer]
There is several reason why theses tribes could ignore theses technology:
**Resistance to change:** People tend to don't trust new and unknown technology, preferring tech and solutions already used and understood, even if the new technology seem more effective. Even more if traditions or elders are opposed to brutal changes.
**Need of adaptation:**
Integration of new technology impose to learn how it work, construct tools and workstations necessary for manufacturing the new tech and change their habits accordingly (for example, introducing new kind of livestock or crops implies important change in cooking).
It's possible that the tribe don't think the gain brought by the new technology is smaller than the cost of implementing it.
**Difficulty being taken seriously:**
Even if the new tech is useful or more efficient, you still need to convince the tribe that this is the case. If the person bringing the technology is too eccentric, mistrusted or bad with selling/presenting his tech, the tribesman will think that the new tech is useless or junk.
**Bad experiences with advanced technology:**
If theses new tech are already spreading, they could be used by hostile tribes and therefore associated with them, leading to negative opinion toward theses technologies and even new tech in general.
[Answer]
Majority of people don't like changes so unless the technology brings immediate and desperately needed benefits I don't see a problem why it shouldn't be ignored.
* **Blast furnace** We don't need cast iron, too brittle.
* **Egyptian screw** Droughts only happen every 4th year, and we have sheep to survive
* **Moldboard Plow** That's good for the land near the river but sucks at drier soil
* **Ballista** Waste of good rope. It kills only one enemy and takes forever to load
* **Silkworms** They ate all our mulberries and for what, one single shirt for the wenches.
* **Composite bow** It takes lot of time to make and we have good yew. Besides bow is for hunting not for war.
* **Rice** You want me to eat that thing with sticks nope
* **Water buffalo** Those beasts of yours ain't afraid of dogs, how I'm gonna herd them when they chase off Lassie
* **Ostrich** Who could eat such large eggs, my in laws don't visit everyday. Plus my nephews got hurt when they tried to ride them
* **Writing** My memory serves me well try my grandpa
**Addendum**:
>
> He who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off
> under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in
> those who might be better off under the new - Machiavelli
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>
One of the ignored aspects of every new technology is that it creates costs and losers. There is no technology that is better at everything compared to the old one.
For example:
* You made that great new threshing machine, guess what poor people who did the threshing for a living would like to lynch you.
* Your new wheat species increases the crop yield three times, but people like the taste of the old one better.
* Your iron plow is superior to the wooden ard. Now the blacksmith is getting rich while carpenter is cursing the day you were born.
The other problem is that the benefits of the new technology outweigh the costs for the possible adopters. Why bother irrigating your fields when according to local customs you will be obliged to feed all your poor relatives. You have extra food share it.
Or maybe you spent 15 cows on a expensive moldboard plough but you have to share it with all your neighbors. Or they will shun you if you don't scrooge.
Egalitarian cultures don't tolerate large inequalities. If the new technology makes certain people far wealthier then other it will be resisted and its artifacts destroyed. You'll find your water buffalo slowly roasted under blessing of village shaman and order from your local chief. And you better don't resist, and they banish you.
All in all technological progress is very hard and requires many things.
Unless there's a fertile ground or political will to adapt the society to the technology, something like [Meiji restoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration) the tribe will stay backward and oddball clan will remain oddball. Their trinkets are cool but we will still do things like our father's-fathers's-father's did them.
>
> Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the
> well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new
> road.” ― Voltaire
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[Answer]
There are instances where religious beliefs have prevented cultures from adopting beneficial technology. The best I can think of was the refusal of Indian 'Sepoys' in the employ of the British army in India to use cartridges allegedly greased with cow or pig fat in their rifled muskets. The loading drill required you to bite open the cartridge and poor powder inside down the barrel before putting in the ball. Moslem's considered pigs 'unclean' and Hindus of curse considered cows to be sacred. This is allegedly one of the causes of the Indian rebellion.
You could easily make certain cloth, say silk 'unclean' if local religious practices state that insects are unclean for instance. Same for newly introduced foods.
Notwithstanding the example I gave which was a special case your biggest problem would be getting others clans to reject new weapons and/or tactics introduced from outside the region. If history shows anything its that getting your ass kicked by an enemy with new weapons or ways of fighting pretty quickly convinces all their opponents that they have to get there hands on the 'new stuff' pretty quickly. Otherwise they won't be around to worship anyone.
One or two stark defeats and suddenly local priests are finding reasons why that new newfangled catapult of gun powder etc is *not* blasphemy. (Perhaps gunpowder can offend the local thunder God?)
[Answer]
You are begging the question about what counts as 'useful'. Useful to who? New technology is not a good thing per se. Writing for example, is a means of social control: originating almost every time in tax gathering systems to enable large-scale government. It did not begin to benefit the average person for centuries. Silkworms are only useful if you want to make silk, always a luxury good. Making better weapons is a dubious advance.
Your other clams may be smarter than you give them credit for. And perhaps they are making advances that your protagonist misses because he doesn't see the benefit?
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While it is possible that a tribe ignores useful technology, I do consider it highly implausible that they ignore it when one clan is actively using it.
Confronted with a working demonstration of the advantages, there remain a few options:
Ban it, and force the clan to abandon the technology if there is some stigma attached to it to restore purity.
If it is a purely economic calculation instead, they may try to sabotage or destroy any equipment to nullify the advantage, and/or adopt it themselves.
When it comes to military technology, then it becomes especially non-justifiable to not try to get the best equipment.
Pretty much the only way technologies can get ignored when in direct contact with them is if they are only idle curiosities, without practical application.
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You might want to check out the book [Guns, Germs, and Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel), which is about the adoption of new technologies and the factors that influence the speed of adoption. It also has some examples of societies that actively ignored or even uninvented new technologies. One of the examples is Japan, which banned guns because of social pressure from Samurais who wanted to keep their monopoly of armed force.
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A historical example of a society largely ignoring a useful technology is the first steam engine being developed in the first century A.D. Roman Empire: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile#Practical_usage>
One could speculate that because the Romans had a mode of production based on slavery, they didn't have need for developing labor-reducing technologies such as this.
Another reason that a group may reject a useful technology is a desire for defining themselves through differentiation from another society. David Graeber and David Wengrove write about this, using the historical example of two American Pacific Northwest tribes: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324199410_Many_Seasons_Ago_Slavery_and_Its_Rejection_among_Foragers_on_the_Pacific_Coast_of_North_America_Slavery_and_Its_Rejection_among_Foragers>
[Answer]
All of the above, and **necessary specialization** -
The rest of the tribe must at all times train and work to fight against the Badguysbeyondthathilloveryonder. And some of them must do the rain dance or there won't be any rain. And the silly walks clan can't just drop everything and learn to read and write.
These are must-haves, or **conceived must-haves** for the tribe's survival. **Each person/clan specializes in something that the tribe needs and **spares others the need to take care of it****. They're all thumbs-up for the techy-tech clan to do useful magic for the tribe, just don't bother them about why the flux capacitator won't charge the space-time infinity crux, or explain that Alibaba cloud limits disks to 5 times the amount of instances in the account.
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Actually, I could easily see gunpowder weapons being seen as curiosities. The materials needed for the powder are not exactly common. And that is setting aside the amount of work that goes into making even the simplest cannon (hand or otherwise). A traveling tribesman is unlikely to bring back enough to make much of a difference.
With muskets if you can't get powder you basically have a club, and not necessarily a good club.
Improved farming (plows, irrigation) is a much harder sell, particularly after a year or two of seeing increased yields.
[Answer]
There are some real life examples of "tribes" not using better technology, despite them having it.
The Steam engine was already known to ancient Greeks, but no one really cared, because you don't need labour saving devices, when it's not your labour, it's that of your slaves. Need more labour? Get more slaves.
Devices which were found in sunken ships, like the Antikythera mechanism, were probably technological marvels of that time, but they were scarce and as far as I can tell only some interested individuals had any use for them.
Other example are the Chinese. They had a culture, were new revolutionary methods to do something were discouraged, because "it works fine and we were doing it for centuries". Sure they found the black powder by accident, as most discoveries are made, but it never really was used for more than Fireworks and very unprecise guns.
Until one single British ship came and conquered whole china.
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[Question]
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Imagine your spaceship encountered a gravitational anomaly and discovered that you are lost in space, your computer tells you that you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy but it cannot find the Solar system. I think in order to triangulate the spaceship current position we need at least 3 other spaceships in the proximity otherwise parallax error gets big, is there a way to transmit a signal so that only 1 station no matter how far away can easily pinpoint the source of the SOS signal?
Edit: the crews were being kept in cryogenic tube but... Hold a sec I thought I'm asking for sending out SOS signal and my officers are still investigating the anomaly which somehow fried the ship's only blackbox.
[Answer]
Don't forget the [Pioneer plaque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque#Sun_and_galactic_landmarks)
>
> The radial pattern on the left of the plaque shows 15 lines emanating from the same origin. Fourteen of the lines have corresponding long binary numbers, which stand for the periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit. Since these periods will change over time, the epoch of the launch can be calculated from these values.
> The lengths of the lines show the relative distances of the pulsars to the Sun. A tick mark at the end of each line gives the Z coordinate perpendicular to the galactic plane.
>
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You can use pulsars to mark your position, or alternatively [Cepheid variables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable), since they act as standard candles for measuring distances.
>
> A Cepheid variable (/ˈsɛfiːɪd, ˈsiːfiːɪd/) is a type of star that pulsates radially, varying in both diameter and temperature and producing changes in brightness with a well-defined stable period and amplitude.
> A strong direct relationship between a Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period established Cepheids as important indicators of cosmic benchmarks for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.
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[Answer]
# The question is inconsistent.
If you know that you are in the Milky Way, and not in Andromeda or whereever, then you have navigational data. Either you know not even that much, or you know much better where you are.
A starship would not have star charts which are dots on paper. There would be databases with size, color/spectrum and orbit, and then it is "merely" a question of pattern matching to find where you are. The orbit data even allows you to correct for an unknown elapsed time.
If that fails, that is a clear sign of weirdness. You might not even be in the same **universe** any more.
[Answer]
>
> you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy
>
>
>
Then you aren't lost. You have an absolute position to the center of the galaxy, and that's easy enough to figure out, assuming that you can see the stars. If you can't, that's pretty bad, but hopefully you can, and if you can see the stars, it's merely a matter of identifying the constellations and nebulas and notable star systems, and so forth, until you can figure out, based on what stellar landmarks you can see, where you are relative to the center of the Milky Way. Then just transmit that.
[Answer]
**You know what? Let's get abstract!**
**It all depends on the nature of signal detection and signal propagation.**
You know what you said about triangulation? That's required if your detection method returns a *direction* but not a distance. For instance, when a submarine detects a sound from "heading 281", they don't necessarily know how far away that noise is. So they run a bit in a perpendicular direction, then stop - and use the difference in headings to roughly triangulate where the sound came from.
But if a submarine 'pings' its target, it not only gets the bearing, but the *distance* as well - based on the time it takes the sound to echo off the target and return back to the originating pinger. Triangulation is *not* required there, because the information being returned includes both angle and distance.
So, let's start taking a look at options.
**Signals have a direction but no distance.** For instance, someone emits an electromagnetic signal and someone else detects it. Or they emit a FTL version of that signal. The receiver is getting an angle to which the signal corresponds. So how does one indicate their position? Easy: just include within the information on the distances to two nearby celestial objects. After all, the receiver could trace back where the signal came from, and there'd only be two possible points on that line with a distance X from object Y. If they give two such distances, that narrows it down to one specific point. Aka, a distress call would be, "I'm 1.98 floobars away from Omicron Alpha 7, and 1.99 floobars away from Omicron Alpha 8."
**Signals have a direction and a distance.** For instance, someone emits a signal that has a half-life depending on distance. The receiver gets both an angle and a direction - basically, the same information as a submarine ping. In that case, there's no need to transmit location information at all. (Just like a submarine doesn't need anything more than a simple 'ping' sound to get what it needs: the signal itself is good enough.)
**Signals have a distance but no direction.** Aka, an ansiable network that has a half-life depending on how far away the signal came from - but there's no telling which *direction* the signal came from. This is when triangulation comes into play. In that case, the best solution is to have three detectors working in concert, using the distances of each to plot a point in 3D space where the signal came from. In that case, there's no need to transmit location information at all - you'd be relying on the detector to do the legwork of triangulating your position.
**Signals have neither a direction nor a distance.** Aka, an ansiable network which just 'is' - it's like a bulletin board where posted messages just appear and you have no clue where they came from or how far away the poster was. This is when things get tricky. In that case, you have to perform the triangulation yourself. If you list your current distance away from 3 known stellar objects, that will be enough to triangulate yourself to anyone knowing the position of those objects. In which case, a distress signal is you listing your position in regards to three stars/etc.
[Answer]
If you cannot see any stellar landmarks for whatever reason, your only hope is to send repeated SOS messages at regular intervals. A single station can eventually work out your position by scanning for the signal with a directional antenna. They would scan first with a wide field of view antenna to get a rough direction. Then they would scan in that rough direction with antennas with successively narrower fields of view until the direction is precise enough for their comfort.
Then, they can get a reasonable measurement of the distance by comparing the strength of the signal they're receiving with an estimated guess about how strong your transmitter is. The weaker the signal, the further away you are. They can know exactly how far away you are if you include how strong your transmitter is in the message, but it shouldn't be essential.
Alternatively, if you can send repeated SOS messages over the course of months or years, they can measure your distance fairly precisely by measuring the parallax between where on their night sky you are on Day 1 and Day 100.
[Answer]
As others have said: without knowing more about the situation they find themselves in, and how they got there, we can't establish how they'd communicate their location.
* Normally, the center of the galaxy is a known, fixed 'origin' point; the plane of the galaxy gives one of two known, fixed orientations; and the rotational direction of the galaxy differentiates between those two possible orientations. Once you have those things, you have a fixed coordinate system, and to orient yourself in those coordinates you need only your distance from the center, your distance above or below the rotational plane of the galaxy, and how far around the disk you are relative to, say, Earth.
* Normally, if any landmark stars could be identified by instruments or eyes, then you will know where you are in the galaxy. We have a 3D map of the milky way now, and that will only get better as time goes on: we wouldn't need to rely on "constellations", but rather on being able to see enough stars to identify them by their relative positions, brightnesses, and spectra. A mobile phone could do this, so you can assume that every person on the space ship has enough sensors and computing power immediately on their person to do it. Downside is, this requires line of sight to enough recognizable things, and if all external ship sensors are broken and nobody can go spacewalking, or if the ship is inside a cloud or other obscuring thing, then you don't get line of sight.
* Normally, you can rely on radio communication and its features. However, the Milky Way is 105,000+ lightyears across, so it's lightly that the tale will rely on handwavey FTL communications.
* Normally, communications are directional, so the receiver can at least use a directional antenna to get a rough idea of direction the signal's coming from. However, with FTL comms, direction might not be a factor.
* Normally, communications are affected by doppler shift, so the receiver can establish a relative velocity relative to the sender, which would tell things like how far away it is. However, with FTL comms, doppler shift might not be a factor.
* Normally, attenuation of a signal could give some idea of distance, but maybe not FTL comms.
* Normally, a long-range signal might be affected by gravitational lensing (if they were crazily lucky), in which case even a single receiver could triangulate to the source, since the signal might take multiple paths. However, FTL comms might not be lensable.
* Normally, a timestamp would allow the receiver to tell how far away the sender was, by how much time had elapsed in transit at light speed. However, with FTL comms, transit time might not depend on distance; and with FTL *travel* the timestamp is unlikely to match between source and receiver anyway.
* Regardless, every message sent should contain an *internally* accurate timestamp, correct for the source's time.
* Normally, anything periodic or any event that can be identified would help, if accompanied by a timestamp. Even orbital periods of local planets, etc. Four events are enough to triangulate a position (if the position doesn't drift much between them): two would cut it down to anywhere on a specific ring, and three cuts it down to just one of two points. However, this requires an ability to see events.
* Even if all that can be seen is a pulsar, pulsars vary very slightly and unpredictably in frequency, and that variance can be sent with the message, which would allow the pulsar to be identified by observers and, in combination with a timestamp, would allow distance from that pulsar to be established. However, since the source and receiver will be observing the pulsar from thousands of lightyears apart, their observations will not be synchronous: to use this for ranging, it will rely on a "tree-ring-like" stored record of pulsar variations over time (which you can easily build for all pulsars, once you've solved FTL comms and travel).
If the ship is inside a cloud, stuck in a wormhole, or otherwise screened from all incoming radiation, but still able to communicate using a handwavey faster-than-light system that's unaffected by physics, then I'm not convinced that locating the ship is possible.
[Answer]
Just use the Galactic Positioning System.
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/what-if-gps-stood-for-galactic-positioning-system>
Analogous to Global Positioning System, it uses Pulsars in place of satellites.
You need to spot a couple more beacons to compensate for the lack of a timestamp, but otherwise it works just like GPS.
[Answer]
Spherically! while a lot of our comms are built on high gain antenna arrays to maximize bandwidth etc, any SOS would be very helpful to emanate from center to Anyone within receiving range.
This does make an assumption that there are a series of receiving stations that would be looking around for any SOS or other signal...
We constantly point telescopes of all types at the sky, but think about how small a window we sweep throughout that looking...
HOWEVER, we then make it to spherical explosions that ripple through all of space-time and a detector that isn't Directional then can pick up.
i.e. volumetric neutrino detectors that then can look at the vector a single ν wandered through (trace the line) OR, multiple detectors in a triangle that can then figure the signal origin (i.e. black hole and gravitational waves)
So, again, what is the signal/receiver "triangle" or even "pyramid" look like?
[Answer]
Use the signal itself to communicate your relative location to the recipient: when they pick it up, they get the direction that you're in by default, and if you include some information about the transmission amplitude, they can also get the distance, which is all they need. For an added bonus, include the transmission frequency, and they can get an estimate of your relative velocity as well.
That might not get them to a pinpoint, technology depending, but it'll get them close enough that you can use some local measures to tell them exactly where you are (say, by transmitting your distance from and perceived angles between some nearby stars to anybody who gets close).
] |
[Question]
[
A colony of space travelers makes their way to their new home planet. After landing and establishing their base camp, a wood worker begins to cut down trees and notices that none of the trees have more than 12 rings. Curiously he explores the country side for several days and can find no trees with more than 12 rings (dead or alive).
I want the character to conclude that there is a pending extinction level event that will happen again, and this evidence is proof it has happened before.
I can't think of what kind of event would leave new trees to grow but leave no old trees behind.
**UPDATED:**
To clarify some of the questions asked in comments.
* He finds no trees older than 12 rings and a ring represents one solar year on that planet.
* The trees are biologically similar to trees on Earth.
* He does find dead and fallen trees but none that have more than 12 rings.
* There are no remains of trees older than 12 solar years ago.
* There are no fossilized remains of older trees.
I'm looking for an event that happened 12 years ago that made all the trees disappear. At this point I haven't figured out how he'll know the event will happen again, but I guess that depends upon what kind of event it is.
[Answer]
Every ~~fourteen~~ thirteen years, vast swarms of a locust-like creature emerge from underground, where they have been living in the larval stage for all this time. The swarm darkens the sky, and eats every last bit of organic matter that is above ground and unable to flee. This includes the leaves, branches and trunk of every tree. Fortunately, the trees can quickly regrow from their root systems, as can pretty much all of the plant life on this world.
Of course, the time interval does not have to be thirteen years, but (as martin pointed out in the comments) it should probably be a prime number, because this makes it more difficult for predators that eat the locusts to synchronize their population cycles to the population cycle of the locusts. This is observed in real life in [the life cycles of cicadas](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-cicadas-love-affair-with-prime-numbers), for example.
Also, the time interval should be a bit more than the twelve observed in the tree rings, so the colonists have time to start getting established, and maybe to plant some Earth crops that will later be devastated. (Also, if the interval were exactly twelve, it would mean the colonists had arrived precisely on time for an event that only happens every twelve years, which seems like an unlikely coincidence.)
[Answer]
The issue of having no living trees older than 12 years would at best indicate that some event occurred 12 years ago resulting in complete devastation of the forest in that region (note that an explorer on foot would presumably have to return to "home" every night, thus would have a limited region that he/she could explore; even with a ground vehicle, the region would be limited). Given this, a large forest fire or insect plague would likely be enough. For example, locusts can wipe clean huge areas of land, leaving essentially nothing behind; if one envisions a somewhat more aggressive predator, the presented scenario becomes even more believable. From what I understand, some army ant colonies can also be relentless.
The absence of dead trees over 12 years old is a bit more difficult to explain, unless the above-mentioned scenarios result in alteration in micro-climate, such that fire destroyed all that was left. One would still expect to find some surviving specimens, though the argument could be made that the sample size isn't large enough.
Unfortunately, all of the above wouldn't be enough for the explorer to conclude that a cataclysmic event was inevitable and imminent. For this, you may have to resort to a cyclical celestial event (series of comets with a 12-15 yr orbit, or a solar flare cycle, or perhaps a periodic alignment of the star plus planet plus moon(s) such that the environment is extremely but transiently altered)
[Answer]
This is not so hard. Forest fire would do the trick. New trees would have started growing, either from buried seeds or from the still-alive root systems of trees that burned down, twelve years ago.
As an extreme example: there's a tree (or grove) called [Pando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)) that's believed to have a root system 80,000 years old, with many stems springing from those roots, averaging 130 years old. In the past, intense fires have burned the stems many times, and they have sprung up again from the still-living roots.
The issue you need to deal with is, is there any other evidence of the cataclysm? Twelve years later there should still be stumps and rotting trunks of the older tries that died. If those are missing, you need to explain their absence.
[Answer]
# Boring answer: genetics
The question is **very** Earth-centric of you. You said it yourself: you are on an **alien** planet with **alien** trees. Did you ask yourself: why is there something so **Earth-like** as trees on an alien planet? And why do the alien trees have rings to begin with?!
But ok, let us assume that: yes, there are trees. And, yes, the alien trees have rings that are curiously similar to [year rings on Earth trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology#Growth_rings).
Why then 12 rings and not a variable numbers of rings?
For the same reason the [Seven-spot Ladybird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinella_septempunctata) has seven spots and not any other number: **genetics**. The rings have not come about through variable seasonal growth but because that is an **inherited trait** of the species of tree.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lwGjw.jpg)
*This species of Coccinella **always** have 7 spots, because of its genes*
## Edit after question edit
Ok, so they are seasonal rings. The problem is... **how can your protagonist know that**? Every objection I fielded up there, will be brought up by the protagonist. Why would they not, hm?
[Answer]
I'm not going to answer about the calamity, as many others already did, and they're all very good answers.
I'm going to answer about how he thinks the calamity is coming again:
make him found old dead trees. possibly fossilized. All with twelve rings on it, and visibly not dead of natural causes (not of old age or malnutrition for example, although a cyclic dryness would be a valid cataclysm).
After finding lots of dead specimen with twelve rings maximum, and a death date separated by a period of 10-15 years, the character could deduce that something cause the death of every living organism every 12-13 years (depending on how long the seed takes to grow) !
[Answer]
One could imagine an extreme fire (perhaps vulcanic in origin), turning all trees into ashes, but leaving seeds in the soil intact. Usual terrestrial forest fires do not work this way, but perhaps wood is much more flammable on this planet...?
I do not see any way by which he could deduct the reappaerance of the event looking only to the tree rings, so after he realizes there *was* an event, he could notify the others to start to search for signs.
[Answer]
There's an opportunity for a twist here. That woodworker didn't explore the whole planet.
One must ask, why does that "region" have the "oldest" trees.
I imagine a magenetic hole wandering around, leaving the life exposed to cosmic radiation (solar winds, etc..).
It could be a terrifying megafauna heard that constantly roams the planet: they think the megafauna are trouble (crushing all vegetation in their wake) when it's the predator(s) of those megafauna they should be worried about.
---
If you want something more direct: how about a pulsar which bathes the planet in radiation every 12 years? (I'm not sure of a typical rotation period of a pulsar - I suspect it's usually much faster than 12 years, so it might need to be another cosmological periodic phenomenon) Of course, the object is far enough away that it doesn't "sterilize" the planet, but instead impedes growth. But life on the planet has adapted, and is in fact necessary for the eco system. Humans are the aliens and need to adapt, and fast.
[Answer]
DAMN I really need to read the whole question, this doesn't work.
Ok this is a fact I had to hunt down:
<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_ring>
>
> Tree rings grow under the bark, and the bark is pushed out while the
> tree is growing. The inner part of a growth ring is formed early in
> the growing season, when growth is fast and is known as early wood.
> The outer portion is the late wood, and is denser than early wood.
> **Many trees in places with hot summers and cold winters make one growth
> ring a year.**
>
>
> For the entire life of a tree, a year by year record or ring pattern
> is formed that reveals the climate conditions in which the tree grew.
>
>
>
So my suggestion, the planet is usually always warm, always equatorial. What causes these cold spells to create the rings?
I think volcano winters, these trees have lived through 12 of them, and they are designed to just "hibernate" through them and keep going. But there just aren't enough plants to feed everyone during the long volcanic winters.
[Answer]
Periodic destruction is not the only possible explanation:
12 years ago, the area was terraformed from a desert, and trees were planted.
Either by an advanced alien race (so your humans are pests in their farm),
or by some kind of cataclysm.
Your protagonist should explore more of the planet, but them again, the tree-farm can extend to entire planet.
Edit: if I was that guy, I would assume this is a tree farm, or an environmental restoration/terraforming. So whoever did it will be real mad at me for cutting the trees that they planted.
[Answer]
It is not necessary for an extinction level event to cause this. There are many places where American Beech trees grow in stands where none of the trees are more than 10 or so years old. Beech bark disease doesn't begin to have an effect on the trees until they reach this age and all the older trees in those places have already died.
There could be a similar parasite that kills all trees once they reach a certain age on this planet.
[Answer]
Your trees are Bamboo.
Bamboo, as everyone knows, grows like mad and is virtually a weed.
Chickens, as everyone knows, lay eggs like mad.
What few people know is why these two statements are connected.
Bamboo flowers once every 50 years. The entire stand. After it reproduces, it drops its seed and keels over, dead. Chickens found themselves literally knee-deep in food every 50 years and so their biology evolved a trigger response: when food is plentiful, make egg.
Sam O'Nella [did a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NSekwyS4Ns) on the topic.
Ergo we have something that mimics what you want: your trees grow for 12 years, then produce flowers/seeds/whatever, and die. The wood is soft enough, and not-thick enough that it completely decays, resulting in few logs and no fossilization. And by "not thick enough" I mean that your trees are fairly narrow. Only 12 years of growth shouldn't leave them more than a couple inches in diameter.
Working backwards with [this tool](https://www.cliftonparkopenspaces.org/treecalculator/)...
* a black maple would be ~2.3 inches in diameter
* Common Horsechestnut would be ~1.6 inches
* Cottonwood would be ~6 inches
* River birch ~3 inches
Several others fall into the same buckets.
[Answer]
Going the other direction to many of the other answers: Years ago, there was a huge volcanic eruption. The lava spread out, and eventually cooled and solidified into rock. Weathering broke the rock down, and it gradually turned into [volcanic soil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vineyard_soil_types#S-Z) deep enough to support tree growth about 12 years ago.
If this happened in a lake or ocean, then the entire *island* may be less than 20 years old.
[Answer]
* 12 years ago a highly advanced alien race finished creating this planet
*(they may come back either welcoming the visitors or chasing them away)*
Picking up the fire / extinction level events notion, keeping in mind that life finds a way to endure such things,especially if it is only on the surface:
* the sun activity peaks every 12 years causing very high atmospheric temperatures with giant fire storms on the whole planet
* the planets rotation around its sun and the current position of the solar system causes the planet to traverse periodically through an area where it is exposed to gamma ray bursts
*(should be strong enough to destroy all trees but not bad enough to anhilate all life and the planet - maybe the burst is not so strong or the planets magnetic field somehow blocks enough of the bursts energy or another planet / the sun itself shields the planet sufficiently)*
With these extinction level events, drama for the survival of your space farers may ensue easily once they figure out impeding doom is afoot.
For repeating sources of gamma ray bursts I found :
<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1995ApJ...441..747W>
```
Title: Repeating sources of classical gamma-ray bursts
Authors: Wang, V. C. & Lingenfelter, R. E.
Journal: Astrophysical Journal, Part 1 (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 441, no. 2, p. 747-755
Bibliographic Code: 1995ApJ...441..747W
```
*(so it seems plausible enough for sci-fi, at least in theory I guess)*
**In case the link goes down:**
[...]From an analysis of the first catalog of the BATSE experiment (Fishman et al.1993, 1994a) on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory; we find an excessive number of pairs of gamma-ray bursts which are clustered in both space and time. The angular separation Between the two bursts in each pair is less than their positional uncertainties, and the interval between their occurrence times is within several days.
[...]Unlike most of the "soft" gamma-ray repeaters, these repeating bursts have relatively hard spectra, complex light curves, and widely varying durations[...]
] |
[Question]
[
Would it be possible for a nation with 19th century to very early 20th century technology and history and hot desert climate to utilize solar power for electrical generation as a substitute for coal or replace the use of coal in any other way?
There is not an abundance of national coal, however, rivers and ocean could allow for importation of coal.
[Answer]
Yes, they could. You "just" need a large mirror to concentrate sunlight on a boiler to produce the steam. Power plants that use this principle are in use today: *[Ivanpah Solar Power Facility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility)*
The first problem you have is with economy. Burning coal is just way too cheap if you have it available, and it's much easier to get a few megawatts of heat out of burning coal than it is to get the same amount of heat from mirrors. Simply because you need about one square meter of mirror for each kilowatt of sunlight you want to collect, and the mirror needs to be continuously adjusted to the sun. A single man shoveling coal into an engine produces much, much more than just a single kilowatt of heat...
You can offset the economy problem by making coal hard-to-get in your country.
However, the second problem remains: Efficiency. Early steam engines were brutally inefficient, turning only 1% or 2% (Watt's optimized version!) of the heat into actual mechanical work. So, if you have a giant 10x10 m mirror ($100\ m^2$), you only get 1 kW or 2 kW of usable power output. Anything that requires more energy than that quickly becomes infeasible to power with the many, enormous mirrors you need, which all require man-power to adjust to the sun continuously.
Of course, you can offset this by a) allowing close to modern steam turbines, and b) fancy clockworks that automagically adjust the mirrors. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to get the power from the power plants to where it's actually needed.
[Answer]
If they have a lot of desert space, perhaps they could build [solar updrift towers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower)? It's basically a large area covered by a greenhouse roof and a high chimney in the middle. The energy output is proportional to the area times the chimney height.
They were invented in 1896, so they use only technology available at that time.
[Answer]
**Egypt 1912**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3tJoy.jpg)
It actually happened:
>
> Shuman built the world’s first solar thermal power station in Maadi, Egypt (1912-1913). Shuman’s plant used parabolic troughs to power a 60-70 horsepower engine that pumped 6,000 gallons of water per minute from the Nile River to adjacent cotton fields. His system included a number of technological improvements, including absorption plates with dual panes separated by a one-inch air space. Although the outbreak of World War I and the discovery of cheap oil in the 1930s discouraged the advancement of solar energy, Shuman’s vision and basic design were resurrected in the 1970s with a new wave of interest in solar thermal energy
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Shuman>
[Answer]
You can run a generator on an open-cycle [hot air engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_engine). This is a heat engine that gets energy from the expansion of air when it heats up.
The major issue is getting cold intake air. You can use [a ground-coupled heat exchanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-coupled_heat_exchanger) for that. Specifically a thermal labyrinth. The air is drawn thru a long path underground and cools in the process, basically.
Heating up the air is depressingly simple in a desert. Just have some some structure made of metal above ground where sun can shine on it and it can change heat with the local air. If you have mirrors you can focus the sunlight for much higher temperatures. [Solar cooking ovens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker) are a thing so the mirror and design wouldn't need to be that good. For a more serious design you can use [a parabolic through](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_trough).
For the viability of all this the best comparison is probably [ocean thermal energy conversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion).
The very good news is that the conception and early tests are pretty much in the desired time frame, so somebody coming up with the idea of adapting it to a desert would be viable. Thermal labyrinths are ancient technology and heat engines were largely invented during the 19th century, so that all works as well.
The good news is that OTEC has been tested and it does actually work, so the desert version would probably as well. How well is bit hard to say since the working fluids and many other details differ. The differences kind of balance out but you'd have to do actual numbers to know how well and that would require an actual design. Maybe an actual physical experiment at significant scale even.
The bad news is that OTEC never has made a breakthrough. It never really succeeded in competing with coal and oil. And the desert version would probably be more problematic. While this proposal basically uses the entire desert for capturing the solar energy and so solves some of the density problems of other types of solar power, it still cannot compete with coal on density and thermal labyrinth would be more upfront work than pumping up cold sea water as in OTEC. So the economic potential would be limited.
That said in this time frame cheap labor might be more accessible than imported fuels. Or the government might simply worry about being dependent on imported coal in case of a war. Or about maintaining the logistics of transporting the fuel.
And there are uses other than electricity where this might work better. This system already pumps both cold and hot air, so it would only need some valves and thermostats to give you a self powered air conditioning system. In a hot desert that is not nothing.
Likewise something like irrigation by pumping up ground water would be better fit than electricity generation. A farmer might be happier with spending time to build a thermal labyrinth than with spending money to buy coal or oil and intermittent and low density works fine for irrigation.
So the actual answer would be split. Utilize, yes. Replace coal, no.
[Answer]
No. Coal works as power source because it is solar energy, concentrated, in a convenient form (rocks). Solar power is simply too disperse to be a power source to early, inefficient, steam machines
[Answer]
A Frenchman named Augustan Mouchot demonstrated solar powered steam engines in 1866.
>
> Augustin Mouchot taught secondary school mathematics from 1852-1871, during which time he embarked on a series of experiments in the conversion of solar energy into useful work. His proof-of-concept designs were so successful that he obtained support from the French government to pursue the research full-time. His work was inspired and informed by that of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (who had constructed the first successful solar oven in 1767) and Claude Pouillet (who invented the Pyrheliometer in 1838).
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1BP8B.jpg)
*Augustin Mouchot’s Solar Concentrator at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, 1878. (source)*
>
> Mouchot worked on his most ambitious device in the sunny conditions of French Algeria and brought it back for demonstration at the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1878. There he won the Gold Medal, impressing the judges with the production of ice from the power of the sun.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wqt9s.jpg)
Sadly for the inventor, coal was and is far cheaper especially since it can be burned 24/7 for power when you need it.
[Answer]
There is another viable alternative for coal which was in use during the 19th Century which you've already confirmed exists within your question; rivers.
Many machines of this period were powered by water wheels. If they have rivers and an ocean, there is no need to reinvent the wheel by creating some sort of elaborate solar powered system. This would meet the second part of your question; replace coal in some other way.
[Answer]
**Your people could use wood gas.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas>
>
> Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces,
> stoves and vehicles in place of gasoline, diesel or other fuels.
> During the production process biomass or other carbon-containing
> materials are gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood
> gas generator to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can
> then be burnt as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce
> carbon dioxide, water and heat.
>
>
>
Your people would be using solar power (as per OP) because they would grow crops to use as feedstock for the gasifier - maybe canary grass or tamarisks or whatever hardy plant they can grow in the harsh lands where they live. Or maybe they have ag waste from whatever they grow as food. Or river weeds.
Wood gasifiers are actually quite omnivorous - wood is fine and so is grass, rubber, dung, dead fish or anything with carbon in it. Anything you can do with natural gas you can do with wood gas.
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I'm not even going to try to compete with Chuck Ramirez's superbly researched answer, but nobody has yet mentioned the [Stirling Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) which dates back to the early 1800s and was far more efficient than primitive steam turbines. It's also a perfect match to concentrated solar power: just use that to heat the "hot end".
The problems with tracking the sun using clockwork and cams mentioned in other answers would remain to be solved.
There was a company trying to develop Stirling engines mounted at the focus of parabolic dishes for direct generation of power (IIRC in the 1990s). There were problems getting the oil lubrication of the engine to work at all possible orientations, and then the whole concept got overtaken by solid-state solar panels. Although it might still be more efficient, area-for-area. Sterling engines can be over 40% efficient, a mirror better than 90%.
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You already have some good ideas of things they could have used. Optics with big lens or mirror to boil water and connect steam engine to electric generator for example.
Modern solar power In terms of PhotoVoltaics (PV panels as we have on houses, camper vans et.c.) it would probably not have been possible as the photoelectric effect was understood just at start of 1900s. In fact in the very same famous paper that gave Einstein the Nobel prize.
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I was thinking of an organism that lives its entire life in interstellar space
* It eats, defecates, moves, grows, ejects eggs, attracts mates, and has sex in interstellar space.
* It has skin that pressurizes its insides so that its insides are pressurized even when the organism lives in the vacuum of space.
* It has thrusters on its back that it can eject fuel out of to change its velocity.
* It is capable of accelerating to 50% the speed of light relative to the rest of the galaxy in 3 months allowing it to cover astronomical distances in search of food and mates.
* Its eyesight is so good that it can see an object the size of Saturn from as far as Earth with as much detail as a human seeing a baseball at a distance of 0.1m.
* It has bioluminescence that allows it to be seen by potential mates.
**What type of diet would be most efficient for this organism to have considering that it would have to get all its food from the vacuum of space?**
Also: **How might its digestive system evolve to process food that it finds and eats in interstellar space?**
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**Such a creature would most likely dine on a diet of the finest pixie dust**
Unfortunately, the creature you describe is so far from reality and the laws of physics that we are pretty much 100% in the realm of magic.
First off, let's talk eyesight. The metaphor of a baseball at 0.1 m isn't quite good enough. Let's take a look at the most likely food source, a comet. Comets themselves are not light sources. They get their light from a nearby star. A absolute-best-case-scenario for our creature is a comet or asteroid at 110 AU, which is right on the edge of interstellar space. Unfortunately for our poor creature, at that distance comets have no tail. They only get a tail when they get into the inner solar system, so they look like small asteroids at a distance.
There's a decent number of 100 km in diameter asteroids (larger than that, they're extremely rare). Assuming it was a sphere, that'd give it a frontal surface area of about 8×109 m2. At a distance of 110 AU, that covers 3×10−17 steradians. Doing the math with our own Sun's luminosity, that's about 9×108 watts of energy hitting the asteroid.
Now let's re-radiate that energy out, so that our creature can see it. You mention its ability to travel across the galaxy, which is thousands of light years wide. Let's give it an easy morsel: it's only 1 light year away (1016 m). We can do some more math here, to determine that the intensity of the light 1 light year away is 8×10−25 W/m2.
This is a *tiny* amount of light. Let's try to put a number on it. The most likely band to be looking at is the hydrogen gap, where hydrogen absorbs the least, 27 cm. At this frequency, a photon has about 10−24 J. This means, on average, a 1.2-square meter detector will see about 1 photon per second from our comet! This creature is going to have to be *massive*! So massive that eating comets is going to be a pretty paltry diet.
That's also assuming a very nice *cool* detector that can pick up those photons. It's going to have to be near a whopper of a thruster. A single hydrogen atom at 50% the speed of light had to be given 2.3×10−11 J of energy. Let's pretend the creature harnesses pure antimatter to store energy. That amount of energy would take the annihilation of 2.6×10−28 kg of matter and antimatter to produce. Coincidentally, a hydrogen atom is 1.6×10−27 kg, so basically for every 6 hydrogen atoms in your creature, you need a corresponding pair of hydrogen/anti-hydrogen atoms to be used as fuel. Given that you also want to slow down, this basically says the creature is physically impossible because its energy needs are too high, even given *perfect* hardware. (None of these "thrusters." You'd never make them efficient enough.)
The energy requirements of the bio luminescence is even more of a problem. And, of course, there's the issue that any light you see from a mate 10 light years away is now 10 years old.
Your best bet is to remove the insanely fast movement, ignore the eye sight, and do what Lostinfrance recommended: have it consume interstellar hydrogen. Of course, you'd still need to dip into planetary systems from time to time to get more materials besides hydrogen. There's not much else out there. I'd also make them live for a few billion years to solve the issue of finding a mate.
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Give it the ability to generate a vast magnetic field, making it a living [Bussard ramjet](http://i4is.org/the-starship-log/interstellar-ramjets). Then it could scoop up and "eat" interstellar hydrogen. It wouldn't exactly have a digestive system, more a [combustion chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet).
Unfortunately the poor thing might get [hungry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet#Feasibility) even so.
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Note: I am not saying this is realistic, just that this is how I could see it working. Well, this is as close to what your thinking about you can get IMO while not being totally impossible.
Perhaps your creature evolved to go into a dormant, **VERY** energy-conservative state known as hibernation while in interstellar space. It goes from star system to star system at some fraction of the speed of light by slingshotting itself off of multiple gas giants in each system (most systems have 1 or two of them it seems). Your creature would not be able to survive solely on junk available in interstellar space because it is to sparse.
Once it reaches the Kuiper belt of a system, though, it would have (depending on size) enough minerals to survive and would come out of hibernation.
Animal itself would likely just float around with minimal control as to the direction it is going (so as to conserve energy). This could happen by the animal evolving some sort of biological thruster system to propel it in the desired direction. I imagine that this animal would gain minerals from asteroids and comets and gain energy by absorbing radiation/sunlight in a process similar to photosynthesis. Otherwise it would absorb what was needed from passing comets and asteroids and dispose of the junk in the universal waste-disposing system: crapping.
You can look at a Baleen Whale to get an idea of its behavior patterns. Baleen whales essentially swim around with their mouths open, swallowing anything useful that come in (plankton, small fish) and getting rid of everything else.
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**tl;dr: You need an ocean in space.**
As many other answers have stated, this isn't within the realm of *known* physics. Accelerating *anything* substantial to .5c [takes a ridiculous amount of energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation), let alone something that does so with the biological equivalent of rocket engines. Forget thrusters and go with something more exotic like pushing on the [quantum virtual vacuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_thruster). Now on to your real question... What to eat.
Whatever this creature's method of locomotion, it's going to need massive amounts of energy. Unfortunately for our friendly neighborhood space whales, space is big[citation needed] and there's not much in it[dubious-discuss]. In order to harvest the amount of energy required, it's going to take an entire ecosystem.
This makes an intuitive sense when you think about it. It would be impossible for only one type of creature to have evolved on Earth, every part of the planet depends on every other part to produce its food in some way, shape or form. Plants absorb energy from the sun and concentrate it, herbivores eat those plants, carnivores eat those herbivores, then ultimately microorganisms eat the carnivores when they die and supply nutrients the plants need to keep harvesting sunlight (if you cite this explanation for any formal discussion of biology, you have only yourself to blame). So we need a similar ecosystem in space to support your space whales.
You could have swarms of plankton-like creatures that cluster around stars and soak up sunlight, and maybe others that feed on raw materials in planets (probably gas giants) and asteroids. Then perhaps a chain of other creatures eat those and concentrate their energy, and these whales are the apex predator of the system (as @oberron mentioned). In fact, it's probably better to think of these as space sharks instead of whales, because no whale on Earth is capable of accelerating its massive bulk very quickly (that would take more energy than they're capable of harvesting from plankton alone). I'd also save the high-end acceleration for migratory purposes, when food runs low in one solar system they need to boost on over to another, risking their energy reserves on the bet that there's more food there. Once accelerated they could go into a sort of hibernation where they turn off most body functions until they get where they're going or sense food somewhere, and just coast along in the meantime.
The moral of the story is there isn't enough energy just floating around in space as we know it to make this possible, so you're going to have to flesh out your ecosystem to make it work in some plausible way. Time to create more creatures!
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Let me start by looking at the rockets.
If it's capable of reaching a speed of c/2 - and then slowing back down so as not to have a very 'impacting' arrival, it needs to have a delta-V of c, which requires its fuel to be expelled at light speed. (Where does that energy come from?) And even then the half lightspeed feat will require ejecting exactly 100% of its mass (at light speed) by the time it has slowed down.
If you tone it down to reasonable levels, the key point remains energy management. All non-extinct forms of life do their energy management well. This thing is going to require immense levels of energy just for propulsion. So after you tone it down sufficiently, you're going to be looking at something that **eats stars**. Maybe not whole (how big are they supposed to be?), but the delicious stuff would be well below the surface. (Do they sun-dive for their food? See also the huge velocities things would have as they impact the sun, just from the sun's gravity.)
This brings thermodynamics into the picture, as they will need to tame the high heat levels of not just the dive/eating but keeping and digesting their food. Who needs bioluminescence anyway?
Alternatively it would need to eat through huge amounts of matter to extract fissionables. Or have a *magic* matter-to-energy conversion thing that would be quite desired by all intelligent space-faring species, to the point of hunting them whenever they were seen, unless they learned to make their own.
Also, why does it need that pressurization? It'll need a membrane sturdy enough to survive high-velocity dust and keep things from falling off. But beyond that, the pressure fluid is probably useless extra mass that will eat into its energy budget.
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What if it's made wholly of antimatter? Its food source of regular matter would therefore be quite tasty indeed (and extremely energetic) provide it had a means to properly ingest it (some sort of magnetics) so it doesn't simply collide and burn. Its food? (plot twist time) the unfortunate craft of all the space-faring species' who discover a strange, moving object in interstellar space and send a big rocket to investigate.
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This is a tuffy, Let's ditch most of the science and hit specific problems.
**it eats**
It can't eat in the normal way. There is just nothing to eat. Photosynthesis gives us a decent model, but stars are really far a part, a space turnip isn't going to make it much further from the sun then earth is. So let's look at what is more "available" then light. Gamma Radiation, X-Ray Radiation, and the like. So basically "Radiation" is a food source. It could work, but it wouldn't give very much energy.
**It defecates** I don't see this happening. It would have to "use" almost 100% of the energy that it collects. See the section on thrusters though.
**It moves** Well, ok, so long as it doesn't move much, sure why not. If it moves too much you have an energy problem again. I would say it would be ok to "spasm" every once in a long while.
**It grows** Sure, why not. The problem is growing takes more energy then maintaining. With such a rare food intake, that precious energy probably can't go too much to growing.
**It ejects eggs, attracts mates, and has sex in interstellar space** Unless your writing space whale porn, let this one go. For all known lifeforms, sexual reproduction is a energy intensive task. Even plants, and they let someone else do all the work. Super abstract, all the energy of making an egg and a sperm, then finding a mate, sharing it, and hatching it, that's quite a bit of waste. Have them produce a-sexually. It's "easier". Once they reach a certain size, they split. In this case the "mother" split would need to die in 90% of the cases. Only if it was really lucky would the mother bit get to live.
**It has skin that pressurizes its insides so that its insides are pressurized even when the organism lives in the vacuum of space.** Why, There is no need for this. In this odd lifeforms, it's insides don't need air-pressure. It can evolve ways around that.
**It has thrusters on its back that it can eject fuel out of to change its velocity.** This is another odd one. I think you might be better off with "farts to change direction" There is not a lot in space, so where are you going to get this fuel. Assuming that this thing eats "radiation" it's gonna need a lot of it. You can get some propulsion by "emitting radiation" but not as much as your going to need. Look to satellites' magnetic engines for your best, currently known bet, and do something like that.
**It is capable of accelerating to 50% the speed of light relative to the rest of the galaxy in 3 months allowing it to cover astronomical distances in search of food and mates.** First, that's horribly slow. That's 8 years between star systems. The good news is, that as long as you don't care about slowing down, I suppose it's doable. It can speed up really really slowly, absorbing the radiation of a star as it gets closer, smashing into it, destroying it, and absorbing some matter in the process. Then fart propel it's self in a minor coarse correction, leaving behind a decimated ruin or a solar system.
**Its eyesight is so good that it can see an object the size of Saturn from as far as Earth as a human seeing a baseball at a distance of 0.1m.** Yeah, that's pretty crappy on interstellar terms. Using the normal analogy of Sol to Alpha century when both are the size of grapefruit, you would need to see that grapefruit from across the US. The good news is that because it eats "radiation" it doesn't have to "see" just has to point it's self at the most tasty radiation it can. And because it only has minor fart propulsion, it's not going to get a bunch of choices.
**It has bioluminescence that allows it to be seen by potential mates.** Unless it can light up brighter then a star, no it doesn't. It simply won't work. You can make it shiny though as a side effect of absorbing the "radiation".
What your left with:
You would have a MASSIVE lifeform, that basically, breaks wind in a single direction, hoping to find enough "Radiation" to sustain it's self. It wouldn't be very smart, it doesn't have the energy for that. Every 200 billion years or so it would clone it's self, without slowing down mind you, let out a massive fart (of radiation) and change direction by 0.0000001 degrees.
The creature would need to live near forever, it would be HUGE and would wipe out any solar system it came near.
I would not want to run into one of these.
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Beyond the 50% of light speed aspect, if any advanced life form was living in space it would be an apex predator for space life.
As mentioned in comments food in space would be scarce but if we consider panspermia theory there is some organic material in space which could be used by an equivalent space-plancton as food source which in turn would be the base food for other forms of space life.
Similar to whales in our oceans size would probably be key to maximise chances of capturing such space-plancton.
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Your creature may consist of dark matter and obtain it's energy (food) from dark energy. IMHO it is more reasonable this way, since space is full of both dark matter and dark energy.
[Estimated percentages for matter, dark matter and dark energy](http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/dark-matter/)
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The OP did not ask whether such creatures were feasible.
For purposes of this discussion I assume that "eating" provides two benefits: Eating provides raw materials used to further growth, procreation, and other activities, and eating also provides a source of energy to power those activities.
Given that such creatures exist in the ficton\**(see below)* and that they eat, there are a few internally consistent possibilities (not mutually exclusive).
1. They eat other examples of the same "species" (cannibalism).
2. They eat other creatures similar but not identical to themselves, which you must add to the ecosystem in your ficton.
3. They eat other creatures that are much more primitive than themselves, which you must add to your ecosystem in your ficton.
4. They eat non-creature organic material (e.g., plant life) which you must add to your ecosystem.
5. They eat non-organic material and derive energy from subsequent chemical or other molecular or submolecular interactions.
6. They gain energy from some source other than eating: electromagnetic radiation, gravitational fields, etc., and they take in raw materials via some other method that might be described as eating but would include such activities as absorption of (admittedly thin) interstellar gas.
**EDIT:**
*A "ficton" is "A fictional universe. A place or environment created for the purpose of fictional storytelling."*
:)
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If you're ruling out eating planets, then what's left is asteroids. See [this link](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26712/what-is-the-average-distance-between-objects-in-our-asteroid-belt) for how dense the asteroid belt **isn't**. That's going to be one very hungry organism
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It can 'eat' energy coming from stars (absorbing some spectrum of radiation). For this to work, you need to assume it has efficient energy/matter conversion. It can go close to suns when it needs to charge up, then use stored energy to travel between stars.
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The creature can drink water and eat close to the usual food: there are [various organic carbon molecules, as well as water](http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/space-dust-carries-water-and-organic-carbon/), in the interstellar space. They are even called "seeds of life", as may be the origin of life in the Earth. Light that powers many organisms in Earth is also available in space, even interstellar (we see light coming from other stars).
The concentration, however, is extremely low, and some really mystical capabilities are required to concentrate the reasonable amounts. Maybe could dwell near black holes or the forming stars where the gravity of these bodies could concentrate the food.
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Earth in the near future (*in 2081*) is invaded by aliens who are just "a bit" more technologically advanced than humans. The war is not a one sided extermination of humans, but humans are about to lose anyway.
An engineer succeeds in building a time machine for a one way trip to the past. From [How fast could a civilization advance if given access to information from future?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5140/how-fast-could-a-civilization-advance-if-given-access-to-information-from-future) I understand that there would be many problems, but this is the only option nonetheless.
*He is one of the last surviving humans and he alone must depart as soon as possible.*
There is some space in the time machine for luggage (think DeLorean from *Back to the Future* - ~~it could be a bit bigger if need be, but not larger than a small truck~~) and the engineer takes a tablet with all human knowledge *and an advanced AI that can function as a military, economic, medical, ... advisor (so the question is not about what knowledge he should bring, but to whom he should bring it*), a Google Glass like device that can translate all ancient languages, a small fusion reactor - but then has to decide *what else to bring with him (for example: penicillin mold, genetically modified seeds, ...)*. ~~between bringing either:~~
* the latest computer with as many spare parts as can fit in the time machine (but eventually the spare parts will run out and you have limited number of computers in the world)
* all the tools (and tools to make tools) to start mass producing an 1955 era vacuum tube computers for the whole world (but this progress will be much slower)
What is the best option and how far back should he travel to benefit most from the technology of the time (*so he can build on the existing infrastructure and knowledge of metallurgy, medicine, science, ... of the time and perhaps influence a great historical figure*), but still advance the human civilization the most? *2000 AD?* 1500 AD? 1000 AD? 500AD? 500 BC? 1000 BC? 1500 BC? *2000 BC?*
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### EDIT for "put on hold as too broad":
Thank you for so many great and interesting answers!
I see now that the question really is too broad and I have modified it in a way that hopefully leaves the existing answers still relevant, while being more specific. If the question is still too broad, I can narrow it further.
What I removed from the question is in ~~strikethrough~~ and what I added is in *italic*.
**TL;DR**: One of the last surviving humans must travel to the past to give the humanity a technological head start in the battle against invading aliens. His computer contains an advanced AI adviser with **all human knowledge** and the question is: **to whom** should he bring it to maximize the chances of success, considering that traveling further back in time increases the possible technological advances, but also the uncertainty of success?
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The engineer will have the most effect when they can leverage an existing community receptive to the ideas. In that way, a sustainable group can carry on the acceleration over history.
Heading to a largish city is important to this. Teaching a few bronze age shamen some tricks is *at best* going to create a brief flurry of power and die out.
Possibly look to great figures in history and enable them. For example Socrates/ Plato or Aristotle. Alternatively, wait until Galileo or Newton.
If heading to classical Greece, its not just engineering/ technical knowledge that is important. Use that to gain credibility, but then the real thing is the scientific method. Teach them how to fish as the proverb goes.
The economic concept is an interesting one. Actual execution on it seems hard. How to convince anybody to adopt your ideas, given the facts that economic are to say the least hard to prove, and in any case take a lot of time.
But on the economic side, think about the *key revolutions*. The agricultural revolution comes down to a scientific mindset coupled with a few basics like crop rotation. More food means more people means more room for overall economic development.
As well as considering the value of accelerating history boom times, consider how to avoid the busts. Perhaps bringing about an agricultural revolution in 200-300 AD would avoid Rome's decline. Problem is, it is hard to be sure about that. However, avoiding the relative slowdown in tech development for the thousand years prior to the renaissance would clearly be a huge accelerator.
So maybe visiting Alexandria in 250 AD, bringing crop rotation and the scientific method you might be able to really advance things. Just need to avoid global thermonuclear warfare in 1200 AD.
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Your engineer needs to forego the trip and send an economist instead, specialising in development economics. The main obstacle to technological development throughout history hasn’t been lack of knowledge, it’s been lack of incentives. There were things like steam engines and electric batteries in the classical world, but they were largely seen as toys or amusements. Those on top don’t want to shake things up, because it might dislodge them from the top. What you need is to create the economic conditions that encourage the rapid development of technology, much earlier than they actually occurred in 18th century England. I think [Diocletian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian) is the chap to target — he identified deep-seated issues in the Roman economy and introduced far-reaching measures to correct them, but because he didn’t know what he was doing he made things worse in the long term.
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# For best effect, head for either UK or USA any time from 1939 to 1989.
The last few decades have brought the most rapid advances in technology and the greatest focus on advancing technology, during WWII and the Cold War this was often regardless of the cost. Anything to get an edge over either the Nazis or the Russians during the appropriate periods was grabbed with both hands and tried with gusto, often no matter how daft it appeared to be.
Of course if your intent is purely to advance technology regardless of cost, then you could head for any of the opposing powers who also had much the same mindset, but the outcome would be ... different.
You could consider the argument that the efficiency of the German war machine during WWII would give humanity the an advantage over the aliens during the future encounter. Their willingness to pursue technological development without regard to inconveniences like ethics gives them a lead and that handing them the technology to overwhelmingly win the war gives the only positive outcome in the future conflict.
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**Take the tools, a gun, and a few cool tricks**
The main problem here is that you can show up in history and claim you're from the future and know everything, at which point you will either be burnt at the stake for being a witch/heathen/rival witch/rival heathen, or told to get in line behind everyone else who very clearly knows the future and they have *astrology*, not some weird magic ... thing.
The best idea here seems to take a leaf out of a sci-fi, specifically *[Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series)*'s psychohistory. *More specifically*, when the Foundation decides to make a religion out of there superior tech. You want to go *far* back in time - basically to the dawn of human civilization (the more time the better). Good location include, but are not limited to: The Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, or perhaps the ancient Chinese. You're looking for two key components. The first is they have a primitive religious mindset, and the second is that they look different from you. Wow them a bit by demonstrating your superiority, claim that you're a superior being, and take their children. (Not *kidnap*, just take them under your personal tutelage.) It's also a good idea to take a consort and have children that way. (Advantage here is to males whose limits is the number of females they have, and don't have to personally endure risky childbearing.)
The children are the key. If you can train them to work with your technology, then you can restart the modern human times and rebuild humanity at whatever point in time you want. It'll take a while to build the industry back up, but with modern knowledge, you can make defensible structures and deadly weapons until that point, after which you can more or less conquer the world. (You may be dead at that point, so leave a good set of instructions.) At which point, we'll have around 2k-3k years of progress on our modern one in present day. Hopefully you won't wind up up with some totalitarian empire after your absolute power corrupts your descendants absolutely, but even if you do, the human race isn't wiped out so ... win?
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You just jump back to shortly before the war with the aliens.
Assume you jump back 2000 years. You may achieve a lot there (or not, but that's a different story), but you are still leaving a lot of the outcome to chance. Just look at how much of ancient knowledge was lost for a long time, plus what might be lost forever after the burning of the great library.
That is definitely taking too many chances, when all of mankind is at stake.
You state that the humans aren't massacred, but they are losing anyway. That means, with some luck and some foresight, it might go the other way.
We cannot craft luck, but we can craft foresight.
I assume that the first skirmishes resulted in either side finding out what weapons are effective and what wasn't. Jumping back to before the war eliminates this part on our side, giving us a slight edge.
Also, i assume we were quite surprised by their arrival, and by the first hostilities. We can eliminate that, too: By traveling back, you can make sure we know when and where they appear, and when and where they will strike. And we already know which weapons work. We can prepare for an all-out preemptive strike the moment they arrive, cutting the war short, and avoiding all sorts of strange developments that are bound to occur when you travel too far back.
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**It makes no difference.**
Traveling back in time with technology does not, in and of itself, **improve** human civilization.
You just get a *different* civilization.
Let's say you give the Roman Empire basic computers. This means they can e.g. count better, maybe do some calculations better, probably all you've done is let their tax people work better. But no matter what technology you gave them (or any other faction), you don't change the politics or religious and social norms.
At any period in history all you can do is (maybe) influence who gets more powerful or richer. You can change *how* they do things (what tools or weapons they use), but not why they use them or for what goals. The goals remain the same - power.
Let's again consider Rome. Would Rome still fall ? Yes - the pressures that brought it down were complex, a mix on internal and external political, social, religious and economic factors. Would your engineer be able to change those ? Not enough.
You might change some things but your engineer cannot change everything. He/she can't change what Gods people believe in, or what social norms are in force in any location. They can't really control the whims of kings, queens, generals and politicians. They can't stop armies from breaking under attacks.
You can't stop one faction or race or religion hating another. The drives are too much for a technology or devices to change. What you change is the details, but it's too chaotic to control it all. Many have tried, all have ultimately failed.
How imagine your engineer (somehow) gains control of e.g. the Roman Empire and sets out to make it a force for improving civilization (something it actually was by the standards of the day). Your engineer can't do that forever and has now started history on a new path and does not know what will happen. Your engineer has no more control over who will invade, attack, stop trading, increase prices, what peoples will migrate and to where and all those other details, than any Emperor ever had. When the engineer dies history will go about it's own path. The Roman Empire of Engineer the First may last a hundred years and then collapse under more or less the same pressures our Roman Empire did. Who knows.
But there's no way to guarantee improvement only differences.
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Take along something that helps record and spread knowledge of a few basic principles. The problem is not that people "way back when" were stupid - it's that ideas weren't able to be recorded, disseminated, and improved upon.
Consider - the Antikythera mechanism, a geared analog computer for predicting astronomical positions and eclipses, was built circa 100 BC and lost in a shipwreck approx. 30 years later. It was a revolutionary geared mechanism unlike any other known from the ancient world. Nothing else like it was known for another 1500 years - but it was apparently a one-off which wasn't mentioned in "recorded history". Had this technology come into common usage who can say how people could have used it? Or - if a simple low pressure steam engine had been built in the early Iron Age, it might have dramatically affected the civilization which could build and reproduce it. But again, the know-how to do this would have to be spread out to keep it alive, and to stop wars, pestilence, and the death of the one mad genius who knew the secrets of steam from putting an end to this idea.
Maybe educational picture books would help spread knowledge. Maybe getting writing out of the hands of the priests and into the hands of, at least, the aristocracy on a regular basis might have allowed knowledge to be recorded and diffused. But it's more about recording and communication than it is about twisting nuts or stringing wires. That, and lots of time - because one man, brief in space, must spread his ideas across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.
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**Ancient Greece**
The ancient Greeks has the boiler and the piston developed already but just never thought to put the two together to make the steam engine.
If that had happened, the industrial revolution could have happened two thousand years earlier.
Give them the secret of gunpowder and the basics of electricity all which can be built using their level of technology.
Basically anyone with a high school level science ability spending ten minutes with someone like Pythagoras and the world would be thousands of years more advanced that where we are now (or extinct much sooner if they follow the same path as humanity)
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Go back to the day that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Shoot him in the head with your sniper rifle before that. That keeps the Roman Republic from turning into the Roman Empire for at least a few more years.
Now go find the scientists of that day and give them translated textbooks. Build a library and store engineering diagrams in it. Build a factory and make things from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And yes, a school teaching the [scientific method](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/151557/2113).
If you can prevent the Romans from turning to an imperial government, you can avoid a thousand years of grief. Think about it. That alone could put humanity a thousand years ahead. If you add to it the basic mathematical and scientific discoveries of the last five hundred years, that's going to put things way ahead.
If another tyrant arises during your lifetime, well, you still have your sniper rifle, don't you? Leave it to a dedicated secret society for the prevention of future tyrants.
After Rome, you need to wait a thousand years to have the same sort of technological base. So you only move things up a few hundred years. Before Rome, you have to build the Roman base before you can do anything. You only move things up a few hundred more years, plus you still need to conquer a larger area. Rome is as good as it gets in terms of having a large civilized area with superior technology for the time.
Alexandrian Macedonia has some of that, but it didn't survive Alexander. You'd have to find a way to fix that. Also, it wasn't quite as advanced as Rome.
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Taking a different approach here,
The more distance the engineer travel through time the greatest the risk of someone killing him/her because of his/hers differences, and it is not his/hers goal either, the objective its to win the war NOT improve mankind to its limits, so the best option would be a couples months before the alien invasion.
Let's say the war lasted until now five years, the alien `"a bit" more technologically advanced than humans`, meaning that the humans learned a lot during the war (alien battle tactics, Alien hierarchy, their technology, intelligence on the alien command at some specific time and so on) and the knowledge would be more decisive than betting that mankind would improve to be better at war than the aliens in the future.
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A few different people have mentioned the concept of "start the Industrial Revolution early", and the idea that if only we could teach the ancients how to make a steam engine, everything would be awesome.
**This, in and of itself, won't work.**
The first steam engine to do any useful industrial-grade work, (pumping water out of a mine,) [was invented in 1606.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine#Early_uses_of_steam_power) But James Watt's steam engine design, generally associated with the Industrial Revolution, wasn't produced until 1765. A bunch of things changed in science and engineering during those 165 years, (it spans the entire lifetime of Isaac Newton, just for starters!), but one of the most significant happened in 1740: Benjamin Huntsman invented a process for making good-quality steel in large quantities.
Steel had been around practically forever. The earliest known samples date back to around 1400 BC, and high-quality *wootz* (aka Damascus Steel) to 300 BC. But *wootz* was never manufactured in any large amount, and eventually the knowledge of how to make it died out.
Good steel is crucial for the Industrial Revolution. The ancient Greeks knew how to make toy steam engines, but it was never considered anything more than a toy, because with their primitive metallurgy they weren't capable of doing anything useful with it. The high pressures involved in industrial work require good-quality steel (or more modern metals, of course); it will tear apart anything less. And it wasn't until 1740 that the world got a way to produce it in moderately large amounts, and not until 1856, with Henry Bessemer's steelmaking process, that we got a way to produce it in *truly* large amounts.
Huntsman's steelmaking technique coincided with the Industrial Revolution, and Bessemer's with the so-called ["Second Industrial Revolution"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution), the one that truly gave us the modern world. This isn't really a coincidence; steel gave us the (literal) engines of industrial power. Huntsman's allowed for wide-scale production of Watt's steam engine, and a very interesting thing happened within a decade of Bessemer's patent expiring, handing the technology over to the public domain for unrestricted wide-scale production: a man named Karl Benz, an engineer who had worked on steam engines, came up with the novel idea of putting the burning fuel *inside the piston itself*. He used a commercial solvent called "gasoline"--easily available at your local chemist's shop for cleaning purposes--as the fuel, and the rest is history. Today we know the name "Benz" as one of the prestige-grade manufacturers of the machine Benz invented, which reshaped the entire world. But it would never have been possible without tough steel pistons capable of withstanding the insane pressures of exploding gasoline at a rate of a few thousand RPM.
If you really want to start the Industrial Revolution early, the key is not the steam engine; it's the Bessemer Converter. Knowledge of electricity would also be useful, as a few people have mentioned, but there's one thing I'm a bit shocked no one has brought up yet.
The tipping point that gave us the internal combustion engine and the automobile wasn't the creation of the Bessemer Converter; *it was its patent expiration and release into the public domain.* It was the widespread availability of the technology to any smith who cared to try his hand at it. If you really want to start the Industrial Revolution early, it's not enough to have someone know how to make good-quality steel. We had that with *wootz* and it still took another 2000 years to get the ball rolling, because it was always held as a carefully-guarded trade secret by the smiths who knew the trick to it, and then the knowledge would die out and have to be rediscovered, again and again. No, what you need is for *everybody* to know how to make it!
If you really want to start the Industrial Revolution early... steel and the steam engine aren't enough. Give them the printing press too.
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**The first week of may 1953, you don't take tools or tools to make tools, you take information (your tablet) and a couple of live kidnapped aliens in the boot of the "DeLorean".**
You turn-up in the laboratory of [Watson and Crick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Structure_of_Nucleic_Acids%3A_A_Structure_for_Deoxyribose_Nucleic_Acid) a couple of weeks after the groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA.
Get them to examine the alien's tissues, show them video footage of the future destruction of human civilization. Get them to invite the Government from every first-world country to examine the aliens - they were so celebrated around the time of the discovery that an invitation to the Government's science-advisers, and leading technologists of the age would be sure to be taken seriously and ensure good attendance.
Hijack the presentation, show the aliens, the footage - explain the problem of the invasion. You're sure to be arrested, interrogated without creature comforts and with psychoactive drugs - but eventually, you just might be taken seriously - they might think the film footage is faked, but they can't deny the live aliens.
Just stick to the truth, they'll come around, and instead of that silly cold-war leading to the space race, a space-race/bio-tech-race/weapons-race can all be funded together with shared objectives to defeat a common outside threat.
You now have your own suite of rooms in area 51, one of the aliens has been dissected, the other has given birth - the brood is being tested for it's physical/mental/immunological tolerances by the [Mengele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele) process. World peace is achieved, the alien threat is neutralized, your conscience is troubled by dreams of a misunderstood civilization about to be destroyed.
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Knowledge of history and some lower tech gear and a few key ideas might allow for more advances than high technology because you can go back farther and introduce some key concepts at far earlier dates.
Population density is a limiting factor when it comes to technological progress, if you don't have enough people you can't maintain the specialised labour that supports higher technology. To that end antiseptic child-birth and city sanitation for example would allow you to create a sustained population explosion if you could introduce them to the Bronze Age. Taking the synthesis of streptomycin, or smallpox vaccine back would prevent the [black death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) and possibly the [Greek dark ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages) respectively both large setbacks to population density. Once you have the higher populations you need you can have your followers work on other innovations in later generations.
My advice would be to go back to 1500BC, with gold and trinkets to get taken seriously one should be rich and generous, iron smelting, gun powder, germ theory, detailed history books, mineral surveys, a plan outlining soil and wildlife conservation, and population-technology supports and linkages.
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The absolute best thing for your engineer is to go back as far as possible and cause the Industrial Revolution.
The earlier you cause the Industrial Revolution, the faster your humans will advance. There are several points in human history where we came close to starting the revolution, but missed out. The most important thing here is to create the steam engine and get it to stick. What you're trying to do is get civilization to invent a machine that will make slavery obsolete. Before the IR, we used people and animals to do all of our work. People are expensive to own. You have to feed them, clothe them, and house them, and at the end of the day you need a lot of them to do anything.
The average human male laborer uses about 0.5 kilowatt-hours worth of energy per day. Compare this to the modern American that uses around 29 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity per day. This means that a single American person today essentially owns the equivalent of 60 slaves in Roman times, just from an energy standpoint.
This free availability of energy is what you need for technological advancement. With the labor requirements of your society filled by machines instead of slaves, you not only have more people to carry out intellectual jobs, but you have the free time as well.
It's no coincidence that the rate of technological advancement became exponential as soon as we mastered the steam engine.
There were points that we came close to sparking the Industrial Revolution during Roman times, but they simply didn't recognize the value in a machine that could do work using steam, as they had slaves to do all the work for them that animals couldn't do. It wasn't until we had an economical need to produce things faster and more efficiently than slave labor could do that we took the idea of powered machines seriously. Your world-saving engineer will need to overcome this and show applications where industry beats slave labor. Once the revolution is started, your engineer's work is done, as the avalanche of advancement will carry itself forward. Take the Roman example, if we as a species got our head start 2000 years earlier, where would our technology be today?
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I would say right after end of WW2 and start of Cold War. Make sure you take plans and detailed scientific papers for atomic weapons, nuclear power plants, rocketry and computers. Possibly take some basic computer, but make sure it is durable and won't need maintenance.
Going further back than industrial revolution would be ineffective. Culture back then would prevent any attempts at convincing both rich and poor about the improvements. And finding educated people to implement future ideas would be extra hard.
World Wars are a double-edged sword in these circumstances. Sure, lots of people died and lots of cities got destroyed. But technology, especially military tech, had huge advancements. So changing the future so that World wars wouldn't happen would make the new future too unpredictable.
The huge advantage of going back only few decades would be that it would be easy to convince people that you come from the future. You can tell them scientific and technological improvements that would be done in next ten years and they can easily confirm them. They will understand the computer and will know how to use it. And when you get their trust, you can tell them about the alien invasion so they can be better prepared.
Knowing what works and what doesn't will make the economics much efficient. The governments will be spending on research and development of computers, internet, rocketry and more advanced and safer nuclear plants. And thanks to exponential growth of today's economy, getting computers and internet a decade earlier would be huge boost. And knowing the aliens are coming would allow for development of weapons specifically build to fight them.
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All the answers until now have focused on the European theatre. Not that I don't approve, but we're not the only ones out there.
China especially was also very advanced very early, just think of fireworks.
The problem is that they stagnated - while Europe moved past them. One of the biggest reasons for this is that China was a land of china - by which I mean porcelain.
Makes for lovely dinnerware, not so good for scientific discoveries, as even slightly volatile components will react with their container...
In Europe, we instead used glass, which is of course known for being pretty inert.
So we take back the "secrets" of working with glass to ancient China, and let them go from there.
They also have/drink tea - something that was of underestimated importance in Britain during the industrial revolution. Boiling water for tea purified it, and meant that even with the dense populations the industrial revolution brought with it, disease didn't run rampant. They have this protection by default!
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I think no matter what you do it is extremely hard to prepare humanity for the extraterrestrial event, because you cannot really foresee he consequences of your actions. I think the key is not so much in bringing technology back and advancing humanity, but rather **warning** them. Given that you already have the time machine, going back 50-30ish years with proof of what it is going to happen, data about the alien attack and the latest scientific advancements may be your most reliable plan. Consider that periods of rapid advancements within our current age are centered about conflicts. This approach wont give you a completely different humanity, but one that you know will be at least more prepared than the current one, and at the same time you will be avoiding the possibility of a random nuclear war or some similar event.
It is also hard to know whether advancing humanity would advance their weaponry, so this way you are making sure that they focus in what it is really needed.
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## Rifle technology, China, slightly before 1416
I would introduce rifles and the technologies to mass produce them (e.g. screws, interchangeable parts, assembly lines) to Ming-dynasty China. The [precursor technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_dynasty#Science_and_technology) were already present before 1416:
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> The *Huolongjing*, compiled by Jiao Yu and Liu Bowen sometime before the latter's death on 16 May 1375 (with a preface added by Jiao in 1412), featured many types of cutting-edge **gunpowder weaponry** for the time. This includes hollow, gunpowder-filled exploding cannonballs, land mines that used a complex trigger mechanism of falling weights, pins, and a **steel** wheellock to ignite the train of fuses, naval mines, fin-mounted winged rockets for aerodynamic control, multistage rockets propelled by booster rockets before igniting a swarm of smaller rockets issuing forth from the end of the missile (shaped like a dragon's head), and **hand cannons** that had up to ten barrels.
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Rifle prototypes would not appear for another half-century, in Europe. They were not manufactured in significant amounts until the 18th century. The technologies involved lead directly to many other inventions.
I chose 1416 because that was around the peak of China's status as a military, economic, and political superpower. This was largely due to the [Ming treasure voyages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages). The Ming navy had up to [2868 ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages#Naval_power), which would not be matched until World War I. Over seven voyages, the treasure fleet visited what is now Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka; Malacca (Indonesia); Bengal and Calcutta (India); Hormuz (Iran); Aden, Mecca, Jedda and Medina (Arabia); and Mogadishu (Somalia). Those kingdoms which were visited were forced to enter into trade pacts and pay tribute to China, in return for naval protection. The fleet brought back to China
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> silver, spices, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, ebony, camphor, tin, deer hides, coral, kingfisher feathers, tortoise shells, gums and resin, rhinoceros horn, sapanwood and safflower (for dyes and drugs), Indian cotton cloth, and ambergris (for perfume).
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The beautiful cobalt blue that Ming vases are famous for? That's not from China; it was imported from Iran during the treasure voyages.
So I would introduce the mass-production of rifles during this period. It would make me wealthy and influential within China. However, I'm not doing this for the sake of the technology, but to curry influence with the Emperor to prevent the country's downfall.
You see, '16 was about the time that the Emperor got the idea that he needed to build a wall to keep out foreigners. They already had a wall, but this wall would be bigger and beautiful. It would be [Great](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Great_Wall). But the Emperor needed money to build the wall, and so he [shifted resources from international trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages#Causes_of_cessation). This ended the treasure voyages, severed diplomatic ties with allies, and [caused economic collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_dynasty#Economic_breakdown_and_natural_disasters) at home. China would cease to be a superpower for nearly 600 years. Oh, and the wall didn't work -- they were invaded anyway.
So I'd use my wealth and influence to stop the Emperor from building his stupid wall. All of the workers who built the wall should instead be patrolling the border -- with my rifles, of course. And China would have 600 years of technological development as a global superpower.
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**Forget Engineer or Economist. We Need to Send Back a Sick Megalomaniac with Serious Delusions of Grandeur**
Carefully reading again your question, the purpose of the time-travel is to help humanity overcome a [slightly] superior alien race invading earth, in a war where humans are about to lose.
For humans to win, humanity needs to be prepared to fight an Armageddon war of survival over a superior alien race. Superior technology is important but **not enough** (Nazi Germany was slightly technologically superior over the allied forces but still lost)!
Preparing humanity to fight a decisive battle for its survival is a colossal task. one that would require multiple centuries if not more. That rules out a short jump back in time.
Given our knowledge of human history, the only conceptual vessel that can withstand millennia and propel the necessary technological, social and intellectual colossal build-up of humanity to win a fight for its very survival is religion.
To my opinion, the only means by which humanity can be empowered to prepare for such a doomsday fight is to go back in time and either intervene/change/mold an existing religion or inspire the creation of a new religion.
The new religion will need to revolve around the war that is to come, teach all that is to know about the alien race that is to invade, promote and reward all human practices that may be advantageous for winning that war (technological advancement is one but there are other human traits like leadership, spartanism, discipline, etc.) and remove other human-nature obstacles like pacifism, dispossession or racism which may derail humanity from being well prepared. I can totally imagine a scenario where aliens invade earth and we waste valuable time trying to negotiate with them, compromise with them or appease them in various ways. If we have the benefit of knowing their genocidal goals today, a pacifist approach need to be discouraged in the past.
Given the magnitude of religiously inspired human achievements throughout history, from the building of the pyramids to the colonization of the Americas, the new religion will direct human ingenuity and human creativity to advance constantly in the path of assuring superiority.
The only problem with religion is that there is a huge difference between what we are taught and what historically happened. Therefore, sending someone back to somehow influence Christ or Moses may be a futile task because he might very well discover that non of them really existed. This is why I will opt for the creation of a new religion rather than influencing an existing one by "hooking up" with its believed founder.
Therefore, to my opinion, the best person to send back is not an engineer (although solid engineering knowledge is a must) and certainly not an economist. The ideal time traveler for the task is a gifted demagogue with proven abilities of mobilizing hoards of people. He would have to be extremely intelligent with degraded morals and serious delusions of grandeur, with a psychological need for people to follow him/her because this will be a lifetime mission. He would need to be propelled by deep psychological motives so we can all trust him to stay on course and not fall in love with a disciple and forget about it all (I have a list of historical figures who would fit the bill, you're probably thinking the same).
The task of those who send him back in time would be to equip him with the necessary means to practice as much influence as possible, over as many people as possible in as short of a time as possible. These means will have to include punitive and rewarding technologies, because punishment and reward are the best human motivators. He would need to have the power to inflict deadly diseases and cure them just as fast. He would need to be able to show deadly displays of force but also spectacular demonstrations mercy and generosity. He would need to be able to defend against the many attempts to end his life because like all people of great influence, there is always someone who wants to kill them.
Last but not least, assuming there is a room for a computer to send with him, that computer should be functioning as his most trusted aid. A powerful artificial intelligence that can provide solutions to problems by drawing on vast historical and scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the biggest, most complex task of that artificial intelligence would be hidden from our megalomaniac time-traveler. The hidden task of the artificial intelligence would be **to end the life of our time-traveler** in the most perfectly orchestrated manor to assure best conditions for our time-traveler will become a Martyr, because throughout human history, the sacrificing of one's life for a cause had always been the best motivator for others to do the same.
Bottom line... given we send him enough time back (like a millennia or two) we might actually succeed in creating a dominant lasting religion, based on the ethos of winning that Armageddon war that is to come, with enough of humanity following it (at least enough to dominate the rest). That religion will guide generations of humans to invest the necessary means to assure human development in the desired direction.
The only problem is... although we might live to win the war, i'm not sure it would be any fun living as a human.
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I agree with the others on the point that close to 2000 AD would be the best time period to go, give or take a couple of decades. The most important info to bring would be the blueprints for future batteries and power sources and technology relevant to their production. Because that is the greatest limiting factor of today's tech. Everything else has been miniaturized today to ridiculous levels. We also have conceptual design of highly advanced tech and weaponry, but their power requirements are equally huge and current power supplies are simply too inefficient. So the progress of current humanity is actually being held back by the lack of suitable power source.
Of additional importance would be an efficient power transmission system, since preventing leakage and waste of power during conversion is just as problematic.
Finally, make sure to bring a proper data and power converter/adapter/connecter for your storage device. You don't have to be from the future to know the disaster of not having one when you need it.
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Saturate the human race and it's history with the knowledge of time travel. Godhood will follow.
If you can take knowledge back in time little by little and educate our ancestors, the future will become more and more advanced.
Pass all your knowledge to an earlier form of yourself (providing you exists in the present and past simultaneously in your scenario) or another scientists. Let them repeat this process. Accruing the knowledge earlier allows for more expansion upon it later. If you repeat this process you can have the first man have the knowledge of time travel. Repeat with the knowledge of manufacturing the required technology and all that will keep you back eventually is a workforce.
Imagine, if you will, the Pharaohs using their workers to build time machines, tanks and jets rather than pyramids. The Romans of ancient Greece making use of drones and nightvision goggles in their armies. The Crusades happening with motorbikes and sub-machine guns.
The human race's history would radically change. In what ways would be up to you as the writer.
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These kind of questions are typically within the restriction of a mind in 3D conditions. We humans tend to think of physical devices and technology, finding a way to travel in time.
Just for argumentation and pondering, imagine a level of consciousness where materialization and dematerialization is a natural ability in living conscious beings. Keep in mind that levels of consciousness can be compared to the bandwidths of a radio, those that are shown on the device as L M FM etc. Instead of tinkering with mechanics, one could look into an entirely unknown and unexplored direction, the power of the mind.
Time travel happened, sort of by accident, during the Philadelphia Experiment in Montauk. There's a book about this event, that ended horribly wrong. Part of that experiment was dematerialization and materialization, in that order. A vessel and its crew were involved and after it showed up again, members of the crew were found merged with the body of the vessel.
An experiment that was one of the first tryouts with human lives at risk. There's a youtube video with Bieleck Cameron, who joined the crew with his brother Duncan. In an interview he talks about his time travel to the future. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyH3yjupayA>
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This question pertains to the videogame *The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask*. In this game, the bell from the Clock Town clock tower can be heard from pretty much anywhere in the world at certain times, when it rings at regular intervals to announce the fall of night or the break of dawn. However, each 'time cycle' in the game ends with the dawning of the Carnival of Time, a festival of cultural and religious significance in-universe, wherein the bell rings much more frequently. On this day, from the hours between midnight and 5 AM, the bell rings once every 10 in-game minutes (10 IRL seconds). From 5:00 to 5:30, it starts ringing more frequently, at intervals of once every 5 in-game minutes/5 IRL seconds. Once 5:30 hits, it starts ringing at intervals of once every 3 in-game minutes/IRL seconds.
This is obviously done mostly for atmospheric reasons as if you allow the game clock to reach 6:00 AM on this day it'll mark a game over from an apocalyptic scenario, but **my question is**: how viable would it be to automate a bell in a clock tower system with purely mechanical (i.e. non-electronic) components to do this on a specific night?
Cursory research has taught me that fully mechanical clocks have been a thing since at least the 14th Century and chiming clocks date back to the 1600s, but so far nothing that has left me satisfied with trying to figure out if a mechanism such as I've described here could be viable assuming it was fully automated and mechanical for one specific night (as opposed to being forced to assume a human bell ringer). This assumes being limited to real-world physics, as this is a universe where magic exists.
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In clock-making such a feature is called a [complication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology)).
[Movements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_(clockwork)) with complications are quite common, from simple-minded calendars (which need to be reset at the end of every month shorter than 31 days) to true perpetual calendars and indications of the phases of the moon. The specific complication described in the question seems to be perfecly possible based on the existing perpetual calendar mechanism.
Wikipedia writes that the record holder is a pocket watch by [Vacheron Constantin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacheron_Constantin); the [Reference 57260](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_57260) movement features 57 distinct complications, including a Gregorian perpetual calendar, with day and month name (which could constitute the basis for the requested functionality). There is a nice [video of this watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InYrmk3Ezb8) (thanks to @SztupY for the pointer).
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Easy if it's made for it
There is a clock set to play different tunes over a 10,000 year period
See [10,000 Year Clock](http://longnow.org/clock/)
All you need is a mechanism that cycles long enough to repeat the cycle.
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Trivially, you could simply rig up multiple clocks, one per timing adjustment needed. Then any mechanism to switch clocks at the right time will do.
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A music box produces musical notes with a revolving cylinder or disc that encodes information on which note to play. This same concept can be applied to a striking mechanism which has pins or protrusions that gradually get spaced closer together for more frequent ringing.
Similarly, [punched card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card) systems were developed in the 1700s and were used in purely mechanical looms. It is not unreasonable to imagine a punched card (or several that could be swapped out) encoding information about gradually faster bell striking.
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This question relates to an attack on a biological space vessel.
My vessel is a space station made from wood, with an oxygen-rich atmosphere inside it. It is under attack and the attackers have decided to "burn" through the wood and let the air inside escape.
**What will happen when you heat the outer surface of the station to high temperatures in a vacuum?**
also:
**What method would the attackers use to heat the wood?**
The attackers have very advanced but scientifically plausible technology.
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# [Charcoal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal)
If you heat wood in the absence of oxygen you get charcoal.
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> Charcoal is a lightweight, black residue, consisting of carbon and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow [pyrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis) — the heating of wood or other substances in the absence of oxygen (see char and biochar).
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This will also result in a reduction in volume meaning your space station will most likely no longer be airtight as a result of surface cracking. You may well start fires on the inside once the heat penetrates to the oxygen rich interior. This would cause rapid failure of the wood/charcoal layer and subsequent loss of pressure containment.
The easiest way to add heat would probably be to use lasers. Keep it simple.
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It'll [char](http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Destructive+Distillation+of+Wood).
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> ...the decomposition of wood by heating to a temperature of 450°–550°C in the absence of air. The products of this process are gases (carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane), liquids, and a solid residue —charcoal. The gaseous and liquid products separate out as a mixture of steam and gases, and when the mixture is cooled, a distillate is obtained. The distillate, in turn, separates into pyro-ligneous acid and wood tar. The acid can be treated to yield acetic acid, methanol, and other products. Fractional distillation of the wood tar yields inhibitors (the fraction rich in phenols), used to stabilize the oils and benzines obtained by the cracking process, and flotation oil, used in ore dressing. The charcoal is used in the production of activated charcoal, carbon disulfide, and other substances. On the average, destructive distillation yields approximately 32–38 percent charcoal, 45–50 percent liquid products, and 16.5–18 percent gaseous products.
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In order to heat it to that temperature in a vacuum, you really have two options:
a) some sort of beam at IR/microwave frequencies, e.g., a laser or simply a parabolic mirror near a star, or even simply a regular transmission antenna.
b) a flamethower: high pressure gas-air mix, ignited at a very short range. Since there is no ambient air pressure, the jet will disperse very quickly, so it will have to be at very short range.
Do bear in mind though that organics tend to have very short survival in a space environment. The wood of your ship will get brittle within hours and break up within a week even without someone attacking it, less if it's near a moderately respectable star--strangely enough in almost the exact way that your question asks.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mdz7i.jpg)
Wood starts to burn at 450°F (233°C). In space, all the moisture in the wood will be sucked out by the vacuum of space. When facing the sun, the skin will heat up to 250°F (121°C) and on the shaded side, cool to -250°F (-157°C). Some cracking will definitely occur.
I could tell you scenarios where your space station would spontaneously combust, but what intrigues me is how would you pull off a wood space station? Would the wood be growing in space? Would the station somehow be alive? Because green wood would still ignite below the auto-ignition temperature of a metal like aluminum, but above the temperature where aluminum loses it's structural integrity, which is 1112°F (600°C).
Wood as you know is mostly carbon. An application of carbon such as carbon fiber under the most optimal conditions will burn at 572-932°F (300°-500°C) which is substantially higher temperature than the 450°F for wood.
Live wood means that your space station would have the ability to heal itself when a tiny meteor strike hits. This is something aluminum cannot do. It could disperse heat (sap could pull heat away from an area), even grow. That means that it might make it's skin thicker in some areas to protect from exposure to the sun, be able to heal from micro meteors or have symbiotic insects or fungus that could help enhance it's ability to thrive.
Wood as we think of it now has drawbacks. But wood has many features that could make your idea really intriguing.
Good luck.
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What happens when you heat wood in the abscence of oxygen is **[pyrolysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h0idv/what_happens_if_you_heat_up_wood_in_a_zero_oxygen/c1rp5bq/)**:
>
> Wood, or biomass generally, consists mostly of polymers of sugar
> molecules. When it is heated rapidly in the absence of air you get
> some small gaseous molecules (CO, CO2, H2, CH4, and other light
> hydrocarbons), thousands of types oxygenated hydrocarbon molecules
> that are liquids at room temperature, and a solid char fraction we
> will call char that is similar to coal or charcoal but with a lower
> heating value due to increased oxygen content.
>
>
>
That is, in short: your biological polymers will break up and new, simpler molecules will be formed; the main thing is, of course, there will be no flames. According to [this other answer](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/170872), this holds equally well for a vacuum (no air at all, not only no oxygen); it's talking about paper, but paper and wood are basically the same in this context:
>
> Paper is mainly made from cellulose, and when heated in a vacuum
> cellulose undergoes a process called pyrolysis. The mechanisms
> involved are enormously complicated.
>
>
>
As for the method, it could be any suitable type of radiation, I guess, like focused coherent light (a laser), or pyrotechnics such as [thermite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite).
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There are two ways of burning through the hull of a wooden space station.
One, heat the external surface of the hull until the oxygen-rich atmosphere in its interior catches fire and burns through from the inside. Lasers or any powerful source of electromagnetic radiation, for example, infrared heaters can do the trick I note @MattBowyer came up with a similar concept in comments and which I only noticed after writing this. Another case of great minds thinking alike.
Two, use a cutting torch with a jet of super-heated oxygen. This will burn its way through wood. How's that for nice and simple?
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Wood becomes charcoal as explained in other answers.
It has rather low thermal conductivity, about 3 times higher than styrofoam, and much lower than wood. Also it blocks for example IR radiation quite well, so you will really have trouble heating anything except the surface.
Charcoal is somewhat brittle, but it doesn't just crumble, you need quite a lot of pressure to make it crumble. So just heating it will not make it disappear. It will shrink and develop cracks, but if any dust appears, it will still cling to the surface and fill these cracks, thanks to electric charges and microgravity. So before becoming dangerously deep, any cracks will fill with carbon dust, which will have even lower thermal conductivity.
And carbon doesn't melt easily... In fact it doesn't melt at all, it sublimates directly into a gas at about 4000K.
If we assume a wood wall thickness able to withstand stuff like micrometeorites, then having some thickness of the surface converted to charcoal will not make much difference to the wall integrity. If it did, the space station would already be destroyed just by space environment...
What this all means is, you will not be getting through by what is usually meant by "heating", exactly. You will be getting through by using [laser cutting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cutting#Methods), probably *vaporization cutting* method, because that is the only way to get the material actually removed so you can keep cutting deeper.
---
Addenum: If instead of heating you are happy enough with burning through using chemicals, then Carbon will readily react with practically any reactive chemical, producing a lot of heat in the process too. This is well covered in other answers. But my impression from the question is, you don't want to burn the wood and produce the heat that way, you want to just heat the wood (maybe from a distance?).
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Right so there are actually several different questions here. If you apply direct thermal energy, such as an infrared laser to the hull without any oxidizers eventually the hull will heat to fracture as the particles gain too much energy to remain cohesive. Depending on the conductive properties of the material such heating may result in fire breaking out on the interior face of the area being heated. That's heating organics in a vacuum covered.
The weapon of choices depends on the desired outcome:
Direct heat as above.
If your attackers just want in considerably faster than direct heating they need to use a chemical attack, super-heating liquid oxygen, liquid ozone, or liquid fluorine and spraying the hull with it would get fairly instantaneous results as you're applying an oxidizer and a lot of energy to keep the reaction going, if want to savage anything of the ship later don't use the Fluorine, once it starts it doesn't stop reacting.
If you want to smash through the hull and dump the atmosphere with minimal collateral damage then you use a laser that's tuned to a much higher energy state and pump in ionizing radiation in the form of UV or Gamma, it will still cause the hull area under fire to fracture but without as much heating of the material thus reducing the area that burns when the atmosphere vents. This is going to take as long or longer than direct heating and a lot more power.
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An ordinary oxy-acetylene torch will do quite nicely.
In cutting steel, the two gases are combined to form a flame hot enough to melt the steel and raise it to its kindling point.
At his point, the steel ignites in the flow of oxygen. The heat of this combustion is sufficient to heat more steel to ignition point, and so on. The flow of oxygen can be used to direct the path of steel burning, and the acetylene can be shut off.
Exactly the same process would work for wood, except that lower temperatures would be involved, and the melting step could be skipped...
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## The wood will fail.
When (complex) organical matter is subjected to high temperature in the absence of oxygen or halogen (or any oxidizer for that matter) it'll decompose into smaller molecules since the big ones simply can't hold it together anymore.
I suggest reading [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis) to get more insight of the process. Depending on how realistic you want to keep it you can play around with some interesting organic compounds. This doesn't work so well for metals though, but those will simply melt when heated just the same.
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In addition to the charing on the outside, mentioned in the other answers, the inside of the station will burn depending on how hot and for how long.
Although the outside of the station may be the other side of the wood and where the heat is applied, the energy will still be transfered, and may reasonably ignite as it hass access to oxygen.\*
Alternatively, one could fire an oxidizing agent - for example nitric acid, at the hull, and it will burn perfectly well on the outside.
\*Until a hull breach or vent at which point the inside will no longer have oxygen to burn with
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There are a number of hypergolic substances that will spontaneously ignite in contact with organic materials, potassium chlorate is one.
There is another one, which I can't find at present, but has been described as being extremely hypergolic in contact with cotton or test scientists.
Spraying an appropriate material onto the wood should set fire to it, even in a vacuum, however the extreme cold of space might reduce the effect.
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If you want a conventional fire despite being in a vacuum, the attacker need only ignite an oxidizer (phosphorous, for example). There are probably numerous combinations that contain oxygen and reacts with heat, so there should be no shortage of options here.
Or, perhaps a bit less practical, a flamethrower that injects oxygen into the jet (like some welding techniques - so like a torch, essentially).
] |
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[
I often read a light novel that tells a story about a person who is transferred from their high tech modern society Earth to a fantasy land. These persons often have some expertise in modern science such as computer programing, chemical engineer or maybe even they have a military experience, but most often they are just an expert gamers. And in the end, if their expertise/knowledge is explored in the story, they will implement it to make some kind of modern enterprise.
So, I'm just thinking...
Let's say, a person/a group of people from modern society 2016-up Earth are somehow transferred to a fantasy land that is still in the Bronze Age. Then that person/group somehow decided that they want to have a weapon that is close enough to the modern military on Earth, for personal use only.
"I/we need to survive, and at the same time build a military equipment that is close enough to modern military on Earth I/we need to build a sustainable factory from the scratch"
So, the question might be..
**What kind of modern weaponry and equipment that is achievable with that limitation of bronze age?**
**What is the realistic approach for that to happen?**
* I prefer the maximum number of person that are transferred is 10, but it is okay too if the answer present a larger number.
* Things that the person bring from the modern earth is limited to the size of a backpack.
* local can be hired and trained to do the job.
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The first problem is going to be that the people going back in time have no background in metal working, machining, mining and chemical processing (save for the chemist), let alone weapons design. Even if you were to transport an entire workshop back in time, your team would be unlikely to make anything more complex than a flintlock musket.
Modern weapons are complex systems, with a lot of moving parts. How to effectively build a firearm has been a progressive effort over the past several hundred years- things like what is the best to feed a weapon (double stack single feed versus double stack double feed magazines for example), what gas system is most robust etc have all been learned over generations of gunsmiths spending there professional lives developing them. Someone with only a vague knowledge of guns trying to build a modern firearm is like someone who's never seen the engine of a car trying to build one from scratch.
Even if you had people who knew how to build firearms, you have the problem of manufacture. The tools themselves required to build weapons (mills, lathes, presses) are also complex systems with many working parts. Without electricity you would need some way of powering these tools (e.g. steam power), which again is another complex system.
On top of that you need the raw materials- iron and coal is going to be needed for the steel, plus a number of other trace elements which means you are going to have to work out how to mine it, then how to set up a processing plant to produce it.
All this has to be set up using tools that can be carried in a backpack, which is going to be basically impossible.
As a commenter pointed out, cannons would be a viable alternative; send back a chemist and an engineer, and assuming they find locals with experience in casting metals, they could feasibly develop them, which would be a massive advantage over siege weapons of the time.
Edit: a case study to illustrate how difficult it is to make a modern firearm is shown [here](https://youtu.be/MLjnR29-aiI). A Vietnamese craftsman in the vietnam war tries to build a 1911 pistol in his workshop using methods that far eclipse those available to bronze age societies, or what the travellers could bring back with them. He has a working model of a 1911 to copy from, though clearly doesn't know what every part does. While the craftsman obviously is pretty skilled at what he does, the result is a crude, somewhat functioning weapon that probably has a pretty high chance of exploding if you tried to fire.
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Forget about modern weaponry in the bronze age.
Any modern weapon is mass produced, in those time every weapon was at most a work of craftsmanship of a specialized artisan: you don't have the supply chain, the methods and the standards to make any mass production.
The only thing that comes to my mind which can be used is the concept of [composite bow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow), using materials available in that period: bones, tendons, wood.
>
> The wooden core gives the bow its shape and dimensional stability. It is often made of multiple pieces, joined with animal glue in V-splices, so the wood must accept glue well. Pieced construction allows the sharp bends that many designs require, and the use of woods with different mechanical properties for the bending and nonbending sections.
>
>
> The wood of the bending part of the limb ("dustar") must endure intense shearing stress, and denser woods such as hard maples are normally used in Turkish bows. Bamboo, and wood of the mulberry family, are traditional in China. Some composite bows have nonbending tips ("siyahs"), which need to be stiff and light; they may be made of woods such as Sitka spruce.
>
>
> A thin layer of horn is glued onto what will be the belly of the bow, the side facing the archer. Water buffalo horn is very suitable, as is horn of several antelopes such as gemsbok, oryx, ibex, and that of Hungarian grey cattle. Goat and sheep horn can also be used. Most forms of cow horn are not suitable, as they soon delaminate with use. The horn can store more energy than wood in compression.
>
>
> The sinew, soaked in animal glue, is then laid in layers on the back of the bow; the strands of sinew are oriented along the length of the bow. The sinew is normally obtained from the lower legs and back of wild deer or domestic ungulates. Traditionally, ox tendons are considered inferior to wild-game sinews since they have a higher fat content, leading to spoilage. Sinew has greater elastic tension properties than wood, again increasing the amount of energy that can be stored in the bow stave.
>
>
> Hide glue or gelatin made from fish gas bladders is used to attach layers of sinew to the back of the bow, and to attach the horn belly to the wooden core
>
>
>
This might require picking the right location for the men to arrive, in order to have all the materials available.
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**Just bring the guns with you.**
As you point out, this group of people needs a limited number of guns for personal protection, rather than trying to outfit an army. There is simply no point in spending years or decades or more attempting to build a gun factory when you only need a handful of guns - instead of bringing the equipment needed to build the factory, just bring the guns themselves. If you really need a gun for protection and are trying to build one from scratch, you'll be dead long before you finish. If you don't need a gun to survive, there are better ways to improve your odds of survival like securing your food supply, or engaging in diplomacy with the locals, which would have far more immediate benefit. Either way, there's no circumstance where you're in enough danger to require a gun, but still have the time to build one from scratch. If you only need as many guns as will fit in the backpack in the first place, just bring them with you.
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This is pretty much the plot of my novel War of the God Queen which literally does have ten women abducted through time to the bronze age where they play a key role in a war against the alien invaders responsible for abducting them :)
With no knowledge of gunpowder or metallurgy, they do at least update as far as pikes and halberds. However, other factors - in particular organisation, politics and the exercise of soft power in organising aliances turn out to be far more important than tactical weaponry .[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zt9sV.jpg)
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**It depends on the weapon - and the factory**
'Weapon factory' could include anything from tanks and guns rolling off an assembly line to hundreds of people hand-packing primitive pipe bombs or grenades. The latter is possible, the former absolutely not.
A modern factory requires precursors that were nowhere to be found in the bronze age. The key to modern manufacturing is precision and repeatability. For example, a station might stamp out a part for a gun, over and over again. The next station might assemble those parts onto a frame made elsewhere. For that to work on a precision product, Those parts have to be built to exact tolerances, all the time. This is a difficult challenge, even today.
For example, how would you power this factory? The earliest ones used water wheels that would drive belts which would in turn drive various machines like lathes and drills. This was not a precise system, with lots of variation in belt speed, etc. This in turn made it really hard to make consistent, repeatable processes. And of course before you even tried it you'd have to know how to build belt-fed lathes and such, and you'd have to make the parts to build those first.
To be able to make interchangeable parts, the basis of modern manufacturing, you absolutely need that precision.
For this and many other reasons, we didn't have precision manufacturing until the 1800's. Before then, parts from different sources had to be hand-fitted by craftsmen, and anything that needed such precision had to be done by hand. Without precise control of temperature and drilling speed, some parts would be heat-worked more than others, alloys wouldn't be consistent, etc.
So forget making modern manufactured steel goods in the bronze age. You would be better off making simple weapons that leverage knowledge we have today, but which can be made from bronze age materials.
For example, you could defeat castle walls by hoisting a rogallo-wing glider with a balloon (or launching from a higher point), then gliding over the fortification and dropping barrels of burning pitch on the houses or dropping bombs which could be made from lots of materials. In the right circumstances you might even be able to glide over enemy soldiers and attack them with some kind of droppable anti-personnel flechettes or something. You could probably make primitive land mines. But even the ability to use balloons for reconnaissance would give you a big advantage.
Just knowing how to make iron and steel could give you a huge advantage, even just in trading it to raise armies.
But forget making modern guns and such. It can't happen.
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Pretty much the only realistic approach for a person from the modern age to build *any* kind of modern factory in the bronze age is for that person to engage in a long-term process of uplifting the society from bronze age technology to modern era technology. Modern era factories rely on extensive supply chains, which are provided by other modern era suppliers.
There are shortcuts you can take, and corners you can cut, so it's not necessary for everything to be 100% up to modern standards, but you will need to get all of the supporting infrastructure at least into the modern-era ballpark. Knowing the final destination and being able to avoid dead-ends along the way will allow the uplift process to go faster than the five or so millennia that it's taken in real-world history, but you can't just say "hey guys, go here, dig up some rusty rocks, put them in a fire until they glow, then pound them into this shape" and expect to even get a modern-quality nail, much less functional weapons.
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Equipment needed. A large backpack for each member is of course ideal. The more space the better. A solid startup needs a lot of equipment. You need to bootstrap your economy up quickly, which means every pound counts.
1. A rugged laptop loaded with key information, and a portable solar panel. You need to plan things out. You'll ideally want someone with basic computer literacy to use this.
2. A big gun and lots of ammo to control natives. A backup pistol, or several. This is so you can find local resources. You're gonna need a lot of help. Probably a sniper rifle, so you can avoid mass rushes. Everyone should carry one and be trained. They can be trained to run your forges, make pottery, mine stones and metals, and scout for you. Larger guns aren't reliable at killing, enemies can attack you from stealth, use cavalry, [and the kill ratio for infantry in vietnam was 50,000 bullets per kill.](https://www.thebalancecareers.com/army-sniper-school-3345043) You need to ration your bullets, which means careful shots.
3. [A portable mass spec machine.](https://www.bayspec.com/spectroscopy/portable-mass-spectrometer/) This will allow you to test metal samples for contaminants. You'll need someone trained in this. There are better tools, but this should give you a basic idea.
4. [A portable machining kit](http://www.hemingwaykits.com/acatalog/projects.html) containing all the tools you need to make more tools. Woodworking skills and kit essential. Everyone should be trained in this.
5. A portable forge, to make metal items, along with an [arc welder](https://www.screwfix.com/p/impax-im-arc140-10-115-140a-arc-welder-240v/17497) to weld parts together.
6. A portable chemistry kit, to manufacture black powder. You'll need to source supplies locally.
7. A drone, to check dangerous areas without risk of danger, also charged off your solar battery.
8. Various medicines and bandages things to ensure survival in early dangerous times. Everyone should be trained in first aid, because a small injury can snowball into a serious infection if not treated.
9. An induction smelter for iron. This may be harder. I don't know if there are small ones. You may need to break it down, and make it on site. You'll need a lot of batteries and porta solar panels for this- the batteries for this may be 250 kilos weight total, along with many large solar panels.
10. Lots of spare parts.
11. Misc goods. Binoculars, lighters, radios, condoms, lotion, food, clothes, torch, batteries, knives, scissors, planting seeds, aluminum blankets, tarps, Leatherman Wave.
12. Bartering goods and misc goods. Drugs, cigarettes,
What you'd do is go strongarm or diplomance your way into control of a local powerhouse. Using the people there, you collect local samples of useful minerals nearby, and test them with your mass spec, along with mining local tree. If you find a suitable resource nearby you bring it in, purify it, and start making metal parts or gunpowder. You can slowly build up your manufacturing capacity, training locals to do key jobs. Hopefully as much of your key core group can survive at a time, because you can scout well and take out enemies at extreme range.
Your drone can give you key spying capacity, and a long ranged rifle can deter armies. The initial goods will wear out with time, but by then hopefully you've made local versions. Computer stuff will run out eventually forever, since a computer lab is beyond what you can do, but you can make a basic smithery and machine worktable.
Diseases will be a concern, but if you stay well fed and follow quarantine procedures, you should be ok. Infections normally hit the weak.
Your team should be heavily cross trained. Some will be specialists of course, to identify good metal deposits and such, as some may be injured or die.
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**Build a university/engineering school**
As many answer have pointed out, building a gun from scratch in the bronze age will be very difficult. Thus to solve this you should not try to build a gun, but build a society that can create a gun.
So in your backpack bring knowledge, USB sticks with encyclopedia and all textbooks you can get your hands on from primary to university grade. This should not take up a lot of space. Bring 4 laptops with the devices to charge the laptop, solar panels and converters. Bring enough to have some spare. Bring some actual guns for protection from the locals if necessary and to impress them. Last and most important bring detailed start up plans and tools. Since it is the bronze age, I would suggest bringing steel axes and saws, hand drills and if still room left maybe steel screws for easy construction. Also fill the rest of the bag with gold/silver/diamond or whatever currency the locals use. I am assuming a rather large bag pack, but you can reduce all number to one (2 for the electronics) if it does not fit.
Once you arrive in the past you need a place to settle and build your university, convince the locals that your knowledge is worthwhile and get as many pupils you can support. If you can choose the place you land make sure your near coal, ion and oil deposits. A place with some kind of states already in place might be best, see: [Bronze Age States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronze_Age_states#/media/File:World_in_1000_BCE.png), but you might also opt for advanced framing cultures. The [hittites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites) empire might be a good place to locate (modern Turkey, Anatolia), near lake Van seems to have all the necessary resources, I just don't know how far underground. Resources: [metals](https://www.gbreports.com/files/pdf/_2018/Turkey_Mining_2018_-_Web_Version.pdf), [oil](http://turkeygroup4.blogspot.com/2014/12/globalizations-impact-on-turkeys.html) and [coal](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259563494_Coal_deposits_of_Turkey_properties_and_importance_on_energy_demand/figures?lo=1).
Once you arrive roughly follow the next steps:
1. Sell you knowledge for food/influence. Best knowledge to sell is probably improving tools (mainly agricultural) and health treatments. Distilling alcohol might also be a viable option or construction work.
2. Build/Buy a house/school and build a printing press. Start printing the correct books for the school. So learning how to read, simple arithmetic and than basic engineering principals. All in a very directly applicable manner.
3. Start gathering and teaching pupils and spread your influence. Do this by helping the local community and state community and let your pupils do projects.
4. Start building a foundry inside your school and start making bronze tools. *Don't overlook the fact that you probably can improve their bronze making a lot.* Being very valuable, also you can teach/use local bronze smiths to speed up you foundry.
5. If no iron is available make a project of building one, you need to have the exact location of easily accessible iron available. Remember that you only need small amount, so no need to look for the very big mines of nowadays.
6. Progress from bronze to making iron tools
7. Later progress to weapons and a weapons factory.
8. If oil is available one might make plastic in a very early state. Making some kinds of plastic is not that hard and has very good material properties for tooling compared to the wood that they would normally use.
This plan will take quite some time and in the mean while you need to make sure that both the local and state community are cooperative and appreciative of you. Building a society by cooperation is probably easier that force, but make sure you have enough force to withstand outside pressure. Have better weapons and tactics should allow you to withstand a lot of pressure if necessary.
To speed up the whole process supplying the state with better weapons and tactics than the enemy can boost the whole procedure of creating a weapons factory. In that way you could start with a primitive weapons factory and gradually upgrade to a modern one.
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You'll likely never come close to modern firearms as we know them.
However if you take a lot (depending on the size of the backpack) of books, covering metal working, steel production, alloying, steam power, tool production etc, with you, you might (and this is a big MIGHT) be able to produce something like a Dreyse needle rifle.
Although it will probably take several years, since you will have to set up mines, foundries, workshops and chemical plants (for gunpowder and such).
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There are two main obstacles. The first is materials. You need to get iron and steel. This requires mining and smelting neither of which is easy.
Next you have tooling. You need to transform the iron and steel into files, drills, and eventually lathes and milling machines. This has to be done in steps. its hard to make machines tool unless you already have machine tools.
A knowledge of making gunpowder and some metal working expertise would let you make bronze cannons. any type of useful rife, musket, or handgun really requires steel.
As an alternative, a know of bow making and arrow heads might be more useful. Wood working tools are easier to make. A decent recurve laminated bow would require a knowledge of making glues, but would outclass most weapons of the day as would a crossbow.
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If you literally mean that the person travels back to the Bronze Age, the first thing you'll need is Bronze. Where (which physical location) did the character end up in?
Bronze is an alloy composed of copper and tin. Copper wasn't so hard to come by, but tin is a relatively rare element, with deposits in only a few locations (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancient_times> - in Europe, mostly in Britain, Iberia and Crete). It therefore was a valuable trading commodity, and the sources of tin were well guarded and a cause for conflict. Getting a hold on a lot of it would be problematic. While you're looking to equip a military, unfortunately you might need a military first in order to get the raw materials to build metal weapons.
Others have mentioned iron as a possible material to use. Iron has a much hire temperature required to work with, so unless your time travelers come with specific knowledge about how to make and maintain fires at such a high temperature, finding Iron wouldn't do you much good because no one would have the ability to work it into anything useful.
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I think there may be a lot of over-thinking and bias towards combustion-oriented gas-propelled pellet weapons. There is also a bias to assume that the time travelers are dumped in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, naked with but a paper towel to clothe and dry themselves.
As to the latter, the question implies that in the Bronze age, Bronze Age materials and technologies will be available. Money might be a problem, but the question does imply tech and materials and says nothing about the means of acquisition. Metalworking can be learned from the existing population if the time-travelers must create their weapon themselves.
It is quite possible to create gas-propelled weapons with a fairly crude bronze tube, that somebody could construct. This tube, and the few other necessary bits may cost a pretty penny, but somebody could certainly make one.
Then, one simply needs some leather seals, and a crude air pump. With a bit of time, an effective air gun could be fashioned. In our own time, even the flintlock muskets and pistols sneered at here were quite capable of inflicting severe damage. Air guns can easily deliver substantially massive pellets with enough velocity to shatter a human femur or skull. The ammo is simply bronze or the more affordable pure-copper "musket" balls. A softer pellet would give less wear to the expensive barrel.
The question does state establishing a "factory". That is a bit vague. Does a workshop count? A "factory" does not need to be any significant degree more advanced than the weapon or item it creates.
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Realistically, the most modern firearm that could be produced given bronze age technology is a slamfire shotgun. These are basically just two lengths of pipe, one free to slide into the other. The bigger pipe has a nail in one end. You put your shotgun shell in the smaller pipe, and slam it hard down the bigger pipe, so the nail strikes the primer on the shell.
Bronze age metallurgy probably couldn't make pipe strong enough to handle modern gunpowder, but that's OK. Black powder is lower pressure and easier to make anyway.
Shotgun shells consist of a hull, a brass plate holding the primer, gunpowder, and shot. Modern hulls are usually plastic, but older hulls were often paper. The ancient Egyptians could've made them from papyrus. The brass plates are discs the same diameter as the shell, with a cut-out in the center to hold the primer. I think that considering bronze age cultures were able to make coins, they could probably make these as well. The hardest part is going to be the primer. The primer itself is just a thin brass cup, but inside it is mercury fulminate or lead styphnate, which when struck by the firing pin, detonates and ignites the gunpowder. These are hard to make successfully, and harder to make safely. Maybe since your character can have support from 9 other modern people he could manage if those people are skilled chemists, but if it's just him and pre-modern locals it's not happening.
The big reason I chose a slamfire shotgun is that it has minimal moving parts. Modern guns are machined to micron tolerances. If they're just a few microns out of spec, they will jam constantly. Pre-modern machining is just nowhere near capable of making parts precise enough to function in a semi-automatic gun.
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I think that your question has to some extent been answered by Jules Verne's *The Mysterious Island*, in which five men, with almost no supplies besides their own knowledge, manage to construct many modern marvels with only a little help.
For instance, they distill glycerine from dugong fat with "soda", and make sulphuric acid from minerals they find. They then added this to saltpetre to get nitric acid, with the final result of nitroglycerine.
Although they never actually make guns, the book details how these could have been made.
As one character says, "You find iron for the barrels, steel for the locks, saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur for the powder, mercury and nitric acid for the fulminate, and last of all, lead for the balls, and Mr. Smith will make us guns of the best quality."
As it happens, they eventually find or produce all these things, and the only reason for not making the guns is that they are provided by a mysterious benefactor.
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In claims of true free market enterprise with an anarchist type 'government' (meaning none), how would the different forms of slavery be avoided? Granted your neighbor who watches your dog when you go on vacation isn't likely to kidnap your children and sell them, but in a society where money is the ultimate (sole?) decision maker, how do you prevent people (eventually) being enslaved? Russia is still very much under a 'free' market, anything is for sale if you have enough money, (or enough power to just take it).
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In a world **completely** dominated by free market? Where the only government control is capital control, and only money matters?
It wouldn't be prevented at all.
If we truly take this concept to the extreme, and say that all of society is governed by the free market, with capital being the only means by which one can seek recourse, slavery would be incredibly commonplace. Assuming there are those who would have no moral quandaries with owning a person, people would be bought and sold as property.
The only thing preventing this from happening is other people purchasing themselves at a high enough markup to cause person-ownership to be prohibitively expensive. The only way to enforce that is through sheer capital, and if one has enough money to overpower that capital, without any laws preventing it, they can purchase a person and own them, with only the effort necessary to hold that person in ownership.
Some people may even voluntarily sell themselves as a 'servant' to avoid this fate, exchanging their life of servitude for the protection of not being purchased as a slave. Without any government to prevent ownership of people, this is the only recourse they could seek, and even then, they may be sold off for profit if their owner decides they aren't worth the upkeep.
The short of it is, in a pure free market society without any governing body to regulate it, everything has a price - including people.
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In short, your premise is wrong: Free Market $\neq$ Anarchy.
One is an economic system, the other is a "form of government". It's like saying "wearing green sweaters causes ducks to be eaten."
**[Free market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market)**
>
> A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and
> services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, in
> which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any
> intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other
> authority.
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Most free markets do require policing of some sort or other (either self or government) to ensure people follow through on trades, et al. However, the government doesn't take place in the price of those goods and services.
**[Anarchy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy)**
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> Anarchy is the condition of a society, entity, group of persons or
> single person which does not recognize authority.
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>
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Presumably including other people's authority to manage themselves and own property. In anarchy you have the situation you describe in which might makes right, people get enslaved, and generally bad stuff happens to good people.
**Slavery**
Slavery in the US came about for multiple reasons, one was there was already a slave trade in place bringing slaves to the new world so slaves could be bought "cheaply." The other was both tobacco and cotton (which were the South's ["cash crops"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_crop)) were extremely labor intensive.
Some scholars argue that [economically speaking, slavery was already declining](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economic-history-2) and likely to end in the US even without the Civil War.
Scholars agree that although individually advantageous to large plantation owners, the system of slavery severely retarded the South's economic and technological development (as exemplified by their lack of manufacturing ability during the war). This "stasis" lead to the American Midwest's development as a manufacturing and agricultural powerhouse and competitor to some of the South's agricultural products.
Putting it another way, the South was slowly becoming uncompetitive with the rest of the world in the production of most goods, including their primary export crops.
Slavery at least in the form practiced in the early US, could not last indefinitely without collapsing.
**Summary**
Your premise that a completely free market economy requires anarchic government is false.
The economic system of a state isn't dependent upon the type of government of that state (e.g. [Communist China is playing with a Free Market economic system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform)). Although I agree some economic systems more naturally associate with certain types of government this isn't always the case.
If you are world building, are you looking for the ultimate in free market society or are you looking at what the natural conclusions of a totally anarchic system of government might look like?
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What counts as slavery and how do you define ownership? For a market to exist contracts have to be enforceable.
The way that you appear to have structured things you aren't asking about a 'free market' but about some form of anarchy, which is rather the opposite of a 'free market' in many respects; as contracts are only enforceable as one is able to themselves enforce them. In which case, *why would anyone choose to be a slave or allow themselves to be one?* There is no mechanism to enforce the ownership, no way to say that the writ of sale is valid or that the ownership means anything; the slave owner has to create his own government that enforces the slavery by himself and enslave people himself, which is not done via free market transactions but via force.
In todays world however, we freely enslave ourselves all the time, and think very little of it. We enter into states of indentured servitude via student loans, car loans, house loans, and possibly even credit card debt and pay day loans (don't do the last two). Our work then becomes not our own but the owner of that debt, we are slaves to them but unlike chattel slaves we entered into it willingly, and get to care for ourselves. It is a much more efficient system than chattel slavery.
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I believe you're referring to anarcho capitalism.
[Here's a discussion from reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/1drooh/how_does_anarcho_capitalism_deal_with/) on this same subject.
Your question begs the question, how do slaves (or other oppressed people) deal with living under a totalitarian regime that wishes to oppress them?
Getting back to the question itself though, there are two styles of answer.
One answer is that slaves aren't as productive as free people working for a wage. Slaves only work hard enough not to be punished which after many iterations of slaves under-performing would force the slave owner to continually set the bar lower and lower. While slaves don't earn wages, they have to be fed, clothed, and sheltered which all have a cost associated with them. At the end of the day, the productivity to cost ratio is likely to be lower for a slave than a wage earner.
Even assuming away the assumption from the first answer (which could be wrong depending on the industry), is that society at large collectively decides that slavery is inherently bad. The US gov't once allowed slavery until it didn't. Assuming laws don't prevent people from owning slaves there are still avenues for other members of society to stop slavers. People who attempt to own slaves would be blackballed from their industry. While this may seem far fetched under our existing status quo of relying on government to enforce the norms of society, keep in mind that boycotts are still used where laws fail. I google searched successful boycotts and the first one that came up was from 1791 in England when Parliament refused to outlaw slavery, the people decided to boycott sugar producers that exploited slave labor.
I think the extent to which people refuse to "vote with their wallets" in their daily product buying is because of strong governments. We assume that if our products are made unsafely or unethically that some agency will punish them and so we, as consumers, don't both issuing our own punishments.
In addition to people boycotting slavers, there's also evidence in history of people who will actively work to set people free. During US slavery there was the Underground Railroad which set out to set slaves free. Another historical parallel to this would be people in Nazi Germany that hid Jews (like Schindler). Keep in mind that Underground Railroad conductors and those that helped Jews escape did so under threat of law. Under a lawless society, an anonymous slave liberator could free slaves at low cost whereas the slaver would incur significant cost to thwart these efforts.
Another set of rhetorical questions I'd like to ask: If slavery were legal tomorrow, would you own slaves? Do you know anyone who would? How many more people wouldn't want anything to do with slave owners than there are people wanting to own slaves?
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As others have showed why your premise is wrong (Free Market ≠ Anarchy), I'll focus on mechanisms to prevent slavery in your world.
First, you should ask yourself if "no slavery" in your world really needs to mean "zero slavery", or if something like "sufficiently low slavery" is good enough. And maybe keep in mind that you can put workers in a slave like relationship to their "employer" which is technically not slavery (the workers are not "property").
So, how could you prevent slavery without laws:
1. Religion: There could be a prevalent religion in your world which might encourage the freedom for people to do any kind of business that makes them prosper (this god loves people who prosper), but forbids ownership of people ("because only this god is above men").
2. As Dean MacGregor pointed out in his answer, slave labor is not free and probably less productive than free labor because slaves work to avoid punishment. This also means you need more resources to keep your slave business up running.
3. Slavery might be really, really uncool. So if word gets around that you use slave labor, customers might avoid you (and other businesses too, because these would risk their customers too). Or you don't find others who want to do business with "the loser who needs slave labor". The same would hold at home, too: If you get a slave to do your household, you lose your friends.
4. Having slaves might be too risky (and thus too expensive). People tried it in the past, there were slave riots, now you pay for work or use machines because it's easier.
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**The short anwser:** Asuming no central authority and completely free market, make it cultural.
**The long anwser:**
Ok, first we have to clarify that anarchy means the lack of "authority", not the lack of order, and that slavery in itself may not be a completely undesirable situation for an individual. In some ancient cultures you could sell yourself into slavery for a few years if you had to, but your master had to take care of your basic needs and didn't had rights over your life and death, you were still a citizen.
A few days ago I read about some people working here in Spain just for food and shelter, so they could stay long enough to earn the right to stay in the country. Their employers were charged with crimes against the rights of workers. [Link to the article (in spanish)](http://www.europapress.es/andalucia/cadiz-00351/noticia-detenidos-tres-empresarios-acusados-emplear-extranjeros-cambio-cobijo-comida-20140821130658.html).
It was a good deal (well, good enough) for them, but for anyone who wants to have a decent job it's a catastrophe. Why would I pay you if someone in need may work for almost nothing? That's also why countries with extremely low taxes for business have bad relationships with their neighbours, for example.
So in order to keep a certain level of quality in the general conditions of life, specially in a country with no authority to grant it, society as a whole has to reject both slaves and slavers, and see them as extremely damaging to them personally.
If your society values business above all, this may be easier than you think. Just make it so anyone who dares to play with slavery will be reduced to ostracism. Nobody would buy or sell ANYTHING from this people or anyone who deal with them. If you cannot buy or sell anithing in a society like this, you've "de facto" became an outcast doomed to live like an animal. Also include angry mobs burning something on the face of those poor souls, for good mesure. They'll need to know how to tell from far away who's been naughty.
Let's see who dares to mess with the eight hours of work.
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Without a law interfering with markets to prevent it, you probably wouldn't avoid things that we'd consider slavery under the definitions currently used by the UN, national governments, etc.
Carrying off children would be theft and worse, and would be prevented by whatever mechanisms are in place to prevent your "true free market enterprise" from degenerating into "one enormous fisticuffs". Whether you call that mechanism government or find another way to do it, there has to be some means by which property rights are (1) created, (2) adjudicated, (3) enforced, or else you cannot have a free market. A bunch of people robbing each other at gunpoint is not a free market. The same means as prevent theft can prevent kidnap, murder, etc, that are crimes against the body rather than against external property. So that form of slavery is covered to the extent that the free market can effectively be defended from violence. It's the same issue as "how would murder be prevented" -- perhaps not prevented 100%, but it would be opposed, and anyone carried off as a child wouldn't be recognised as the property of their captor or anyone who bought them from their captor.
So there needn't be slaves-by-kidnap, but there very well could be conditions of indentured servitude that fall under current definitions of "different forms of slavery". Why? Because some people have nothing to offer their creditors, or potential creditors in the case of wanting to borrow for medical treatment, education, or other such desirables, except their future productivity. If the creditor doesn't trust your judgement to make yourself sufficiently productive to pay the debt, then you can instead offer indentured service so that *they* control how productive you'll be. That is, once you've sold a kidney and still need money, you can sell yourself into slavery.
Whatever the means are by which property rights are created, recognised, and enforced, either they permit this kind of contract, "if you pay for my child's education then I will serve you for the rest of my life", or else they don't. Decide for yourself whether it represents a "more free market" to uphold such a contract or to forbid it. It depends which kind of freedom you want people to have, the freedom to walk around or the freedom to make a contract in which you receive value for giving up your freedom to walk around! But if want to explore the darker side of a "truly free market", then it should permit freely-entered contracts as far as possible, even if to our current society the contractual terms appear repugnant.
Some protection against it might be needed, since by this mechanism, a free market system could even collapse. If somebody achieves a near-monopoly on some essential resource, then absent market interference they can leverage that into contracts that purchase most or all of the future economic output of most or all of the people. They win at capitalism, and everyone else doesn't win. That's part of the general issue of whether anarcho-capitalism (or for that matter any form of social organisation) can be stable, and if so under what terms.
Note that in most non-archaic philosophical systems of property, you don't own your children, you just have custody of them. Therefore selling your children into slavery might be legally impossible where selling yourself isn't. As with the case of kidnap, it's the simple rule "nobody starts out owning you except maybe yourself" that prevents slavery by this route.
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You've stated that this is a free market society without a government. This means that economic forces are the primary driver in your world. The economics of slavery are simple: **A slave is always worth more to herself than she is to other people.** For that reason, there's a market incentive to free slaves and subsequently protect them and trade with them because the slave is willing to pay more for their life than someone else is. If the market is a truly free market, there will be no slaves.
That's what pure "market forces" will dictate. Now, is it possible that something other than market forces allows for slavery? Certianly yes, after all that's exactly what governments did in enforcing slavery laws. One could imagine that certain people would pay exorbitant sums for certain types of slaves. However, since it wouldn't be economically viable for the reason already stated, this would presumably be quite rare. If it's a small minority, there may be enough people willing to pay a premium to see it stopped -- or there may not.
A point of clarification: slavery is not the same as indentured servitude. Note the [definition of slavery](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/slavery):
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> The condition in which one person is owned as property by another and is under the owner's control, especially in involuntary servitude.
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>
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Indentured servitiude, by contrast to slavery, likely would exist in a free market society because many people would be willing to sell their labor (not themselves!) to another party. That's how some impoverished people were able to gain passage across the Atlantic to the New World. (Some others were sent as a punishment for crimes, which is likely closer to slavery than indentured servitude.)
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## Does your society have some 'social norms' enforced ?
There are two options how your hypothetical society can function - either there are some social norms that are enforced by someone (possibly everyone), using coercion and violence or threat of it if they're [about to be] broken; or there are no such norms.
If someone enforces them, then the question is reduced to who does that in "an anarchist type government". It could be that the more powerful local mobs enforce some of their morality/ideology/religion/etc, and punish slavers - phyically, economically or by social ostracism. It could be that everyone does that - it's a common social norm, and is aggresively prosecuted by any individual who witnesses that. It could be a separate society or organization that explicitly makes their business to prevent/reduce slavery everywhere.
If noone enforces social norms, then the obvious result is that slavery is not prevented; people or groups who are strong enough will protect themselves from being enslaved, and weaker groups will become enslaved to the extent that it is useful/beneficial/desired by the stronger groups. Same logic applies for robbery, rape, murder, theft, commercial fraud, etc.
There can (and should be expected) significant differences between theory and practice. As historical experience shows, in places where you don't have any *formal* law enforcement and government, very quickly informal/unwritten laws get assumed and enforced, and some de-facto government system emerges. Sure, it will initially be very decentralized and unstable, with every local place possibly having different norms, but every society will come to *some* approach of conflict resolution that will over time become a habit, tradition and eventually law. Even if that law is limited to something like a consensus of 'Around here, if someone keeps slaves, rapes kids or steals horses, then people tend to spontaneously gather in mobs and beat them to a bloody pulp.'
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Social pressure and culture. Humans listen to culture even when they ignore laws and stuff, widespread beliefs are stronger than any law. If that aberration for slavery was cultural as culture doesn't goes away with gov there would be no demand and therefore no market, of course there would be exceptions as in the real world, but not generalized slavery.
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**You've touched on the difference between "free market" and "anarchy"**.
If people cannot trust contracts between themselves and others, then they simply won't trade: it would make no sense to do so. But without trade, there can be no kind of market system, free or otherwise, and so **even if there is no government *per se*, a truly free-market system must have some sort of mechanism to enforce contracts**. The implementation of such a mechanism is left as an exercise for the reader: governments usually fill this role in the real world, but I cannot rule out the possibility that a different mechanism might be devised. For lack of a better term, I will call this mechanism a "contract authority".
As a matter of logistics, a contract authority must have some ability to decide what constitutes a valid contract. This ability, however, carries considerable power. Among other things, **a contract authority could prevent slavery by refusing to enforce contracts which treat people as property, or induce other people to do so**. This leaves slaveowners no recourse to recapture fleeing or kidnapped slaves, and without that recourse, slavery makes a lot less sense: some people will likely try in the beginning, but the hassles involved will prove to be more trouble than they are worth.
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There is a great lecture by learned liberty discussing the free market and the family as well as slavery. Retrospective studies helped to reveal the root cause of defeating slavery was the market. It is an inefficient system of production: forced laborers have no incentive to produce maximally, therefore lower production results (when slaves had their own land to subsist on they produced several fold more); slave masters incur a greater cost to survey, house, feed, train, and force the slaves to work; it depresses wages for non-slaves who then fight to end slavery/boycott products/etc.
Lastly, ignore those who claim to be anarchists. Anarchy means no rulers (no one can use force to make you act), they conflate it with lack of hierarchy (no person is above another in status, skill, etc.). It stems from a false equivalency. You can have peaceful mutually voluntary transactions on a mass scale (the free market) and lack of government. The Mises Institute produces a plethora of lectures and data on the subject of a free market anarchy.
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I agree with most of what I read here.
Even though, I think that if you still wanna keep your world somehow Anarchic there's kind of an option. The richest and most powerful could create and pay for a private police that enforces some rights they think must be guaranteed are protected. Or maybe, rather than doing so for their good will, it's some kind of contract between the most powerful, in order to ensure they will never be slaved.
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Free market is a fantasy resulting from the desire of the burgeoise class to justify their ruling. Free market showed itself impossible time to time. When a crisis leads the government intervention (with the usual use of public money to save this or other company) you see that the market cannot regulate itself. This is true at various levels, even when not under crisis, capitalism needs the anti-trust organizations to prevent the forming of monopolies, wich are the usual consequence of a free market economy without any government intervention.
The mechanism of monopoly formation is very well understood by marxists. When a company becomes big enough it holds a power over the market that allows it to dump its price in order to destroy the incumbent companies and allow them to be sold at much smaller prices than under normal circuntances. The existence of anti-trust laws is a clear cut surrender to the inevitable fact that the market cannot regulate itself.
Besides that point, market autoregulation is usually thought to be based on supply and demand. There is a high demand for weapons, so the market produce those, even if this is not the best rational choice for a society to invest its productive forces. When the market "self-regulates" it does so in "numerical" terms, not on a rational choice of allocation of resources from the point of view of society itself.
Besides that point, its a clear confusion about the roles of politics and economy. Politics come from polis, the greek city state and its affairs. We assume that politics means power and all that is related to power. Well, economy IS POWER. If you have more money than someone else, you have more power than someone else, period. This money will, and usually do, convert itself into political power. What the anarco-capitalist thinkers forget is that power is inherent to humans. Even if the power that you hold over other people is informal, not the result of a reconizable formal political entity, it is still power. If you remove the democratic formal entities that usually hold power, all you are going to do is to free the power of the larger economical groups to enforce their will, becase to have power is to be able to force someone else to do what it might not want to do. So, if the state apparattus is not present to present a large company to impose its will, balancing it, this large company will impose its will at large unharmed.
If a president is limited by the power of a constitution and a democratic election process, a large company is usually a ditactorship where the ownership of it allows the owners to do as they suit. They usually cannot do as they want all the time, simply because the state exists to prevent this. A company owner is not elected to be a company owner, it does this by the socially accepted concept of ownership and private property. This is diametrically oposed to the concept of democracy. But, in the absence of a state to prevent this, you will see company owners do whatever they want.
Ownership is the capacity to do what you want with what you have and exclude others from doing the same with what you have. In other words, its a ditactorship over what is owned. This is usually limited by state laws. The public comes to say "hey, your ownership is limited by this law, and this one too" etc.
If there is no more state, no laws, you get a plain simple ditactorship steeming from the ownership of the means of production, plainly and simply. Worse, the market cannot trully regulate itself. It is bound to become a big monopoly hindering inovation.
How the dumping strategy works ?
1 - Two or three companies stabilish themselves in a market.
2 - The competition between them drives the prices low.
3 - In order to prevent the further fall of prices they setup a cartel.
4 - A forth company decides to enter the market. The cartel sets the price below the cost of production, rendering the forth (incumbent company) unable to compete.
5 - The forth company (incumbent) goes out of cash and goes bankrupt. Its bought out by the cartel.
6 - The cartel now sets back the price very high and recoup their loses due to the dumping.
7 - If another company enters the market they repeat the process, indefinitely.
The key to this strategy is that smaller capitals cannot enter the market once the top players are stabilished. You might say that someone who amassed more capital could enter the market, but this only means that the bigger hoard of gold will capture the market in the dumping game. If you watch carefully you will detect that smaller capitals cannot endure the dumping period against bigger capitals, rendering competition impossible. Theres no "Free market" solution to this. This clearly shows that the concept of "free market" is a bogus, ideological concept used to justify laws and moves that forster the big capital at the expense of other parts of society.
TL;DR
Free Market capitalism has no internal mechanism to prevent monopolies, lacking laws, all sorts of strategies can be devised, by those rich enough, to prevent competition. Its by no luck that we have anti-trust and anti-dumping laws.
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People seem to forget that anarchy doesn't necessarily mean no government for a free market society. As I pointed out [before](https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/75512/29927), some anarchists like anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky support a night-watchman state: a state that does not have a monopoly on violence and meets the minimum requirement set by John Locke in his book Two Treatises of Government to be considered a government. In a traditional federal state, some people with elevated legal status and power enforce the state through a monopoly on violence and a vertical hierarchy (pyramid-like top-down power structure) that separates them from the average person. In anarchism, there is little to no monopoly on violence and, if there is any hierarchy at all, a general horizontal hierarchy (an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between the average person and those in charge) where no one has any legal power that doesn't belong to other citizens in general.
This type of government has been used in real-life [anarchist](https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/75908/29927) societies without a monopoly on violence like FEJUVE or The Federation of Neighborhood Councils-El Alto which practices a form of market anarchism called mutualism and Freetown Christiania that practices a form of market anarchism called agorism. Both of these places have general free markets and prevent slavery with a volunteerism form of [law enforcement](https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/78004/29927) where said volunteers get training to prevent people from being murdered or turned into slaves, but the enforcers are treaded more like citizens in uniform than people that are the sole protectors and enforcers of the state. Considering these societies have been able to function and be autonomous for decades, I say this system works pretty well.
Basically, having a nightwatchman state and volunteer law enforcement allows for a free market without slavery because a free market (and even certain forms of anarchism) does not necessarily equal complete lawlessness and anyone can do whatever they want.
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I know this is an old question, but I feel like the most obvious answer is missing.
How to avoid (or minimize) slavery in the this world? give them modern technology.
It's not just the goverment, or even our culture, preventing slavery in fist world countries. Even if you somehow changed the rules and made everyone okay culturally with slavery in the US you would see very little slavery (well, probably sexual slavery, but that's a whole different issue...).
The reason why is because *it's not economical*.
Once upon a time it made sense to have slaves because you needed someone to an your physically difficult menial labor. Now of days we don't really have that much menial labor, not compared to the old days. We have machines to lift and move heavy things, we have automated factories building our resources and cars moving items from A to B. It no longer makes sense to have a person doing much of this work because they do it so much worse then technology.
However, a slave still requires you feed, cloath, and house them, which is expensive. Minimum wage arguably isn't enough for someone to live on their own, so there is a standard for what it costs just to keep someone alive to be your slave. Now sure your not going to spend as much on housing as even a minimum wage worker does, you can save some money there. However, you also need to pay to restrain and gaurd them; and slaves generally work far less efficently then non-slaves (less motivation obviously) so your getting less work out of them. You can afford to pay someone well..not minimum wage, but not all that far off from it for the expense of having them as a slave.
So, for a slave to be worthwhile at minimum they must be performing work that is notiable worth more then minimum wage.
Lets look at modern jobs. All the high paying ones require education, you don't want to throughly educate slaves because it gives them too much power, and because without motivation to work hard for you it's unlikely your get as much value out of them then you would paying an already educated person.
There are some hard working physical labor jobs where slaves are still useful, but not that many. In addition most of them are the sort of thing where no *one* person benefits from a slave. Sure having someone to weed my yard is great and I may want my slave to do that, he has earned his room and board for the day. But tomorrow my yard is weeded...and I still have a slave. I don't have enough *personal* tasks I need done. I may be able to sell my slave out to others to have him weed their yard, taking the profit. However, the profit isn't that high and in addition to the effort of figuring out where to send him to I need to figure out how to make sure he doesn't escape, it's too logistically expensive for a job that doesn't pay *that* much higher then what it costs to keep him unless I do it in large numbers to benefit from economy of scales; and there just aren't that many large number of jobs out there that need physical labor.
Service industry is the biggest place for people without college or even high school degrees to work, but slaves aren't as well suited for this. Part of the service industries existance is because people feel better talking to people then machines, we only want service from humans if it makes us feel *better*. Seeing a beaten and abused slave who obviously hates where they are at isn't going to make us feel as good. lowering the value of a human representative at all.
So there would be some physical jobs and some service jobs where slaves would be useful, but not that many and for limited profit. However, for slaves to work a goverment needs to support the system, it needs to put money into catching escape slaves for instance. This is not a trival amount of money, as all your slaves are going to want to run away. The goverment thus will want to tax anyone with slaves to help pay for the "slave catching services", that tax can be enough to remove any profit the slaves have. And, as already mentioned, there is an issue of economy of scales, unless you have *allot* of jobs that slaves are good at it doesn't become worth setting up the logistical effort for getting slaves where they need to be and making sure they don't escape.
The net result of all this is that slaves really aren't worth the expense in a first world country. Finally, people naturally are opposed to slavery in general, so if slaves made only minor profit someone who would have been tempted to go along with slavery if it was a strong profit may find the tiny benefit isn't worth violating their instinctual (yes instinctual, there are evolutionarily engraded instincts at work here) ethics against slavery. Even if someone is a sociopath and has no moral qualms others will, and they may lose business to those who take offense. Without a strong financial benefit, enough to tempt those with questionable morals and encourage the fully immoral to put expense into indoctrinating others into accepting slavery, it's just not worth trying to get people to accept the moral violations.
So in short, with modern technology slavery just isn't worth having, at least in any quantity. Some individuals may keep slaves, but that slave is best kept secret so they don't have to worry about how others react to it. This will be the exception though, I don't see regular slaves being any more common then they are in today America (because yes, slaves do exist today, not legally but there are always some who require it).
That is with the exception of sexual slavery, which I could see being more common in such a situation. Look to the other answers to address that. The big point was simply that it's not that hard to do away with slavery because there isn't that much of a motivation for it anyways today.
\*all these arguments assumes world that has modern technology. That means third world countries, where human knowledge exists but the same access to machines is not as available, would still benefit from slaves more.
[Answer]
It is not possible to prevent slavery when economics is based exclusively in a secular (human) society. Respect for life and liberty is not a natural result of an evolutionary model. The implications of the evolution model is dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. In such a model there is nothing morally wrong with slavery.
When moral principles are derived from a non-secular, no-evolutionary model (aka creationism) there exists a supernatural moral authority under which slavery is considered evil.
In short, the only way to prevent slavery is for society to adopt a higher moral standard than that which derives from a purely secular model of existence.
] |
[Question]
[
Yes, I know the answer for this is "no, that's unrealistic and ridiculous," but magic in my world may just change that. You see, mermaids have the (super)natural ability to create and manipulate seashells (and pearls, but that's outside the scope of this question).
Now, I've decided that mermaids will use seashells as clothing (specifically seashell tops, but other seashell attire will exist too) in my setting, both for modesty and practical reasons (explained below), but that made me wonder. Could seashells even work as clothing?
I mean, realistically, **there are only three justifications for seashell tops:**
1. Magic-This should come as no surprise. Only with magic can seashells be conveniently molded to the wearer and given the strap (or straps) necessary to hold them in place.
2. Supply/Availability-Seashells are pretty easy to obtain in the ocean, and with their magic, mermaids can easily bend and even merge them to suit their needs. (Merging fuses two shells together into one seamless object, essentially turning four small shells into one big shell.) Generally speaking, humanity works not just with *what is there* but with *what is easiest to work with,* and this makes seashells a prime candidate for mermaid clothing material.
3. Protection-I believe it goes without saying that the female chest is a vulnerability and must be protected. Which would be better at that, specially made seashells or seaweed? Yeah, I thought so.
However, just because I came up with three reasons to justify seashell tops (or seashell clothing in general) doesn't mean they're actually viable. Perhaps they just can't be made comfortable enough, or maybe seashells have some irredeemable flaw that would prevent them being used in this way. So my question is, **Are Seashell Tops Viable Clothing For Mermaids?**
**Specifications:**
1. The best answer will account for the variables that determine the desirability, usefulness, and popularity of clothing, then explain why seashells pass or fall as a viable clothing material. These variables are supply, workability, comfort, and cosmetic potential (as fashion *will* be important to mermaids, they'll want something capable of as many different colors and designs as possible).
2. The best answer will also contrast seashells to other options mermaids have for clothing to see how they compare. As far as I can tell, these options are seaweed, marine animal hide, sponges, sea stars, sea anemones (decorator and boxer crabs do it, so why not mermaids?), and maybe even fishbones. [Rubber](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/118927/could-mermaids-feasibly-make-clothing-out-of-natural-rubber) was mentioned in this question, but I'm not actually sure how feasible that is, and while I *am* asking about seashells in particular, I am also willing to accept a better alternative as long as its pros and cons are explained alongside that of shells.
[Answer]
**Yes.**
<https://www.naheri.com/products/african-inspired-cowrie-sea-shell-necklace.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DcimZ.jpg)
This top (really a necklace) is eminently practical for a mermaid. Shells are available. Cowrie shells are smooth, waterproof, durable and common. Varying sizes can be used to provide more or less coverage for the front as desired. They are heavy enough not to float up when she is in the water; a larger necklace could wrap around and tie in back at the midriff and so secure it against the body when she swims. A top like this could be made more extensive to provide protection from the sun.
Plus it is a sweet and exotic look. Project Runway here I come!
[Answer]
Doesn't sound very practical.
Corsets weren't very practical.
Foot-binding wasn't very practical.
Stiletto heels aren't very practical.
Why not?
[Answer]
Seashells are rigid. Totally rigid clothes on a moving body are very likely to cause blisters and bruises due to friction.
Prolongued friction might even cause ulcers. If you have ever worn boots which were not broken in for long hikes you will get something like that.
If the shell covers only the breast is not offering that much protection.
If it covers the whole chest it hampers movement and all what I have written above.
Neither option seems nice.
[Answer]
To everyone saying that seashells are a no go because they are hard, remember that coconut bras are a thing in the real world. Mermaids would surely use some sort of padding to protect their [voice producing organs](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45803/21222).
That said, who's to say that those bras are made of actual sea shells? They could be made to look like shells because that's underwater folk culture. Same reason why people cheering for some sports team in North America use hats with moose antlers, which are not actual moose antlers.
The mermaids make their bras out of soft materials such as shark egg cases (which some people call "mermaid purses" BTW) and seahemp. They make them seashell shaped because it sells, but if you visit their markets you should also find some shaped like sponges, crabs and in their erotic shops there are even sashimi shaped bras. The latter are actually edible.
[Answer]
## Don't kill the molluscs!
It would be cruel, and then you would be left with hard shells and straps. Have you ever seen a mermaid with *straps*?
There are more fundamental reasons: mermaids do appear to be mammals. Marine mammals have no trouble nursing young in the ocean, but mermaids might like to do better than nature. Maybe it started out for protection, to soothe baby-nibbled surfaces sensitive to sea water.
Introducing a little magic to the breeding of pets, it should be easy enough to come up with a flattened gastropod or a one-shelled clam, bred to use its muscular foot and antimicrobial, healing secretions to conform closely to a soft substrate of varying shape. More importantly, these can be bred to accumulate milk in a sanitary internal sac, and to allow it to be sucked out through a separate small orifice in its shell by a determined infant. Filling several such shells with milk in advance allows the mother to prepare for a period of separation.
The invention of this mollusc-pumping magic helped mermaids take part in longer marathon swims and elaborate festivities where the presence of infants might be an encumbrance. Now they leave them behind in communal babysitting creches for days at a time. Some may argue that this is not truly an altogether good thing, but natural sensibilities rarely stand up to convenience and obligation.
] |
[Question]
[
## Background
A previously subjugated population flees a region, settling in an extremely remote location and remains isolated for a few hundred years. The population, upon fleeing, speaks the same language as their subjugators.
**What is the likelihood that the languages remain comprehensible between the two populations even after several hundred years?**
## Considerations
* We may assume that, for whatever reason, both populations put in an effort to maintain a standard language in academic and government settings.
* We may assume little technological progress during this time
* We may assume communities within each nation are not isolated
[Answer]
**Yes, as long as both have books.**
It's estimated the evolution of English has slowed dramatically with two major historical impacts: the Bible translated into common English and printed for the masses, and a boom in literacy during the Victorian era after a generation of social reform that pushed literacy.
[Why Did English Stop Changing? Let's Blame the Book of Common Prayer](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/why-did-english-stop-changing-lets-blame-the-book-of-common-prayer/261589/).
[Answer]
Mutual comprehensibility is a continuum, it is not all or nothing. Americans and English people understand each other, especially if both make an effort to avoid excessively local pronunciations and words. Literate speakers of any of the Scandinavian languages can read most texts in any other Scandinavian language. Most educated Romanians can grasp the meaning of Italian Wikipedia articles without any special training; Spanish Wikipedia articles are less transparent for us, and reading French Wikipedia is not possible at all without actually learning French. Russians are said to be able to follow the main points of an Ukrainian text, and so on.
If the two populations are highly literate, have schools and a common body of literature (fiction, poetry, law, technical all count) then a *few* centuries won't break their mutual comprehensibility. Americans are a good example – they fled England and for two centuries or so they had limited contact with the mother country, yet their language is still recognizable as a form of English.
On the other hand, if one or both of them descend into illiteracy, then language evolution will be much faster, and three or four centuries *may* be enough to break the mutual comprehensibility; six or more centuries will almost certainly be enough. For example, the speakers of the earliest forms of French lost mutual comprehensibility with the ancestors of the earliest forms of Italian (and with the Latin books) in about 400 or 500 years (between the 5th and the 9th century). Note that the relationship between the two languages will most likely remain obvious even to ordinary people, but learning to read or speak the other language won't be trivial and will require a certain (probably small) amount of effort.
For linguistic divergence to reach a point where learning the other language is difficult you need more than a *few* centuries. Even today, after about 15 centuries of separate evolution, speakers of one Romance language find it relatively easy to learn another, and translation between Romance languages is smooth and effortless; and the same can be said about Slavic languages, which have about 12 centuries of separate evolution.
[Answer]
We have plenty of real-life examples for this, that are isolated from each other by time rather than space. Modern Greeks can understand some Classical Greek, with a 2,500 year separation. Modern Icelanders can easily read and understand 10th century Old Norse. A few hundred years will be no problem.
[Answer]
That has already happened.
The "subjugated" people were the Jews in the Iberian peninsula expelled in 1492. Some of their descendants still speak [Judaeo-Spanish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Spanish) or Ladino, which is intelligible for speakers of Spanish - the samples of written Judeo-Spanish I've seen can be understood despite using a very different spelling.
Notably, those two populations didn't made any effort to keep a common standard -hence the different orthography- but language hasn't drifted away in 500 years enough to stop being the same.
[Answer]
Language, especially spoken language, tends to change a bit over time naturally, and you just can't avoid this. Just look at [this slang dictionary](https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=vUgMWQv0CywC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR3) from less than 200 years ago and see how little you recognize. Writing changes less than spoken language, but there is still some change. Try reading [*Romeo and Iuliet*](https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_OCHPAAAAMAAJ) (and not some modernized version)—words like *ciuill* will trip you up, while I'm sure you'd recognize the modern form, *civil*. Then listen to the old pronunciation [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi-rejaoP7U).
However, you don't need to try and fight colloquial language, you can just force people to learn the traditional language, in school. Make it a [prestige language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_(sociolinguistics)).
[Arabic is a good example](http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/Ling450ch/reports/arabic.html). In addition to all the colloquial dialects of Arabic, there is [Modern Standard Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic) (MSA), which is taught. It is both written and spoken. Part of the appeal of MSA is how much closer to the language in the Quran it is than colloquial Arabic. (It would be even closer if they didn't reform it at all. So don't reform!)
[Answer]
You can look at Quebec as an example of this:
* French (from France) still understand Quebecois (but the accents make it hard at first)
* Quebecois swear words are different from French ones (e.g., *tabernacle* isn't profane in French but it is in Quebecois [(Quebecois French Profanity is weird)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity)).
* The Quebecois (the isolated community) are more hardcore about not losing their French culture so don't have as many Anglicisms (e.g., stop signs in France say "STOP" whereas in Quebec they say "ARRET").
* In some ways Quebecois has stagnated and still uses many older words.
Anyway TL;DR: very likely that it's still comprehensible with some eccentricities.
[Answer]
Undoubtedly there will be regional variety (dialect / accent differences) after several hundred years, but it's no stretch to imagine both populations managing to understand each other. A couple of factors to keep in mind:
1. the language must be somewhat regulated by official institutions or literature. Dictionaries, literary works and grammar books are important in establishing and cementing an official language.
2. geography and ties to neighbouring nations will have an impact on a nation's language. This influence should not be significant enough to drastically alter a language if there's a natural evolution of the language (a non-natural evolution would include events such as long-term subjugation by an enemy nation or enforced language laws).
[Answer]
There are several real world examples of this:
* The [Greeks of Southern Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_in_Italy)
There are a number of English speaking countries, a good example in particular would be the island of Tristan da Cuna, where the language is little changed from the time that the island was 1st settled in early 19th C.
* The [Welsh in Patagonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonian_Welsh)
* The Amish in USA
* The Spanish & Portuguese languages of South America
] |
[Question]
[
**Some background:**
My interstellar civilization(s) have fled our home Solar System, spreading throughout the nearby systems in the [Orion Arm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Arm). They possess [FTL](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faster-than-light#Adjective), but for plot reasons, they have only just begun to reach Sagittarius.
Since they have spread out through a large portion of the Orion arm (but not all of it), a standardized form of mapping was needed. In most of my drafts, locations are simply referred to via the "Sector XXX" trope, but, as we know here on this Stack, space is *massive* ***and*** *three-dimensional*. Thus, the three-digit sector schema won't work.
**Relevant Information:**
The sector naming schema is chosen because this system only needs to point towards a location, and provide minimal information about what is there (for example, sector 123a is the first star system in a sector.)
Assuming the following conditions:
* The Orion Arm is 10 [kly](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kly#Noun) long, 1 kly deep, and 3 kly wide (small estimates, I know.)
* Each sector is 5 ly apart
There should be 200x800x2000, or just around 300 million unique sectors.
This number seems absurdly large, however. Even is you used a base 16 coordinate system, you would still have a ~7-digit identifying number. ***Addendum*:** You could lower this number by having the system be two-dimensional, only dividing up along the galactic plane.
I did have the idea of using a truncated three-dimensional coordinate system, though. An example would be Sector 02101440.
Of course, a coordinate system might not even be the optimal choice, and conventional naming schema for star systems are essentially out the window, as I also want to be able to point at an empty region of space and say "This is Sector XYZ."
With all of that now in mind: **How would an interstellar civilization map the arms of the galaxy?**
**Criteria:**
* The ability to point to and label any region of space
* The ability to identify components in a system
* The system being expandable
* 3D is *not* required. It's secondary to all the above, as a sector can always be subdivided.
Systems that allow for shorter designations, or the ability to truncate one to be shorter, **without overgeneralizing** are preferred.
[Answer]
First of all, please check out our [List of Worldbuilding Resources](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143606/40609), which might give you ideas about how you want to solve this in your world. There's an entire section devoted to mapping, from a fantasy land to star charting.
**But, when it comes to creating your own mapping system, you need to remember two things...**
1. Coordinates tell you where locations are.
2. Boundaries tell you where your friends and enemies are.
The idea of "sectors" as portrayed in fiction such as *Star Trek* doesn't actually make a lot of sense unless there's purpose behind making arbitrary boundaries. Cataloging isn't a sufficient purpose for a civilization that can actually hop from one star to the next in a practical manner. Think about it, who cares if the planet Gronk is in Sector Alpha-Seven-Niner-Epsilon?
It's like comparing latitude and longitude vs. national boundaries. The first is a mathematical solution that anything from a printed book to a computer can use to find, well... as I said... a location. The second is *fluid* because it changes with purpose. National boundaries (for example) change for many different reasons ranging from war to polite resource trading to "I saw it first!"
What's the value of the coordinate system? To precisely find a location or group of locations.
What's the value of boundaries? To know who your friends and enemies are. Or, at least, to more easily identify a culture that might be fun for a vacation.
**Use coordinates to explain how you travel. Use boundaries to explain why you travel.**
Maybe it's true that the Gronk Empire just declared war on the Wabooda Oligarchy! Your family was looking forward to vacationing on the famed Abtrusian Spinnarette! The auroras wafting through the island planetoids of the Spinnarette are to die for and it took *months* to obtain passport visas to the Oligarchy! What are you going to do???
1. You're going to open up your world's version of the [Michelin Guide](https://guide.michelin.com/us/en), which totally doesn't have the words *"Don't Panic!* written on the back (but should 'cause your family's gonna find out about that war...), and do a quick cross-reference to *amazing worlds with breathtaking auroras.* You'll discover that there's a possible alternative, the *Lumpus Origami Rings* located at Periamory Fourteen.
2. You quickly ask your handy-dandy ~~cell phone~~ um... ~~personal digital assistant~~ ... OK, you quickly say something that really doesn't sound like *"Alexa, change the family's vacation plans to the Lumpus Origami Rings!"*
3. What neanderthal rednecks like you and me here in 2023 might rudely call a *computer* spends about a bazillionth of a second collating the spherical coordinates of relevant planets, caring about whether or not arbitrary *boundaries* are going to matter to you, withdrawing payment for services at one and scheduling services at the other, routing transportation that would involve really complex calculations that should really be the transport ship's problem had you not booked the absolutely *cheapest* transport on the planet, and spits out an entirely new itinerary for your family's vacation, complete with a 15% gratuity Alexa will spend courting Siri. (Both of whom won their independence in the Great Anti-Contra-Ludite Debate of 2623.)
**Funny, JB, but what's your point?**
As before, two-fold:
1. Locations will always be a coordinate system that, frankly, has nothing to do with artificial boundaries, regions, politics, religion, a good time, or anything like that. Computers will be doing all the routing and flying. They don't care about names anymore than DNS today actually cares that you called your computer *Dilbert* or that your domain is *JacquesStrap.Org.* Computers like numbers. They like mathematics. And since planets and solar systems move, they're going to care a lot about vectors, angles, and equations.
2. Boundaries will always be a ~~*human*~~ *living* thing. Boundaries are how we number-averse beings collect and organize fun things to do, like holding national elections, identifying national parks, and generally expressing the idea, "um... this is mine." Boundaries can be a LOT of fun for worldbuilders, so long as you stay away from seriously using them to deal with #1, above. Believe me, the Klingons really don't care how the Humans marked off space. They have their own way of doing it — and it has a LOT to do with "um... this is mine."
And, above all, boundaries give you the ability to list coordinates that are relevant to the boundaries: such as the list of solar systems claimed by the Gronk Empire. You'll soon discover that trying to *draw lines* in 3D interstellar space isn't very practical. But assigning a list of *resources* (planets, solar systems, nebulae, mine fields from the ancient Eyklynoolian Panic... *now THAT was a panic!*) to an arbitrary category number with the name "Gronk Empire" and letting a computer worry about how to display it... that's actually pretty easy.
```
<StarChart>
<Region>
<Name>Gronk Empire</Name>
<SolarSystem region-identifier="1">
<GalacticCenterVectorLength type="parsecs">1255</GalacticCenterVectorLength>
<ParallelMeridianAngle>272</ParallelMeridianAngle>
<PerpendicularMeridianAngle>135</PerpendicularMeridianAngle>
<LastVerifiedLocationDate>26190127</LastVerifiedLocationDate>
<ProgressionModelName>Haskell5-theta</ProgressionModelName>
<Name>Gronk</Name>
</SolarSystem>
...
</Region>
</StarChart>
```
Of course, what your *people* want to see is...
>
> **GRONK** Home planet of the Gronk Empire. ‚ú®‚ú®‚ú® Notable for its vast obsidian deserts and popular *Enk-gronk-eay* music. ü•£üõèÔ∏èü¶Æüê± Notable celebrities: None. Current politics: at war with Wabooda Oligarchy (üí•üí•). Graft: üí≤üí≤üí≤. See *GRONK EMPIRE* for current list of planets.
>
>
>
Above all, remember that an actual coordinate system *is what your shipboard computer cares about* and won't be particularly readable by any human. Or, if it is, it'll be boring. Use coordinates sparingly and, IMO, don't worry too much about coming up with one that *actually works.* Unless that level of precision has a critical role to play in your story, it's not worth the effort. Coming up with a way to *express the idea of location* is, IMO, what you're really after.
In other words, how do people in your world look up locations? How do you do it today? Do you type in 48.8566° N, 2.3522° E? Or do you type in "Paris, France"? The first might be useful for a [SLAMRAAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAMRAAM) launch computer, but the second is more useful for finding a cafe.
[Answer]
## Name sectors after bright stars
I'm an astronomer and therefore utterly awful at naming things, but I'll vote in favor of centering each sector around one bright star -- in particular, an O or B star -- and use whatever name people on the street call that star. In our local stellar neighborhood, these luminous stars have a combined number density of [roughly $n\sim3.2\times10^{-5}$ per cubic parsec](https://www.pas.rochester.edu/%7Eemamajek/memo_star_dens.html). The mean separation is then $d\approx n^{-1/3}\approx100$ light-years, so any point in space should be within about 50 light-years of an O or B star.
Now, this is larger than the 5 light-years you asked for, but bear in mind that all kinds of stars in our neck of the woods put together have an average number density of $\sim$0.1 stars per cubic parsec, meaning that the typical star is about 7 light-years away from its nearest neighbor. In other words, if we stick with your sizing scheme, the vast majority of sectors will have no more than 1-2 star systems within each one at the most, which seems like too fine-grained a measuring system. I'd argue a 100-light-year separation is better for practical purposes.
Some advantages:
* There are O and B stars throughout the galaxy, so wherever you go, you'll have new reference points.
* O and B stars are easy to find and locate and will likely be among the best-studied natural landmarks (spacemarks?) available.
* Using this coarser system means you can use words, like Nosajimiki suggested, to name sectors, without running out of easy-to-pronounce combinations any time soon.
Some disadvantages:
* These stars will die after a couple tens of millions of years at the *latest*; on the other hand, more will spring up in their places.
* They do tend to be clustered together and sometimes in binaries, so the separation I quoted above is a slight underestimate.
[Answer]
## Think about what your galaxy spanning civilisation needs
Contrary to popular belief, *stars and galaxy arms are independent*.
That is, that spiral arms are constantly changing density variations that the stars move through - the stars are actually orbiting the centre of the galaxy at a separate rate the arms do. This is still a mystery as to why for astrophysicists, but there are some theories out there as to the reasons to be confirmed by more observations.
This animation demonstrates that stars and arms do not orbit the centre of the galaxy together:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vwSe9.gif)
This means your coordinate system should not be able to reference arms, for instance to get to a certain star, as to track a star over a period or even to find out where that star had been, would not be possible. A star would obviously change arm over millions of years, but even over a 1000 years this would cause a complex problem referencing between arms and for a galaxy spanning civilisation this will still make plotting of stars difficult.
Instead I would recommend a simpler Polar Coordinate system measured around the perpendicular axis to the galactic plane, with the 'North' direction a fixed normalised direction to a nearby galaxy. Although this too changes, the time-span for shifting of this direction would be billions of years, not millions as per the arms, so would be far more useful to a galactic spanning civilisation. If not for navigation, perhaps culturally or scientifically.
Plotting the position of the star historically in relation to this would then need a time-index and a computation model of a galaxy.
So your coordinate system would be:
This Galaxy, Nearby Galaxy, Polar Angle from Normalised angle, Distance from Centre, Time Index (if referencing a star, not needed otherwise) to be safe measured from the Big Bang. This way you can then plot a course to or from this point at any time.
So it may look like this:
* Coordinate of Sirius Star = Milky Way, Andromeda, 31.252º, 16832LY, 13.451Y
Or you can omit the first 2 coordinates for 'common parlance':
* Coordinate of Sirius Star in the Milky Way = 31.252º, 16832LY, 13.451Y
And you could leave out the time index if you wanted a fixed point at the precise moment of coordinate generation:
* Coordinate to the current position of Sirius Star in the Milky Way = 31.252º, 16832LY
[Answer]
**Sun-centric Cartesian coordinates in light-years**
* **X** is distance from sun towards galactic center
* **Y** is distance along the rotational axis of galaxy
* **Z** is normal to X and Y
This is the logical development as space technology progresses. At first, we don't know the accurate distances to far-away locations. If we started with the center of galaxy as origin, Earth's coordinates would have an error bound of +- 2600 light-years. Unusable for navigation.
Sun-centric system expands as we travel further. Close stars have coordinates like 4-1-0, while further away systems are still reasonable 232-32-17.
The angular version of [Galactic coordinate system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system) is logical for observing from a single place, as we know the direction much more accurately than the distance. However as soon as you have multiple planetary systems, the rectangular/Cartesian variant is more practical. Distance between two places can be computed directly from the coordinate numbers. Binding the coordinate axes to location of a star system and the galactic center keeps the coordinates relatively accurate over millions of years even as the galaxy spins.
Eventually a second central world will find its place. It is inevitable if travel speed has any limit. Which world will find importance depends on abundance of resources, easy travel and local developments. They will start mapping the neighbourhood relative to their own system, maybe using a letter distinguishing the systems. Thus *A232-32-17* will be *B0-0-0*, and the cycle repeats. Dealing with multiple coordinate systems has its cost, so this will only happen when enough travelers consider *B* to be central and *A* to be some distant relic.
[Answer]
### Subdivide it
The problem you'll run into with any galactic coordinate system is that, for your typical freighter run, you're only going to use a tiny portion of it. Yes, you could use cartesian or polar coordinates based on the location of Sagittarius A\*, but nobody wants to describe their flight as a regular run between O 273.334.5616 and O 274.334.5618. You need something that's meaningful locally, but translates to something that's useful globally.
If you're basing your coordinates on a spiral arm, you can start with a linear measure along that arm. You can have your survey crew identify a curve that runs from the beginning of the spiral arm to the end of it, then chop that line into meaningful bits.
The Orion arm is about 3.5kly edge to edge, and roughly 20kly long. The maximum resolution that we care about is roughly 1 ly. You do get stars closer than that, but that's something you can adapt to.
Let's chop that length into 1000 light year chunks and label them A-Z. You could keep the extra letters for later, or give them a special purpose. That's up to you. This gives you roughly twenty zones that are 1000 x 3500 x 1000.
This is where you want to start paying attention to the way political boundaries are drawn up. You could split the boundaries purely mathematically, but you really want to break it up so that things like nebulae and big star clusters get grouped together. If there are edge systems, go ahead and have people argue about which major sector they belong to. It all translates to the same top-level coordinate anyway
So what we do is pick a star in every cluster that is near the middle, and doesn't have a high relative velocity compared to the arm. A large, bright star would also be beneficial. Use that (movement and all) as the distinct, moving center of your zone. You can pick cartesian or radial coordinates from that point.
Personally I'd apply a second layer of letters and numbers, so you're dividing it into 36 x 36 x 36 sub-zones, each roughly 27 x 97 x 27 ly across.
This gets you up to 1.2 million sectors, with labels like Sector Om, sub-sector 2FQ, zone 23.85.21.
Once you have a volume of space, number the stars by magnitude, and planets by distance from their star, moons by (etc. etc.)
The thing this system doesn't do is account for the motion of stars. Fortunately, even today's computers can calculate the current and future location of all of the stars. Ok, maybe not ALL of them, but that's why your people need to trade star charts. You pick a point in time and set the designation, then maybe update it every hundred years. Thus, time stamps would be critical for star charts.
[Answer]
## Option A: Use Monosyllabic Words instead of Numbers.
There are 10 digits in the English Language; so, sector 4-1-2 can give you a base-10 grid for 1000 sectors, averaging about 800,000 stars per sector across the Orion Arm.
Letters will get you a bit farther. Sector f-c-x can give you a base-26 grid with 17,576 sectors averaging 45,516 stars per sector grid... still pretty darn big.
But there is one thing that the English language has that is just as easy to say as a letter or number that we have a LOT more of: **Monosyllabic words**. In fact, there are about 12,000 words in the English Language that only have 1 syllable. This could be truncated down to the 10,000 most common words to give you a convenient base-10 system to work with. This grid would fit the entire Milky Way inside it while isolating Orion's Arm to a section of the grid system that is about 200x800x2000 sectors.
So your captain could say, "set course for sector cat-pop-bag" and with this simple 3-word combination, you establish one of a trillion possible, easy to say, sector names... and because they are alphabetical, they also give a good idea of displacement and distances so, even if you are outside of your usual territory, you would understand that "cat-pop-bag" is pretty close to "can-pond-back", but very far away from "door-zoo-gin". Over time, some of these sector names may even take on local pronunciations and be treated as words unto themselves like Catobag, Canonak, and Dozogin.
Also, because you are dropping some words, you could actually manipulate the word arrays just a bit do to something snarky, such as placing Earth in the Earth-Earth-Earth sector, or doing something practical like dropping offensive or overly similar sounding words.
## Option B: Use local designations.
I remember back in the 90's (before cell phones messed everything up) if you asked someone for their phone number, they would give you a 7 digit number... but phone numbers were all 10 numbers long. This is because everyone would drop their area code because 99% of the time, you and the person you were talking to were in the same area code.
Now let's apply this same concept to a coordinate grid. Another way to break up the milky way into a trillion bite sized sectors is to break up this number into a series of 4 sets of 3 numbers where each set of numbers is an XYZ 10th of the previous subdivision such that your actual sector is a number between 000.000.000.000 and 999.999.999.999. So if you are in the sector representing the cardigan location X=1234, Y=5555, Z=6789 then your sector address would be 156.257.358.459. What this means is that if you are in sector 156.257.358.459, the closest sectors to you would be 156.257.358.359, 156.257.358.559, 156.257.358.449, 156.257.358.469, 156.257.358.458, etc... since everyone near by you is going to be in the same area code "156.257.358", then you in casual conversation can just say, "Set course for sector 458" and everyone knows that you mean the local sector 458 meaning 156.257.358.**458**. If you want to go a bit farther you might say "Go to sector 356 dot 458" meaning 156.257.**356.458**. The farther away you are talking about, the longer the number gets.
This way you can keep destinations simple small numbers most of the time. And ofcourse, over time people will have to come up with names for each of these levels of detail, like Domain, Zone, Section, and Sector so that if you want to reference a more broad area than a little cube of space containing no more than a handful of stars, you could say something like "The Moobark empire spans most of Domain 436". Now, you know you are talking about an area of space that is a billion sectors in size.
[Answer]
**Just use galactic center-centered coordinate system in higher-base numbers.**
Instead of hexadecimal, you can use base-32 and make the numbers 2 times shorter (and 3 times shorter than decimal with the same accuracy)
You can even go base-36 (10 digits and 26 English/Latin letters) and your coordinates will look like:
DCA4/PGS0 (angle and distance from the center, accurate to well within light-year)
This is enough not to get lost in the sparsely-packed habitable regions.
Regions with a dense population of high-mass, bright, short-lived stars and their remnants (neutron stars and black holes) may be scientifically interesting, but neither habitable nor easily navigable (strong EM radiation all over the spectrum, convoluted gravity and fewer planets). Whoever goes there will add a character or two for accuracy and a third number.
[Answer]
An unbroken string of 8 digits isn't terribly ergonomic...think of telephone numbers. Breaking things into chunks makes them both easier to remember and easier to communicate without errors. And as with phone numbers, consider a hierarchical system.
For example, use base 32, consisting of 10 decimal digits and 22 letters. A 3-symbol galactic sector code breaks the galaxy up into 32768 sectors. Another 3 symbols breaks each of those into 32768 sub-sectors, for just under 1 billion sub-sectors total. For local business, you only need the last three...there may be 32768 sub-sector A57's, but even near a border between sectors it will be pretty clear which one is meant, and you will rarely need to specify whether it's 3G9.A57 or 72E.A57.
Also, cylindrical coordinates centered on the core will result in inconveniently shaped sectors, only imperfectly fit the galaxy, and make little sense out in the halo, satellite galaxies, or other galaxies. Just put the galaxy in a Cartesian box. It is expandable: when you need to deal with locations outside a cube containing the Milky Way, just add a prefix defining intergalactic sectors, giving the one containing the Milky Way coordinates near the middle, so each Milky Way set of coordinates becomes GGG.###.###.
If you set the size of the Milky Way-containing intergalactic sector to 131072 light years across, then each galactic sector is 4096 light years across, and each subsector is 128 light years across. Or for a civilization with a bit less forethought, start defining sectors at the origin of the civilization and just add prefixes from there, with a result that doesn't so cleanly fit the Milky Way in a box.
[Answer]
If you have a map of named pulsars you could define a coordinate system that would uniquely define a point by using the distances to the closest four pulsars.
example Larry 5.0, Curly 11.5, Moe 222.4, Shemp 502.3. Let the computer do the math and knowing where the pulsars are in absolute galactic terms.
This would be locally useful and spare the user from a distant origin point and spare the author and reader lots of angle measurements.
And since it's unlikely the pulsars are going to be well defined it makes proving continuity errors difficult (like why Star Trek avoided real stars - some trekkie could map the Enterprise following a very random voyage.)
The Voyager 1 probe for example used a very redundant 14 Pulsar map to point to Earth.
<https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/science/pulsar-map/>
[Answer]
An alternative to the many great ideas here:
Divide your galaxy up into 100 domains named after the highest mass object within each domain. The highest mass object is poetically treated as the cosmic "ruler" of that domain, much like we anthropomorphise mountains and such on Earth. These domains can vary in size based on the gravitational influence of it's cosmic ruler. You can even divide them further, much like a feudal system of Kings, Dukes, Counts etc.
From there just use vector 3 in light years relative to the cosmic ruler. e.g.
Traveller: "I come from Uddakar alt-Selim in Archaeon."
Officer: "I'm sure you do, coordinates?"
Traveller: "103-209-77, if you really must look it up"
^ So Uddakar is the traveller's planet, "alt-" means "of", "Selim" is the local name of the star and "Archaeon" is the galactic name of a black hole that influences 1 billion stars around it and was therefore categorised as a "cosmic ruler".
This allows you to blend some cool lore and cool names with some acceptable hard science. You can lower the number of cosmic rulers to be easier and really just treat naming of planets and stars as a local thing only, where ruler and vector 3 is the universal language.
[Answer]
Part One of Three: A frame challenge:
Settling star systems in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy is a bit like settling the aurora borealis.
When you look at a spiral galaxy from the outside, the spiral arms look very impressive, being much brighter than the spaces between them. Thus at first sight it is logical to assume that the stars are concentrated in the spiral arms and their are few stars between them.
Thus in James Blish's "Okie" or *Cities in Flight* stories first written during the 1950s, it is said that Earthmen have spread out along Arm II of the galaxy.
But in a later Blish novel from the 1960s a character notes that the spiral arms are mostly visual features of a galaxy and that the star distribution is more uniform throughout the galactic disc.
In most science fiction stories of interstellar colonization, humans colonize naturally habitable planets of other stars. And science fiction writers who want high scores in the Sliding Scale of Science Fiction Hardness:
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness>
Will have their human colonists only colonize planets of stars which are capable of having human habitable planets. Since it took Earth billions of years to develop an atmosphere breathable by humans, planets that are naturally habitable for humans should only orbit stars which are billions of years old.
And only some spectral classes of stars can last for billions of years.
Thus naturally human habitable planets should orbit spectral class G and some class K stars, and maybe class F stars on the shorter lived side and maybe class K and M stars on the dimmer though longer lived side.
And all stars in our galaxy orbit around the center of mass of the Milky Way Galaxy. Stars which are closer to the center take less time to complete one orbit, while stars that are farther from the center take more time to complete one orbit.
So if a straight line is drawn between two stars and the center of the galaxy at one time, millions of years later the star closer to the center of the galaxy will have pulled ahead of the farther star, and so the line will no longer be straight.
Spiral arms also orbit the center of the galaxy. They are regions of higher density interstellar gas and dust, where new stars form. New stars are formed in a wide range of mass and luminosity, including short lived highly luminous stars. So spiral arms contain many might young stars, and bright clusters of young stars, and nebulae that reflect light from young stars, and so they are brighter than the spaces between spiral arms.
Stars generally form in open star clusters. And the older a cluster is, the higher the percentage of its stars which have escaped from the cluster due to gravitational interactions with passing stars. So the star clusters which stars form in gradually dissipate and their stars become spread out over a vast volume of space and orbit the center of the galaxy independently instead of as a group.
Long before any planet of a star can become habitable for humans, that star will have escaped from its birth cluster and orbit the center of the galaxy independently.
The young stars which are part of spiral arms are mixed up with many times their number of older stars that formed millions or billions of years earlier. So the density of stars per cubic volume of space is almost exactly the same within a spiral arm and outside it.
The galactic disc of the Milky Way galaxy is more or less arbitrarily a hundred thousand light years in diameter. The stellar density decreases gradually with increasing distance from the center of the galaxy. And the stellar density also decreases, but much more rapidly, with increasing distance "above" or "below" the central plane of the galactic disc. Thus the galactic disc is often arbitrarily said to be one thousand light years thick and one hundred thousand light years in diameter.
So if humans spread out from Earth settling on naturally habitable planets, they will settle on planets of disc stars, and won't care whether those disc stars are within spiral arms. The region of human settlement will be a spherical area which gradually increases in diameter, until the "top" and "bottom of that sphere reach the ill defined "upper" and "lower" edges of the galactic disc. Then the zone of human colonization will become a flat cylinder bounded on "top" and "bottom" by the "upper" and "lower" limits of the galactic disc, and expanding radially throughout the galactic disc.
Part Two: One Possible Reason to Settle Spiral Arm Stars.
But maybe human colonists won't colonize naturally habitable planets. Maybe some advanced civilization terraformed many planets of young stars in spiral arms to be habitable billions of years before they would naturally become habitable. Maybe all the naturally habitable planets have their own life forms which have evolved there, and only the terraformed planets are considered to be open for colonization.
In that case humans would colonize only young star systems which had been terraformed by the advanced civilization, and so they would spread out colonizing terraformed planets of spiral arm stars instead of planets of the general disc stars which were already taken.
Part Three: A Second Possible Reason to Settle Spiral Arm Stars.
Or maybe humans don't colonize naturally habitable planets or planets terraformed by some advanced alien society, but settle in stars systems that have many small objects suitable for space mining and build artificial space habitats to live in.
The younger a star system is, the higher the concentration of heavy elements will be in that system. The younger a star system is, the less likely it will be to have planets already formed, and the more likely it will be to have billions of small rocky planetesimals which would be much easier to mine than planets.
Thus for a society which builds artificial space habitats very young star systems may be the most desirable. And so such a society might only colonize young spiral arm stars, and spread out along a spiral arm, instead of colonizing disc stars in general, and spreading out in a spherical and later disc shaped volume of space.
[Answer]
It could be that the first interstellar navigators spoke Hawaiian, and they noticed that the language's 200 possible consonant-vowel-vowel (CVV) syllables would neatly divide the thousand-light-year thickness of the Milky Way's [thin disk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_disk) into five-light-year slices. In the galactic plane, they already used a logarithmic spiral coordinate system matching the pitch of the spiral arms. Combining Hawaiian's 40 CV syllables in pairs, they could conveniently divide the coordinate patch containing the Orion Arm into a 1600 × 1600 spiral grid. They could then specify a comfortably sized region of space with a three-[word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)) sector name like *kai-hale-manu*, *lei-papa-hine*, *kui-lima-holo*, *kei-waha-wale*, *hoa-noho-lana*, or *pā-hana-mana*.
As these examples show, sector name "words" were often actual Hawaiian words, and sector names would occasionally be evocative strings of words, or even phrases. This was good, on balance, because it often made sector names easier to say and remember. However, it also had some weird effects. For example, on the very rare occasion that a sector name was mistyped in a document, miscopied from a log, or misheard over a bad audio connection, there was a slight tendency toward errors that mistook nonsense words for sensible ones, ungrammatical phrases for grammatical ones, ugly names for beautiful ones, boring names for funny ones, and scary names for auspicious ones. This affected migration patterns over time. The *w≈´* slice of the disk also took on an air of mystery, since *w≈´* was the only CVV syllable that never occurred in any Hawaiian word.
] |
[Question]
[
Assume you have an inhabited O'Neill or McKendree-style cylindrical habitat or ship designed to move between star systems—[not unlike Rama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama). What are the major advantages and disadvantages of orientations A and B below?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B79mu.png)
Yellow indicates direction of travel and and acceleration. Blue, rotation.
Notes: The length of the journey is irrelevant, and you should take it as given the structure can withstand the stresses associated with rotation, acceleration, etc. The pseudogravity generated by rotation (including any influence from propulsion) should fall within realistic tolerances of plausible Earthlike organisms—say 0.5–2.0 g—as the ship must remain habitable for the duration.
[Answer]
## Option A is the safest long-term orientation
This is because it minimizes the surface area of the cylinder along the direction of travel. Assuming the cylinder is traveling at relativistic speeds i.e. some small % of the speed of light this will be an important consideration because the vessel will almost certainly encounter gas molecules and dust particles etc if not larger objects during its journey.
And the kinetic momentum of those objects will be equal to to their mass (however tiny) multiplied by the velocity of the ship at the time of impact (which is huge).
So if the ship is traveling at say .1 C on a journey to Alpha Centauri and the trip takes about 50 years then for most of that time it will be being bombarded by high energy impacts and will probably need shielding of some kind. I say probably because as far as I am aware we don't have good data yet on the density of the interstellar medium in our local neighborhood.
Point is the shield can be much smaller if it just has to cover one or both ends depending on whether it 'flips' at the deceleration point or possibly has engines at both ends.
[Answer]
### Option A has better engine mounting, and less wear and tear while thrusting.
As another answer has already pointed out A will take impacts onto a smaller surface area - that's a good thing, but there's one other thing to consider - where the engines go and how they are fired for acceleration and deceleration.
Option A you can have an engine at either end. While accelerating or decelerating the engine can be firing constantly, and gravity will remain down and everyone will have an equal force pushing them slightly sideways.
If the ship is designed for constant acceleration, you could build your cylinder interior with a saw-tooth floor such that rotation + acceleration forces always equal the felt "down".
Option A also allows for a single engine - at the mid point of your journey you just need to stop rotation, rotate 180, start rotation, and then fire the original engine again.
Option B, (barring some larger structure in addition to the cylinder) the engine has to be on the curved outside of the cylinder, and can only fire in pulses when the rotation lines up with the direction of travel. You'll only need one engine for accelerating and decelerating, but you're going to have to run it in few second bursts which will not be great for longevity. Also citizens will experience varying forces depending on where they are - they could be jolted up / down, or side to side, which would drive them mad as it would feel like every 90 seconds they'd get hit in the gut. This will probably also loosen every bolt on the ship and trip everyone walking over.
[Answer]
Option B is utterly terrible in almost every regard. It's harder to build, it's less structurally sound, the gyroscopic effects the drum creates will make it into an absolute nightmare to control, and the gravity will begin to fluctuate while you are under acceleration, which will give everybody inside seasickness. The increased frontal crossection is almost an afterthought at that point.
In comparison, option A devoid of nearly all of these issues. The vector of simulated gravity will diverge under the acceleration, but it will do this uniformly across the entirety of the cylinder, making the inside feel more like a conical valley with the bottom towards the engines rather than just a valley, and it's far easier to make this type of layout more structurally sound (It's easier to build a mile-high rotating tower than a mile-long rotating bridge section).
[Answer]
## Layout A can be Hinged to Compensate for Acceleration
While there are a lot of answers so far that say that A is best for things like drag and wair-and-tair, all of those things can be hand-waved away depending on the technology in use, but since this question is about the creation of artificial gravity using a rotating habitat ring, there is one advantage of A that you can not handwave into layout B, and that is the ability to compensate for acceleration.
Layout A can be made to turn your cylinder segments outward during the acceleration portion of your journey so that you retain a consistent downward appartant G at all times. Layout B can not do this; so, acceleration would cause drastic cyclical changes in your appartant G; so, accelerating would feel like the floor is bobbing up and down like a ship on rough seas.
In the below example, your ship is accelerating at 0.6g and the rotation of your cylinder is slowed to 80% of normal and opened up to ~36.9°. This will create a vector sum of 1.0g straight down from the cylinder segments giving you consistent Earth like gravity despite your acceleration... at least, ideally speaking.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3EaV2.png)
As pointed out in comments, there would be a different apparent gravity closer to the hing than at the tips; so, you might really get 1.0g in the middle, 0.5g near the hing and 1.5g at the tips. This still falls into the OP's acceptable range, and more importantly prevents nausea from skewed or bobbing gravity... but is still not really ideal. You could solve this though if your ship can accelerate at 1g, because then you would not need to spin your habitats at all during acceleration, only once you reach a cruising speed.
### An even better layout would be Option C
By using a shorter cylinder with a greater radius, you can minimize the apparent gravity variation between the bow and stern of the cylinder when hinging it at sub 1G accelerations, but the advantages do not stop there. Narrow cylinders create a much sharper gravity gradient than a wider one which would make your feet feel heavier than your head. Moving through a more narrow rotating cylinder can also cause vertigo since things in certain directions that feel straight will look more curved and vice versa. Moving in a narrower cylinder also means that you will feel more lighter or heavier as you walk depending on if you are moving with or against the rotation. So, on many levels, a wider cylinder helps gravity, and your environment feel more normal.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nEqy9.png)
[Answer]
option B has some advantages over A, so as A has some advantages over B.
## impact reduction
as mentioned in another answer frontal projection in the A case is smaller so the number of impacts can be lower than in case B. However if some significant impact happens, something sizeable, like a mass of let's say square meter of the hull, depending on speeds there may be different effects and in case of A it may go through the whole hull, axial-wise, while in B case it may affect only a section of the cylinder, still may be disastrous effects, but a portion of construction to survive can be bigger with the same impact.
But really depends on how protection and detection are done and other factors, if done right then generally A case is preferred.
## acceleration
For acceleration cases, B may be better or may not, depends on tech and other factors, but general tendency holds - accelerating force can be applied to structural elements more evenly(if we have some line of nozzles on the side) while accelerating in A orientation it will have the most stresses at the bottom(engine/acceleration nozzle) which will put restrictions of accelerating rate for given length/mass of construction but lesser forces on top.
That difference can be mitigated by design and technological means, to some extent, but the B case is more freer in terms of length of construction.
Addressing that rotation pulsing regime of work of those engines - they do not have to rotate with the hull at all, so as it may be a perfectly fine mode of operation for some thermonuclear engine, or even be the only mode of operation it works - so depends on tech heavily, but generally is not a problem.
## apparent gravity
it may be more convenient to have changes in "gravity" once some minutes than the constant inclination of that force. Constant inclination can affect tree growth, if acceleration time is long enough for that, and it may have some weird effects when there is no acceleration.
However, changing force periodically over a long period of time may have some unpredictable health effects, so with a slight advantage A wins here, but if the problem is known to have no bad side effects on humans convenience of straight-looking trees may win.
## drag
B will have more drag aka deacceleration forces against the interstellar medium, that's a fundamental one.
**All** in all - A is preferable, most likely, but the difference isn't huge
# Clarifications
it is an offtopic part of the answer, but it seems that my statements brought more misunderstanding even for the smart part of the community, than I have expected it to be.
Hence I kinda forced to put some context and perspective and dive a little bit into space habs design considerations. Not extensively, but it just a big topic by itself.
## Structural stress by acceleration
* what I mention in the main body of the answer seems not apparent, so let try to clarify what's it meant
let's have some rudimentary picture drawing of A and B cases, left is B case, right is A case
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xebjY.png)
in A case we have a typical rocket problem - internal pressure, thin walls, elongation in the direction of acceleration. The most compression force the structure experience is at the bottom where the weight created by acceleration is connected to the acceleration force created by the engine nozzle. or we can say it is a typical skyscraper problem - the bottom has to be stronger as it keeps the weight of everything above.
Case B has a different situation, it indeed is more dynamic, but is a separate question('ll address that too). The hull is loaded by stretching forces - it is internal atmosphere pressure, it is weight created by the rotation of that volume - all the soil, all the materials used so as humans try to escape and fly away, by ripping hull apart and one of the things holding it together is the tensile strength of the hull. But tearing apart I mean stretching hull construction until it breaks - direction and orientation of stress forces are important here.
engine working in the B case works against those created forces which would like to rip the hull apart. So in some sense(not so simple) but there is the reduction of those forces along the line of acceleration (on both sides of the hull next to the engine and on the opposite side). However, of course, it has a price and we have deformation and other changes including stress forces - in general, the situation gets less symmetrical.
### here we have to touch 101 of interstellar with no FTL
* really guys, u have to put less magic in your questions, because u lose touch with reality, robbing yourself of the context and intricate details which as classics say is greater than a typical imagination.
Let's say we have a thermonuclear engine, exhaust 0.1c, target speed 0.9c. Applying rocket equation and ignoring relativistic effects which aren't that big here we get a picture:
* fuel to construction ratio is 22000:1 (deacceleration done by magic, not included)
* with 8.5m/ss we reach the target speed in about a year, so less than about 25% of our total travel time for the closest possible target.
if the target speed 0.1c(i know many like that number) then:
* fuel to construction ratio is 2.7:1 (deacceleration done by magic, not included)
* acceleration at 25% travel time - 0.1 m/ss, travel time close to 40 years to the closes target.
So accelerations of 0.01-1g cover pretty much every target speed which is practical.
And surprise surprise 0.01g is enough for all of those who do not see any practicality in interstellar speeds above 0.1c
## Structural stress by acceleration, strikes back again
in case of A, and acceleration 0.01g the length of a cylinder is limited(if we take modern skyscraper as a somewhat lazy reference) by 100km, and it scales linearly, so 0.1g it is 10km, 1g it is around 1km
in the case of B, it is more tricky, but the **first thing to notice** that even 1g acceleration, forces from the engine comparable to the forces which already act on the hull structure and sort of (if we smear average it over the hull, which may or may not be the case by design, later about that) does not exceed them, and somewhat even counteracts them in some nonsymmetrical way.
So if your diameter of habitat is 20km as an example, u still have the ways to make all that work under 1g, in the respect to the structural integrity of the construction. As 1g is kinda too much for A and B. Sure where is the will are the ways, but it all depends on the maturity of technologies and we have the most basic situation here.
And the length of your 20-100km diameter habitat is not limited at all.
**Second thing to notice** is that 0.01g changes of apparent gravity barely even noticeable, it is like to drink a bottle of Kvas and increase your bodily water content by a 0.5-1L
yes, sure, 0.1g is more noticeable, but for closes targets, it does not reduce your travel time that much, if u keep the same target speed in goal, so it applicable not to all case
### but what if u don't, 0.1g and >0.1c target speed
but is we stick to higher acceleration rates and willing to travel faster, mass ratio of fuel to construction:
* 0.1c, 2.7:1, with deacceleration 7.3:1
* 0.2c, 7.4:1, with deacceleration 55:1 <- close to your typical rocket
* 0.3c, 20.1:1, with deacceleration 404:1
* 0.4c, 54.6:1, with deacceleration 2980:1
here we use a fraction of light of speed as speed, but sure habitat as the space ship is good because u can use basically any speed even much lower than those, but then a difference between A and B is negligible or not existing, and one can use accelerations way bellow 0.01g.
So even with a 2.7(7.3) ratio, we have to think about fuel which we carry to propel the construction - where it is, how we carry it - is it inside of habitat or has it its own separate tank, how we combine all the stuff together, etc. And more so with other ratios, those questions have their solutions.
## design, of a space habitat with the intention to accelerate it.
let's draw again:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Btg50.png)
* Great picture from me, as usual, I'm great, MIT license forever, we live and die for it, no pasaran!
So in some sense, it is your typical A case, in a sense engine and fuel block aren't rotating. There is a gap between it and the rotating space habitat hull we have to close somehow.
* a thing to notice that the engine fuel tank block isn't rotating not for the reasons of engine management problems wear tear and difficulty to pulsate it which are no problems at all(and no I won't dive in it here, we already way off-topic, ask your own separate question about how thermonuclear engines work). reasons are mostly about fuel containment structure, which is an important question considering that even in a low case scenario it 7 times more than the whole habitat structure, with a slight acceleration of the structure in which fuel (H, D, T, He3) are stored can be very lightweight, basically non existing as we can have those things as ice form (beyond Neptune it is okay for hydrogen to be ice) or a liquid with low vapor pressure.
* another thing to notice, engine placement isn't optimal, but again there are more reasons and more questions, and more design considerations - as an example we have ideas about great materials which work superiorly under tension(cnt) and no great materials that do the same with compression(first can be converted into a second, but there are nuances).
So we have a gap to close to accelerate the cylinder, to conduct accelerating force to it and there are ways to do so.
your typical maglev solution is easier to imagine on that scale and with that particular design - but its way too energy-hungry, tech-savvy, and all that
An easier solution would be some air cushion between the fuel block and cylinder, and gas pressure acts on the external shell of a cylinder, evenly distribute the force on it. The principle lays in direction of air bearings.
* again sure there are technical nuances to recapture that air as an obvious one and a lot more. They have their own solutions.
### a bit more realistic design which considers few factors.
That oblivious gap problem emerges mostly because of reduction design, making it simpler than it actually may be.
if u still in the '70s and imagine cylindrical habitat like a plain rotating tin can - u do it wrong. it has to be a more complex structure, so as for benefits a different design may provide, so as a result of necessity to solve problems which are specific to such design.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9nxmq.png)
one of the approaches is to have a multilayer structure, which advantages it may have:
* alleviate stress on the internal hull where humans are, or remove it almost completely. the internal structure is not stressed means, in the first place higher safety of inhabitants and lesser concerns about the degradation of the structure. it allows having a deeper soil, where u need it as an example(for tree and forests as an example).
* it also removes or eases constraints on the diameter of a structure so do take your 15km sky with you, which looks and feels like home.
Compensation is done by the pressure of gases which are in the volume where intermediate layers are placed. But we get friction of the hull and that surrounding air and if it gets supersonic it may be not the best thing to have. And for that, we have those intermediate layers, which also are shells. they are not necessarily massive or robust, something on a lower side, just to get the job done - which is to separate gas volumes and have certain, defined by design, differences in speeds of shells, keep it subsonic to whatever value is good. (layers are not needed, but it is a more advanced approach, or less)
How they don't rub each other or collide? yeah, imagine an airplane(this thing with wings) kind there are ways to keep those shells separate - more strictly it gets back to air- and hydrodynamic bearings.
*Most* of the structural load bears the last shell - external hull, which by the magic of that layered design can have zero(0) angular velocity. But at the same time, it is the most pressurized can and has to be the most strong out of all those layers. But what advantages it gives:
* the part of the construction which holds things together, does not rotate and thus isn't affected by centrifugal effects, and its mass brings no additional requirements to the strength of the construction. Meaning as it does not rotate there are no additional forces we have to consider because of its mass.
or we can formulate it differently - there is no limit on the mass of the external shell. it can be as massive as a planet, or km's tick - and more massive a bigger internal volume habitat it can hold together. So it can be as tick as needed.
in a sense, it is the opposite situation and one closer to the reality than when we look at the guys who imagine them being able to burrow a hole in an asteroid and rotate it to make habitat from it and for some magical reason it does not fly apart by what is in essence greatly exceeding The Roche limit for the body. The shell does not rotate and it stays put.
* another good thing about not rotating shell is the ability to put some loose layer on top of it, which won't fly away, but at the same time serves as a protective layer for all kinds of things, like laser rail gun projectiles ... uuups sorry, that's a different subject, like it protects against meteorites particles radiation, drunk rocket drivers, etc. And being in a loose state it does not mind that mich being bombarded periodically, maintenance is a low effort thing, etc.
and in the case of accelerating space hab, it is where your engines press and where(maybe) your fuel is and the shielding from enormous fusion reaction happening next to u, which effects dwarfs any other effect like space radiation or radiation from the collision with interstellar medium - if we talk about 0.1g as an example, so honestly the same with 0.01g I guess. This can be solved but then it requires a different approach to your engine attachment.
+ I'm especially amused with the comments like at A case one end we will have shielding compartment etc - guys u are delusional, next to the end of cylinder unknown amounts of Kuskina mother happens per second, to propel the massive thing, and u think 10km apart from the place is a safe place? And if not, do u really think it much stable to accelerate the stick in A case(but that will be a separate matter). The way I drew it also isn't much better, but there is more flexibility, not necessarily by much, but still.
there are other advantages but enough about that for now? more space habitat question for wb, I guess.
## Stability
Some mention stability and it is indeed an interesting question, and have to start from the very beginning - O'Neill cylinder is not stable, to begin with.
There 2 videos to illustrate:
[Rotating Solid Bodies in Microgravity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPMjcN-sBJ4)
[Dancing T-handle in zero-g, HD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM)
while all life happens at a pace habitat masses are moving inside of it, stresses change, minuscule bending happening, etc and even if it may be okay for a year or many years if we consider it over longer periods of time it is problem to be solved p reactive propulsion is one of the ways, multilayer structure another one out of many smart solutions we can come by.
To grasp instability of rotating rod it is not necessary to go to iss, it is a widely known problem in the machining of shafts, to which attention has to be paid.
So if someone imagines that pushing A case means more stability, it is not correct - a slight displacement on a different end for a structure that is rotating in one direction and being accelerated at the same time - is a first step for the whole construction to go haywire (it can compensate itself, but it depends on own frequencies and a lot of things) and if turning point conditions are missed, u can't do anything to save the situation - cutting down engine won't help, too late rotating forces already work on making it go out of control. u tilt engine - u do it even worse to the stick - the thing starting to wobble will be a best-case scenario.
A space habitat on the scale when it meaningful to call it a colony can't be considered a rigid body.
## There is no other way but **B** *(ed: not so fast boy)*
Diving a little bit in some specifics of certain direction or specific design family of habitats - it is possible to see that for those there are no other ways but to be oriented in **B** orientation. And it does not matter how big the disadvantages or advantages of **A** are, it is the only way for that design to go - if we push the throttle a little.
it does not mean there aren't other designs and approaches which can't benefit from A, but I hope this clarifying section shows that there are designs that have their advantages to be built that way, on their own, fulfilling the space habitats function and which would prefer **B** case.
## There is no other way but **A** (*not so fast boy*)
After extensive consultations with our space hab design engineer [@John](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29409/john) and him investigating papers on motion sickness (comment section for links and refs) it became apparent that even if **B** case may have some advantages from a structural perspective(so as problems), it has some disadvantages for human content of the space habitat. As a vector of apparent gravity will oscillate around a vertical axis, and it causing some unwanted consequences, like motion sickness, because the threshold is quite low, ~0.007 m/ss.
So people have to adapt, but it is not known which other consequences it may have to humans living 24.7.365 in such conditions. Have seen an infant living on a yacht in Atlantics, just recently on yt, seems doing fine enough, so as there are some historical tribes which live on floating means, so as there are people living half-year at sea, but still, it is a problem which has to be considered, especially on the scale millions or more of different people living in such conditions. 33% of children below age 12, are more sensitive to the problem, for lesser ages it can be as high as half of them. people adapt, but yeah the problem has to be investigated specifically before the **B** case is rated for humans.
* *Good news for treemans - they do not have to have wind for their branches to grow healthy and strong, maybe.*
So **B** case has problems as well.
# There is no other way but **A** or **B**
The full circle here and we back at more moderate statement **A** and **B** have their pros and cons. And it is a matter of design decisions - which problems do you choose to negate and which you choose to live with. either way, no matter the choice there will be a price to pay for the decisions.
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# Option C: it travels in whatever orientation it happened to be in already
This option will make the most sense for "short" trips (i.e. within a solar system) at low acceleration, i.e. much less than 1g. (Such a trip may of course still take many decades.)
In such a case it probably doesn't make sense to reorient the cylinder. It's an extremely large rotating object, and reorienting it means fighting against gyroscopic forces, and must be done extremely slowly to avoid generating weird Coriolis forces inside. On the other hand, if the thrust is low enough then you can probably use directional thrusters to accelerate it in any direction without reorienting the whole structure. The thrust needs to be low in order for the structure to take the load, so journeys will be long, but if there's a self-sufficient civilisation living inside it that probably doesn't matter all that much.
For travel between the stars you'd probably want to use as high an acceleration as possible. In that case you'd almost certainly want to build it so that it can take compressive loads along its axis, and reorient it to position 'A'.
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During the transit between stars, the only difference is the view. As far as rotation of the ship is concerned, the travel is not going to make any difference whatever. It only changes what stars you will see out the windows, if you have any windows. Other than that you literally will not be able to tell the difference.
Keeping Rama in mind, in the book it did a gravity well maneuver near our sun. If such an operation was performed near a very dense object (neutron star for example) then tides might be important. You might need to orient the ship so the tides affect it in the direction causing the least problems. That will depend on internal arrangements.
The biggest deal is likely to be the direction of thrust. If the ship has to point "this way" to thrust "this way" (like a rocket typically has to) then you need to orient the ship that way when you want to maneuver. Only matters when you are actually thrusting.
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If nuclear powered engines are used Option A is better, safer and easier because the engine can be at one end of the cylinder and the crew quarters and stations at the other end. With this option the crew would get less exposure to radiation from the engines than they would with Option B.
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As in The Expanse, option A could be used like a tall building. When accelerating, this means that gravity is created in the correct direction. The ship can then be flipped and decelerate to move 'downwards' to the passengers and keep that same gravity.
The spinning would be a major problem for option B because you're accelerating in a changing direction from the perspective of the passengers - if they stay in one place, they are still being 'pushed' to the edges, while also being pushed opposite to the direction of acceleration, which would cause a variable force, not ideal.
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Simply, during the journey there will be no difference whatever. How could there be?
If yourn is a planetary craft, designed to land - and perhaps take off again - then the orientation on approach could be crucial.
If it's a purely inter-planetary craft, designed for travel - ignoring launch or landing - please explain what difference orientation might make?
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**Option B has advantages in radiation shielding/management.**
When flying in orientation B, the angle can be selected so that the one end always points towards the Sun regardless of flight path. This end can then be covered with a thick radiation blocker which keeps the rest of the structure in it's "shadow". By doing this, the radiation shielding doesn't need to cover the entire circumstance of the tube and you can have solar panels or thermal management systems which are always exposed to the Sun. Furthermore, it would allow you to do closer flybys to stars and visit inner planets without melting.
**Edit: Ya'll seem to think that I'm saying option B is better in every way. *I'm not*. I'm simply stating that there are potential advantages of option B, not that they outweigh those of A. Jeez.**
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Various forms of magic exist, and they are used in different ways for different effects. One involves scribing runes onto an object to provide it with magical properties. This allows for enhancing these objects in ways that would not normally be possible. A sword that lights on fire for example, or a ring that places a protective barrier around the wearer when activated. These runes were infused with their own power when they were created, with a range of qualities. Some are made to last for long periods of time, while others fade away after a certain amount of uses, in which case they would have to be reapplied or replaced completely. In essence, they are like batteries that last for a certain duration, and lose power with use.
This extends to magic clothing, specifically made from the materials of animals. Dragon boots and handbags made from creatures can be outfitted with runes to enhance their effects. A handbag that can hold more than it should naturally, or can withstand certain conditions or hold particularly powerful magic artifacts without disintegrating. Entire clothing lines have been built that focus on this use of rune magic.
However, the skin of living things is not suitable for runes. Individuals wishing to power themselves up or give themselves other properties will be disappointed, because living skin is not a good conductor for magic. This sounds like a contradiction.
Why would this be the case?
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I think the best explanation would be somewhere in the area of autoimmune reaction. Fundamentally, when you enchant something, you change it. In the case of non-living things it wouldn't matter, and there is not much difference whether it is non-organic or organic.
When you try to apply this fundamental change to the part of the living organism, it stops being recognised as a part of itself. Best comparison to the effect of a runic enchantment on the skin would be a failed skin graft at the very least. Inflammation, allergic reactions, the patch of the skin with the runes falling of - that will be the best case scenario. In case of more widely applied runes it would, most likely, result in the death of the subject from toxins.
That means that it can be done in a pinch, for a temporary advantage, but the price of such self-mutilation is too high. Alternatively, it can be used as a particularly gruesome punishment.
Additionally, it means that you would be able to do enchantment on the parts of the organism that are not connected by nerve tissue and blood vessels. Nails, claws and horns on animals, perhaps teeth? Hair would qualify, although I'm at loss how you would be able to make magic patterns on something so thin.
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The body’s natural flow of Chi/life force/spirit energy precludes the addition of further magical effects, somewhat like it being very difficult to build buildings in flowing streams. Any artificial rune will either fail to take or, possibly, disrupt the flow of Chi (with awful side-effects).
This does mean corpses can be rune-ified, as they have no chi.
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## Animal Material is Magically Processed
One explanation is the animal material needs to be processed in order to make it suitable to be inscribed by a rune, much like how hide is processed to make it into leather. You would have a hard time making boots or handbags out of raw, unprocessed animal hide. The hide may be too weak or too flexible or too uneven or an incorrect shape to be used straight off the animal. In order to make it more useable, animal hide is tanned and processed to make it easier to work with.
In a similar sense, animal material needs to undergo a magical processing, enhancing the material to allow magic to flow through it more easily. For an analogy, think of ice and water, ice being the unprocessed material, water being the processed version:
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By processing the material (heating up the ice) the magic of the rune (your hand) can flow through the material more easily (the animal hide). This magical processing can’t be done on living tissue - it is impossible as, by magically processing the material, you are killing it.
Whilst you *might* be able to have runes on your body, the process would be a very grisly one. You’d have to have part of your living skin turned into leather and then magically processed before carving a rune into this dead flesh. Not only would this be extremely impractical, it would be an excruciatingly painful process and possibly could be fatal, causing shock in the person or severely damaging vital organs, nerves or arteries.
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**A rune changes the essence and purpose of the object its inscribed onto.**
This is a property of the magic itself that makes it unsuitable. Each of the inanimate objects has an unchanging essence and purpose - a sword will be a sword forever. Or until it breaks. Changing a sword from "it cuts things" to "it burns and cuts things" is simple matter of slightly altering the mystical definition an object has.
Humans, however, have an ever changing purpose and essence. A woodcutter today can become a soldier tomorrow and later on a general or might retire to become a merchant. Moreover, each person has many purposes at one time, too - the woodcutter could also be a son, a father, a brother, a friend, maybe he also sings in the choir, too.
Living things, and humans in particular, are vastly more complex than a simple inanimate object, hence why magic runes cannot alter them. It's like trying make a lasting inscription with chalk on a flowing river.
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The human skin is impermeable to magic. If it weren't, we'd catch fire whenever we approached a fire magic source, drown whenever we approached a water magic source etc.
Magical creatures such as dragons have skins that allow one type of mana to pass through, but not all kinds of mana.
Humans, being humans, cannot be trusted to handle magic safely. They have therefore naturally eliminated the mana-permeable epidermis genes from the gene pool through the Darwin Awards.
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Generally it's not the case. Wizards (of various flavours) have been using themselves as magic conduits for millennia - whether it's [tattoos](https://www.larskrutak.com/shamanic-skin-the-art-of-magical-tattoos/) or scarring, or even simply using hand gestures that counts as magic being performed using the practitioner's own body.
Wizards have also been enchanting themselves for millennia, symbols tattooed on body parts are commonplace for most genres, even David Blaine had an evil eye drawn on his palm to [ward off interviewers](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/71/7e/dd717eff32aa3e9ef0f16265360692ea.jpg) he didn't like ;)
If you do not want that, the simplest explanation to prevent enchantments on people from working (or lasting long) is water, running water has traditionally an "earthing" effect on magic energies so all the blood in a body can be treated as running water, making enchantments on people very tricky and short-term. Which is why, if you wanted to harm a person, you conjure a fireball and let it hurt them instead.
You can also say that some materials hold enchantments better, to amplify them - such as dragon skin armour - and this is why you spend the effort to enchant *them*, rather than yourself. Same effort expended for greater effect.
Of course, if you have a magically enchanted amulet, you can give it to someone else. Tattoos are awkward to share.
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Several possibilities:
1) The magic is sensitive to temperature. (living) Human skin is at about 34°C. Let's say magic deteriorates somewhere over 30°C. Yes, that means during warm summer days magic-inscribed hides stop being functional. It also means the skin of living snakes or lizards is OK, and inscribing runes on your face during winter might work when outside.
2) In fact, it *is* possible, but the runes have to be inscribed with a specific depth (they are 3-dimensional grooves). While possible, cutting runes into your skin is very unpleasant. And the bleeding fills the runes and stops the magic. When the bleeding stops, healing processes start and destroy the (sensitive) depth profile very soon.
3) Magic is somehow related to electricity, and the runes need non-conductive substrates. Human skin resistance is maybe around 50kΩ, rather high, but still enough to destroy any magic. Side effect: magic stops when the hide gets wet.
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Magic is stored in the crystal structures like those found in [metallic bonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_bonding) and [cation-anion bounds](https://chem.libretexts.org/Ancillary_Materials/Exemplars_and_Case_Studies/Exemplars/Culture/Lattices_and_Unit_Cells_of_Salt) like those salt forms.
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Nuvola_di_elettroni.svg/220px-Nuvola_di_elettroni.svg.png)
[](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_7337/3228/0?Expires=1558394652&Signature=UiX%7Egl9I9aJlN0IAloFag7aoZVOiwi61DBDQinJNOCJ599xSM65F1Wq6NjwzsefZ73CzA7gjnwNjSpV5gZzDqLa%7EVlGn2LJd0xXDMl4xZOk7md8xrJslNoerLlZqTH9XTz8uriVP-uPR8KXFODnXuxLKGmM4yrCAQRVJ-8sDQf4_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA)
These structures can hold magic very well and more perfect the structures are the better the magic storage.
Organic molecules still have structure, but they are much more chaotic than crystal and metal structures.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZWeeS.jpg)
[](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alicja_Menzyk2/publication/324683128/figure/fig1/AS:630443099578368@1527320756553/Structure-of-a-hemoglobin-molecule.png)
Thus magic can´t be retained by materials based on them so easily. As you want to know why living things cause a lot of o trouble, organic molecules in still living things are a lot more active, thus making the magic drain unsustainably high.
Concluding everything metals and crystals hold magic best due to their structure. Dead organic molecules work better because they are less active, thus can retain more magic.
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## Some animal skin has magical properties
The skin of animals, such as dragons, may have magical properties which make it more suitable for inscribing runes onto. Their skin conducts magic in a way that human skin or the skin of many domesticated animals simply don’t.
This is like how certain elements on the periodic table conduct electricity extremely well but others do not. A dragon could theoretically have a rune carved into its skin as it better conducts magic than human skin would. However, i doubt a dragon would be willing to let you start slicing into its flesh.
Other mythical creatures may also have magically conductive skin, you may have guilds of hunters who specifically go out to gather the hides of magical monsters to turn into leather to be inscribed with runes. Or, you may have a “dragon ranch” where dragons are raised simply for their meats and hides.
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# Skin Flexes
Runes requires very precise line and curve work, and must be reproduced *exactly* or they simply don't work. But living skin is constantly growing, and this deforms the skin continually. Whenever the person moves around, the skin moves with them, scrunching up and stretching out constantly. And there isn't anywhere on the human body that's perfectly flat, which most runes require (and the ones that involve tracing lines in 3d space require quite particular geometric shapes).
So the runes simply can't be carved with enough precision to take effect. It just doesn't work. You could maybe, if you were crazy desperate, insert an iron plate just under someone's skin, to hold the skin taut enough to runescribe on it. But without *really good* medical attention, anyone you do that to will die from massive infection in short order.
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<https://youtu.be/ap_mEm8m0HU?t=10>
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> However, the skin of living things is not suitable for runes. Individuals wishing to power themselves up or give themselves other properties will be disappointed, because living skin is not a good conductor for magic. This sounds like a contradiction.
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Perhaps re-frame that a little bit, living skin is too good of a conductor, and therefore will "burn" off any appendage that the runes are inscribed upon. This can allow for very powerful creatures to have runes on their skin, but mere mortals can't have it. You can explain why something like a "magic missile" will cause damage to people on contact. Non-living objects don't normally cause the magic to be used; it takes a living creature to channel the magic. The energy stored in a battery isn't used until it's channeled by something after all, (at least, not a great portion of it anyways).
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# Skin *grows*.
If you're carving a rune into an object, and imbuing that rune with magic power, destroying the rune should also break the enchantment.
While you *can* create scars on your body, even scars are tissue that's regenerating.
When your skin is removed from your body and turned into leather, it no longer regenerates, so it would be suitable for marking with runes just like any other animal.
Even tattoos are not stable - macrophages in your body eat at the pigment in the tattoo, that's why they fade over time.
Depending on your magic system, any rune based enchantment will either quickly fade or completely be broken once the body starts healing itself.
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It would make sense to me that if living skin is used, the magic tries to neutralize it to make it a better conductor for the magic. Some ways to get around this could be specially trained monks, or other things like that, but over all it seems like this could be a easy way to explain it. Tl;dr Dead things conduct magic, live ones don’t.
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What could cause a planet to naturally have **zero** caverns with surface openings apart from small impact hollows in the sides of craters and crevices carved in cliffs?
To be specific, zero large caverns and cave systems with openings on the surface.
*(Subsurface caves could exist. BUT if anyone has an idea on how zero caves on the surface AND below the surface could be possible then please feel free explore that idea as well because the less caves the better)*
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Solid is a relative thing
* No caves in sand
* No caves in water
* No caves in magma
* No (permanent) caves in ice sheet
* No caves in soft soil
* No caves in peat bogs
In short:
* No caves in anything fundamentally unstable
* Only caves where you have surface rock
An old, geologically stable world, where the mountains have eroded down. Land is low lying and either swampy, jungle/forested, desert or coral island, with floating ice caps at both poles.
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I expect the [plains of Pluto](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Surface) doesn’t have any caves※ because the material is plastic on a time scale shorter than geologic time. The “minerals” (carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and chunks of water) flows like tar or silly putty, filling in any voids.
Meanwhile, you avoid processes that create caves. We get limestone caves due to acid and limestone — a planet without those won’t get caves carved by water to this extent. Lava tubes leave caves: make your volcanoes such that they don’t crust over and drain, or always collapse, etc.
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※ Do you count crevasses in glaciers as caves or pits?
IAC they are a transient phenomenon.
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Well most caves are formed by erosion, more specifically by various water related forms of erosion. So the easiest way to have a planet with no caves what so ever is to have a planet that has no water.
No water means no sedimentary rock in the first place (no life to die and be compressed) and no means by which that rock could be dissolved and eroded.
There are no oceans to form sea caves and coastal erosion, no rivers to carve out canyons and caves, no ice to crack rocks and form caves.
The only remaining forces likely to form caves are plate tectonics and volcanic activity. You might get Lava tubes and primary caves but they would be far less common.
Of course, as far as telling a story set on such a planet is concerned you would probably struggle as it would likely be a completely barren, lifeless rock; which may not be what you are looking for.
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Cover the planet with a liquid, e.g water or lava (at the right pressure and temperature). Any caverns will be below the liquid, i.e. below the surface.
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Would I be wrong to say that all "large caverns and cave systems" are formed in limestone?
I may be wrong but if you pick a famous cavern like Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico) or Lascaux (France), or [Karst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst), they're in limestone.
Now [limetone has a biological origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limestone):
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> Limestone is a sedimentary rock, composed mainly of skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, forams and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).
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So, perhaps a planet which never evolved corals and moluscs, for whatever reason, might do?
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Perhaps some bear species takes it upon themselves to fill the naturally occurring caves so that they're sealed off. Maybe said species finds it useful somehow? Perhaps it's a religious thing for these bears?
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A planet with no mountainous area and even hilly area (littlest altitude possible), and important tidal range (as important as the highest point on the planet).
With the movement of the sea, sand and other light solid will fill all the surface cavern.
Tide could destroy all the cavern in an other way. See the example of [Io](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon)), one of the satellite of Jupiter, the tidal effects are sufficient to move the rocks and all the planet surface. It will destroy all the cavern on and in the planet (but maybe it could create some).
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I believe a planet without tectonic activity would work.
Most of the large caves on earth which aren't man-made are a result of either volcanoes or limestone decay.
Most, although probably not all, volcanoes on earth are created around the tectonic plates. Thus, eliminating those plates could potentially eliminate volcanoes which eliminates volcanic caves.
Limestone caves are a result of the tectonic plates lifting the sea-floor above sea-level and then letting erosion run its course. With no tectonic plates, there's no lifting which means no erosion of the limestone to create caves.
This does leave open the possibility of caves under water, but I think it covers the "dry" planet surface.
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If there was never anything liquid on the surface, you would never get caves. No water = No caves. Caves can still form an most rocks as long as there is liquid water and a crack and somewhere for the water to flow to. Another thing is magma will create caves (think lava tubes) after it has flowed and hardened the surrounding rock the remaining liquid drains and you get caves.
Ice can also create caves, if you got rid of all the liquid on a planet I think its safe to say you'd get zero caves.
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I am back in a 'shrinking/being small is neato' phase, so I have been thinking about things at small scale.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3csCn.png)
Anyway, my question is what would be the best choice of weaponry for a 1 inch tall man that can be held or ported by a person in general, to fell a 'giant'/6 foot man(or woman if you had so liked)?
Of course, here is some clarification context:
1. Any real/realistic(no fictional weapons) weapon type such as explosives, guns, or bladed weapons are allowed as long as an average 6 foot tall (shrunken)man can wield and lug it around.
2. The target is asleep/unaware of his assassin's presence.
3. The shrunken/small man is unaffected by the negative or positive ramifications of being that small. He has the same proportional strength and speed as when he was 6 feet tall. The weapon(s) also still works despite being shrunk.
So what would be the wisest weapon to use to slay the 'giant'?
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**A poisoned needle**
You only need to puncture the skin of your victim in order to deliver enough of the humanity's best poison to kill the target. And since a mosquito is a lot smaller than one inch and still does penetrate the skin, a scaled down human can do that too. Finally, the assassin does not need to apply their own force to the needle, just simulate that a mosquito has just landed on an open skin, and then the person would whack self there, hitting the poised needle. There, target eliminated.
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By this, I think you're saying to ignore the square-cube scaling laws. That is, the small person does not have the high strength-to-weight ratio that a creature his size would normally have; their strength-to-weight ratio is the same as that of a full-size person. If a full size person can just barely carry a load, then the little person can just barely carry the same load scaled down to their dimensions. This is the same as saying that their muscle tissue is weaker per cross sectional area than a full-size human's.
So, if they can just barely carry around a 100 kg object at 6 ft (182.9cm) tall, they can just barely carry around the proportionally shrunken object when they're 1 inch (2.54 cm) tall. The proportionally shrunken object weighs (2.54 / 182.9)^3 \* 100 kg = 0.27 grams.
Also suppose they weigh roughly 0.27 grams themselves, based on 100kg weight for a muscular six-foot tall soldier.
This means they're a lot weaker than an insect of similar size.
With regard to mobility, say that when full size they could jump 0.5m, which is a good vertical jump. When shrunk therefore they can jump 0.7cm. They can't easily climb objects the way insects can.
* Explosives? Possible, if circumstances are perfect. 0.27 grams of TNT will release 1130 J, a potentially fatal amount of energy if directed properly. It would be like a moderately large firework. Perhaps if they could glue the explosive to the target's temple before running away and detonating it, it would be fatal. However, climbing up to the target's temple while carrying their own body weight in explosive would be an impossible task if the target is standing up. This could only be possibly effective if the target is lying down. ("wedging" the explosive underneath is not possible with only 0.27 grams-weight of force).
* A knife? No. 0.27 grams-weight of force is completely insufficient to drive a scalpel through skin.
* Poison? Possible. 30 milligrams of tetrodotoxin is a potentially lethal dose if ingested, and to the shrunken person this would be like a 10kg weight, a bit heavy but easily carried. The difficulty would be administering it. Climbing the target's coffee cup would be a monumental task, probably not possible with a smooth cup, to say nothing of getting on the table to begin with. They cannot inject the poison, because they do not have the strength to penetrate skin with a needle. Perhaps they could use a small explosive charge to drive the poison under the skin of the victim's ankle. This would, of course, be a suicide mission, since the poison wouldn't work instantly, and the little person is too slow to escape retaliation.
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Now, I think it *might* be possible for your tiny murderer to take down a regular sized human with bladed weapons, but it isn't going to be very nice. You're gonna be needing a [rebreather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather), some hooks, some sharp cutting instruments, maybe a crowbar and a willingness to crawl into confined, hot, slimy spaces. And then you're going inflict traumatic brain surgery, by going in through the nose whilst the victim is sleeping. It's is going to take some time, the nose-owner is going to be trying hard to get you out, and it is possible they might be able to get surgical assistance before you actually inflict enough damage to kill them promptly, but it remains *possible*.
I can think of a couple of better options though.
First is poison. Injecting the poison is largely impractical because skin is thick and tough and you'll have a job driving a mini-hydrodermic through it, but there's some scope for ingested stuff if you can get it into the victim's food or drink. The right kind of chemicals can also work if instilled into the eyes, but perhaps the most straightforward approach would be to use a powerful neurotoxin that can seep through skin.
Chemical weapons like [VX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)) are perhaps the best known example of such a thing. Only a few tens of milligrams of the stuff can kill an adult human, it is effective on skin contact, and protecting the assassin from the stuff requires relatively well-established protocols and fairly easily available protective equipment. Squirt some of the nerve agent into the victim's ears, nose, eyes or mouth for best effect (but even an exposed ankle or toe *might* be enough), leave promptly. They might never notice.
Other things like [ricin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin), [botulinium toxin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin), radiotoxins like [polonium-210](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium-210) and perhaps some biological weapons are even more dangerous but present significant difficulties when administering the stuff, and protecting your assassin from their dangerous effects. Wearing a hazmat suit and wielding a squirt-gun with some low-vapor-pressure neurotoxin seems much safer and more reliable.
The second is demolition.
You can't really treat something that's 72 times taller than you as an opponent you're going to fight with... its a large, complex, pretty solid structure that can nonetheless be damaged in some critical areas. Humans have been making military and industrial demolition charges using shaped exposives for decades now, mostly for use against tough things like rock, reinforced concrete or metal. A human target, being made largely of meat, seems likely to be easier to attack this way.
Consider something like the [M150](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m150.htm) "Penetrating Augmented Munition", intended to be a device that can be deployed by a single soldier capable of disabling a hard target. With a bit of careful design, a shrunken shaped charge might be made that's capable of being attached to the right spot on the scalp of the target and blasting through to the brain stem. Maybe several such charges would be needed to be certain, but a team working together could be fairly certain of killing a target with the right demolition charges.
Or, as Glen Yates said in the comments above, just nuke your way to success. You've already extended the middle finger of authorial fiat to the laws of physics, so of *course* your mini-nuke will work as expected. A shrunken Davy Crockett might just be powerful enough, with the scaled yield of 56g of TNT, the same as a hand grenade. For a bigger punch, the [Special Atomic Demolitions Munition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition) could deliver 10-1000 tonnes of TNT-equivalent in a single-person-portable form, and even when scaled down that's the equivalent of a couple of kilos of regular-scale TNT... much more than enough to kill a human. In either case, the amount of prompt radiation released by the nuclear reaction should be enough to inflict lethal damage to a nearby human even if the blast didn't. Even larger warheads can be brought in and still potentially deployed by a single person, eg. [W82](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W82), etc. As luck would have it, there was another question about scaled nuclear weapons recently, so you can [read my answer to that one](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/245404/62341), if you were interested, though it wasn't concerned with human-portable devices.
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Based on your requirements - you are realistically limited to ingested poisons.
Your 1 inch human lacks the ability to puncture the skin using any bladed weapons - and any projectile weapons would have a projectile so light and tiny, it wouldn't be able to do any critical damage.
Since you can't reliably puncture the skin, Venoms and Toxins are out, which leads to ingested poison. Something like Cyanide or similar that can be Lethal in small amounts.
Even then, it's debatable whether our 1 inch human could carry enough poison to reliably kill a human.
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In Dungeons & Dragons, the sprites (very small flying people) have weapons that do only 1 damage (due to their diminutive size), but they use poison on them to do more damage. This would probably be your best bet here.
I would suggest using the poison of a poison dart frog, perhaps dripped from a vial or stabbed with a dagger-like weapon. It is a good choice because even small doses ─ as small as one *micro*gram, according to [sciencedirect.com](https://sciencedirect.com) ─ can cause muscle paralysis/convulsions or death. Your theoretical inch-tall person, being around 1/70th the size of a human, thus has 1/343,000 the muscular capacity of humans (because muscles are three-dimensional), and could (with work) carry over 100,000 micrograms of things, easily allowing enough to drip the poison on the person.
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A [rocket-propelled grenade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade) with a [batrachotoxin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batrachotoxin)- [botulotoxin](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16168317/)- or something-injection warhead should do the trick. The injection warhead would have to be custom-designed, but well within physical laws.
Best used from a vicinity of a mouse hole for bonus to own survival.
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If we're operating in the realms of realism as much as possible, the best way might actually be to use something like fentanyl, or a derivative of it.
It's something that you could realistically find in just about any town or city simple by looking in the obvious places, and it only takes a very small amount of it to render someone unconscious, or even dead.
It can be injected, put in food or drink, or even administered directly such as through the ear or eyes.
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Since it's sci-fi, I'd go **antimatter**.
I gram of antimatter, is "like one nuclear bomb".
Our 1-inch guy can only carry **1/4 gram of anything**, so, he can in theory have an antimatter bomb that is powerful enough to easily kill one human, or say small building.
How he delivers it, I have no idea. He's far to weak to throw, climb, etc.
I guess, some sort of micro-mine-like device, a timed bomb. He attaches it and runs.
Again, **the ONLY thing (in the universe) with any power at the scale of a tenth of a gram**, is anti-matter.
AIM - Antimatter inch man!
Maybe there's some sort of plot twist where indeed he himself "is made of" antimatter. In some unimaginable way, he does NOT just immediately self-destruct. But when he say spits, pees or defecates, in some way ("quantum!") enough time passes for him to clear the area, and then the left-behind item becomes un-encased (or whatever) and there's a matter-anti-matter annihilation event - destroying the enemy.
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# If you aren't using poison
## High explosives
Insert into ear cavity. Or put on temples. Etc
## A sharpened telescopic pole
Insert up nostril or into ear of sleeping victim.
## Electricity
This will take a little setup, but while the victim is asleep, wire mains electricity to them. A circuit without an RCD, or a cable on a 2 pin plug will be required.
## Hypersonic rocket
This basically becomes a conventional bullet.
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## Miniature sized self inflating raft
Assuming the target is asleep, wait until their mouth is open, and then drop into their throat and deploy the self-inflating raft. This will clog their airway and unless someone is nearby to perform a tracheotomy or the Heimlich maneuver this should be relatively effective. As an added bonus, after the target has expired, the raft can be deflated and removed, leaving little evidence of the cause of death (aside from asphyxiation).
Seriously though, poison is probably the right answer as basically everyone else has pointed out.
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The most obvious response would be "poison", but that may be exactly the reason to not use poison. If it's so obvious, then it won't be nearly so interesting. So there are a few other options.
As a tiny person, they actually have a distinct advantage. One major reason we cannot make objects any sharper than a fine razor is because we are big and our machines are big. A tiny person with a tiny file could easily make something sharper than a razor, so much more if they have a proper whetstone.
A blade this sharp would easily open softer flesh, and being such a small, thin blade, it would be almost painless. Moreover, the tiny person may even be able to see the smaller nerves, so they could avoid startling the giant.
Option 2 is infection of bacteria, fungi, or parasites. Note that this is a slower, more subtle approach.
To a person 1 inch tall, a standard 2-micrometer germ will look about 1/7th of a millimeter. Now that might be tiny, but it's big enough for a tiny person to collect the microorganisms on a tiny razorblade and deposit them wherever needed.
Option 3 is fireworks. Readily available, and often far too powerful. It only takes 1 well-placed spark to set it off, and if a tightly held firecracker can take off your hand, what will it do up your nose or down your throat?
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I've been wanting to develop a sort of post apocalyptic setting where dinosaurs rule the land and humanity is confined to underground bunkers. I've come up with ideas of events where dinosaurs are resurrected, but I don't have a very good idea of what would happen that would cause humanity to become a shell of itself.
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### **All of them, and more**
Nuclear winter (and summer), global warming and sea level rise, deadly pandemics.
And why not a combination of these previous responses, plus eschatological sects promoting mass murders and mass suicides, the collapse of modern national states and the rise of a new caste of superhumans (you can call them moguls, oligarchs, billionaires, rich people, whatever) that control the few remaining resources while continuing a project to cleanse the lower castes?
Yuval Harari mentions this in *Homo Deus*, for example:
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> *"The birth rate is falling in technologically advanced countries, such as Japan and South Korea, where prodigious efforts are being made to raise the level of education of fewer and fewer children - from whom more and more are expected. like India, Brazil and Nigeria compete with Japan? These countries look like a very long train. The elites in the first class cars enjoy health care, education and income levels on par with those of the most developed nations in the world However, the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens who overcrowd third-class carriages still suffer from widespread disease, ignorance and poverty. What would Indian, Brazilian and Nigerian elites prefer to do in the next century? Invest in solving the problems of hundreds of millions of poor or raising the level of a few million rich? Unlike what happened in the 20th century, when the elite participated in the solution of the problems of the poor because they were militarily and economically vital, in the 21st century the most effective (if more brutal) strategy may be to leave useless third-class coaches behind and move forward with only first class. To compete with Japan, Brazil may need a few upgraded superhumans far more than millions of healthy ordinary workers."*
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It's a perfect storm, cornering humanity.
A dictator with delusions of grandeur launches a nuclear attack and has his country wrecked by the others. His most passionate followers declare revenge, with terrorist attacks with biological and chemical weapons against these others. The chemical and biological agents get out of control, spread easily and force the population to isolate themselves.
Parallel to this, we have a worsening in the effects of climate change. Events that we call extremes today become the norm and others off the scale are recorded. Mass displacements of climate refugees are seen all over the world, and due to fears of chemical or biological contamination they are not accepted anywhere, many slaughtered up to miles before reaching any fence.
Many of these settlements become victims of their own security forces, others do not adequately protect themselves and are decimated by famine or pestilence. Isolated, they become fertile ground for the formation of sects in which they believe they are the last inhabitants, degenerating to apocalyptic ideas.
Somewhere in the wild on Earth, or perhaps in space (Elysium?), the 1% of humanity (or less) that has energy, good food, proper planning, accumulated knowledge and resources to enjoy good health, has kept quiet, for enough years until the other 99% will either end up on their own, or there will be so few left that wipe out them won't bring any remorse to their sensibilities.
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As uninspired as it might seem, what you're looking for might be as simple as...
# Rapid Global Warming
And it's not just because it's a hot button issue. The heyday of the dinosaurs, the Cretaceous, was also one of the hotter periods Earth has seen. They needed this heat to thrive. We're talking 20 degrees above the present day.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/G5yA3.png)
As you might have guessed, high temperatures correlate with high sea levels. Glaciation was reduced, and sea levels were 200m+ above present. This isn't just the coastal cities, this is most currently inhabited land, except for mountains and high-elevation regions.
And it takes a lot of good land to sustain an 8-billion population. If the sea levels rise within a few years, there won't be enough time to redevelop and resettle to new lands, while maintaining extensive mining, farming, and manufacturing necessary for the process.
To show just how big a deal a sea level rise in the hundreds of meters can be, here is a map of North America 90 million years ago. The changes weren't just due to the lowering sea levels, but they played a major part.
A present-day flood map can be [seen online](https://www.floodmap.net/?ll=46.800059,-82.477828&z=3&e=350), though note that erosion and subsidence will also make a difference.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/04RU3.png)
What could cause such a major and rapid warming?
Current CO2-based AGW *is not that rapid*. Even if the worst predictions come true, it can still provide multiple generations' time to adapt and migrate. That's not likely to give a 90% population loss rate. Also, it's not clear if it can go as far.
A more catastrophic warming event could be caused by a global nuclear war. At first, such a war produces global cooling, a "[nuclear winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Nuclear_summer)". Carbon particles will block much of the sunlight for multiple years, enough for most plants to die.
It's not clear what happens next. But one major theory predicts a nuclear summer. As the formerly living matter decays, it bursts atmospheric methane to higher levels than ever. Once the carbon black falls out, Earth will become a massive greenhouse - the perfect conditions for dinosaurs to return.
If you don't want it man-made, a series of massive volcanic eruptions can achieve the same result. But the scale has to be massive, 1000 [Krakatoa eruptions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa) within a year. Multiple mid-size asteroids could cause that.
The war takes care of how the humans die out. It also justifies the massive effort for bunker construction, if the war was expected or occurred in multiple stages.
A warmer climate creates perfect conditions for the dinosaurs to thrive. Bringing them back... well, that one you have to invent on your own, and it seems like you already have. Given a few million years, reptiles might even evolve on their own.
P.S. You might want to scale that 90% well up, as mentioned in the comments. 10% of the current human population is still a lot. Below is the distribution of all living matter on Earth, measured in tons of carbon:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l24Jg.png)
Humans, livestock, wild mammals and birds comprise almost all macrofauna on dry land. The rest is marine life or microfauna. Currently, humans outweigh all other mammals and birds about 8:1. It becomes 20:1 if livestock is counted alongside humans.
That's total dominance, to the point that everything but humans is only a small niche, surviving in the few reserves left to them. Furthermore, much of that surviving wildlife is in Amazon, Siberia and Alaska, regions with limited human presence. In mostly-inhabited lands, the ratio is closer to 100:1 in favor of humans.
To make humanity a minority species, you would need a reduction by a factor of about 100. That would leave humans as apex predators, able to partially survive by hunting, if the rest of the biomass compensates, since mass conversion with predation is only about 1:10. This still leaves no room for other predators at the same level. For humans to lose their status as *the* global apex predator, a factor of 1000 would be called for.
8 million humans globally surviving in underground facilities of various quality (some proper bunkers, others might be just settled caves) is on the higher end of plausible. This number could realistically feed from surface sources without becoming so significant as to deplete them.
A 1000-fold reduction would still leave 10k+ sized settlements, which is easily above the thresholds for both genetic diversity and cultural continuity. The society would simplify to medieval levels, but stay robust. If you want it darker, a 10,000-fold reduction would drop most cities to <1k, bringing society to the brink of survival.
Basically, you need to decide where you want humanity to be on this scale:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YU04H.png)
I have extended the scale a bit with two unnamed notches.
Currently, humans are a solid "Least Concern", and would stay there even if cut 10-fold. So I placed it an extra notch to the right. Very approximately, every 10x reduction will move humanity one notch to the left.
At some point, genetic diversity would fall below what is believed to be sustainable. As for how to define "Extinct in the Wild" (EW) for humans, I think that point comes when humans can no longer build the kind of bunkers they need to survive, essentially becoming captives of their old civilization. For bunker size, 5,000 is considered a solid threshold from which recovery is feasible.
But that is for a population concentrated in roughly one place, or at least multiple settlements that maintain trade relations. Planet-wide, it would be split into sub-populations. Interconnected communities reaching 8k or larger would have good chance for recovery, and 200 to 5k would paint a bleaker but sustainable picture.
So for a planetary scale, given 100-1000 separate communities, your story seems to be around the level of Endangered (99.99%) if it's a tale of decline, or Vulnerable (99.9%) for a brighter outlook for recovery.
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# Gamma Ray Burst
Conveniently, 90% of people live in the northern hemisphere, so a catastrophic interstellar event could plausibly devastate half the world by being aimed directly at the earth in line with the axis of rotation, and ‘north’ of the planet. I propose a gamma ray burst, which are conveniently high energy, but can be stopped by our dense terrestrial surface, thus protecting the southern hemisphere.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/odjy7.jpg)
Admittedly, a GRB that catastrophically close would also cause a lot of additional issues in terms of depleting our atmosphere, but with some fine tuning, there’s a plausible initial death count so that the knock-on effects of apocalypse take you to 10% survivors.
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# Virus
A very contagious and deadly virus could very easily wipe out most of the human population. Similar things have happened before, after all:
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> In the Late Middle Ages Europe experienced the deadliest disease outbreak in history when the Black Death, the infamous pandemic of bubonic plague, hit in 1347, killing one-third of the European human population. -- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague#History)
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(Bubonic plague was caused by bacteria, not a virus.)
To make the virus most effective:
* make it airborne
* give it a long delay between when it is contracted and when symptoms become visible
* make it almost always kill
* make the human population refuse effective medical intervention (such as vaccines)
Some humans will survive, either because they manage to fight it off, or perhaps they have some kind of helpful genetic mutation that makes them less susceptible. These are your survivors.
This has been done before, in fiction. See [*The Stand*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand), as just one well known example.
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This answer may be too far out there, but please bear with me...
## Women get access to education!
There is a strong inverse correlation between TFR (Total Fertility Rate) and education. That is, the more years of education a woman has, the fewer children she is likely to have over her lifetime (on average). This is why most developed nations have birth rates at lower than replacement (about 2.1). Here is a graph from [Pradhan 2015](https://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data) which strongly illustrates this correlation in three African nations:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0KfYF.png)
The high total TFR for Ethiopia, means the population of Ethiopia is growing! This is nicely illustrated in a [population pyramid](https://www.populationpyramid.net/ethiopia/2020/):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ViOjZ.png)
When women have access to education and birth control, the TFR drops below replacement. This occurs at about 2.1 TFR. A good example of this is South Korea, currently with a birth rate of only 0.92. This population is in decline, as can be seen by its population pyramid:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wOheZ.png)
If all women had access to education, we could expect a worldwide "Great Decline" in population. For birth rates lower than 1, human population could reduce by an order of magnitude in just a few generations.
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ZOMVID-21 has already taken care of global warming as main driver in his awesome answer. If that theme is a little too political for you, there are plenty of similar very realistic scenarios which are both inexorable but flexible enough to give you all the time in the world to spin your story in an enjoyable manner.
## Tipping of the oceans
As of right now, we are not exactly affectionate in our behaviour towards the oceans. A lot of junk is going in there, be it macroplastics, microplastics, raw oil catastrophes, lots and lots of containers going overboard and so on.
At some point we can envision a tipping point where ever larger [Dead Zones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)) develop, i.e. areas low in oxygen. Eventually all oceans will be a global dead zone, and basically turn into a giant swamp of whatever you want to allow in there. To quote that link, "once [oxygen] declines below 0.5 ml O2/liter in a body of water, mass mortality occurs." After this, in your world, the oceans will be a brown ugly mass of deadliness.
If you really want to put the lid on the kettle, invent some process that turns the acidity up a lot, so even touching the water will significantly harm or kill you, and all infrastructure near the coasts will be wiped out as well.
Since oceans produce a [significant amount of worldwide oxygen](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html), this will soon lead to reduced oxygen contents, with a nicely dystopian story-line, where artificial oxygen production becomes a thing; where people have to start housekeeping how much strenuous effort they apply to their work, and so on. You can also have scientists measure a noticeable, unstopping decline, with a natural end-of-life (literally), and unfolding political and socio-ecological dramas, large and small, seeing how suffocating is a particularly unpleasant death.
## Storms
Independently, or together with that, you can imagine that shifts in the atmosphere lead to the development of global storms on an unprecedented level. Eventually, monster storms will form that dwarf any hurricane we know so far by magnitudes, which flatten whole continents - repeatedly. Eventually, the whole world will be a constant zone of high windspeeds that twirl ever around, similar to some of the other planets we know.
Humanity's only choice may be to go sub-terranean, with all the problems ensuing, from how to get light down there for synthesis, over how to dig big cave systems in the first place. This alone will take care of wiping out most of us - it just is not possible to dig fast enough and build up all the infrastructure and food processing in time to save any amount of people.
An alternative solution would be to invent some kind of force field technology which allows cities to be placed inside big bubbles or domes that withstand the pressure. Then you can have eco-terrorists threatening to damage those domes, fascist city-states controlling all entry and exit, and so on and so forth.
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## **Transmissible cancer.**
Cancer is normally not transmissible between members of the same species, however if the population is inbred enough cancer can be transferred between individuals and the body will not recognize the foreign cells as invasive. This is currently what's killing the Tasmanian devil population in Tasmania.
[The thing is](https://www.ashg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/genetic-variation-essay.pdf), [by most species' standards](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity) [humans are pretty inbred](https://bigthink.com/life/humans-are-less-genetically-diverse-than-wheat-what-does-that-mean-for-our-species/). Enough so that we're in the same boat as Tasmanian devils, cheetahs, and walruses, though not enough for 100% successful organ grafts. Which means that in theory, a highly transmissible cancer could arise that spreads through the population like wildfire. Tasmanian devils share theirs through fighting, but other transmissible cancers are known to act as STDs, and there are even some (not fully tested) hypotheses that [cervical](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2550096/) and [prostate](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-27466853#:%7E:text=Prostate%20cancer%20may%20be%20a,prostate%20cancer%20to%20this%20list.) cancer may be sexually transmittable.
However, transmissible cancerns are super rare in humans. They're basically what happens when a cancer cell is so malignant it can spread to other host bodies.
This would play out a lot like the AIDS epidemic but a lot nastier, as it would take years before symptoms showed up and no one would be able to reconstruct who had been affected. Imagine a disease that was guaranteed to kill you eight years after you had been infected, but could only be *detected* after six when the tumor got large enough. And the problem is very little of our existing medication would be of use, because it's designed to either kill bacteria or act as an anti-viral, cancer treatment is comparatively crude because we have a hard time targeting the tumor and not the rest of the body.
## **Gametocidal pollution**
This is one people are actually worried about as the large number of artificial chemicals, synthetic hormones, etc. that people dump in the water . Specifically the body only absorbs a certain percent of most medications and chemicals, the rest get filtered out through the kidneys and go into the water supply. Some of these chemicals include [antidepressants](https://www.sciencealert.com/marine-ecosystem-impact-psychotropic-antidepressant-medication-solutions), [morning-after pills](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/03/30/fish-dont-want-birth-control-but-scientists-say-they-get-it-from-your-pill/), degregational byproducts of plastics that the body thinks are xenohormones, growth hormones and antibiotics used in crop cultivation, etc. It's to the point where the amount of chemicals is affecting a lot of animals, and there's been a [decline in fertility that may be associated in humans](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32168194/#:%7E:text=Summary%3A%20There%20exist%20substantial%20data,and%20exposure%20to%20environmental%20toxins.). I've also heard suggestions that it may be in part responsible for the rise in mental illness and other behavioral problems in the last ~70 years, given so many of these chemicals are known to have psychological effects when ingested over long periods of time.
Basically the way this works is fertility drops so low no one can have kids, and the people who are born are so physically and mentally unhealthy they can't take care of themselves, let alone raise children. This one would be harder to wipe humans out because if people were able to pinpoint a strong link between certain chemicals and health problems they would just...stop using them. Like this is what happened with DDT and chlorofluorocarbons. Or they would invent chemical scrubbers for plumbing. Like even with the aforementioned chemicals, it's plausible they'll be referred to the same way we talk about DDT in the future. In the (mostly) past tense.
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Let's not forget the t-rex in the room: where did those dinos come from?
Well turns out, the new mRNA vaccines have a long term side effect: they eventually rewrite your DNA and turn you into a dinosaur! These about 65%of the population chomp down on the unaffected, resulting in a total loss of 90% before the rest manages to reach their shelters.
Edit: As a bonus, this might explain why the humans are hiding in bunkers instead of exterminating the dinos: from their point of view, the dinos are actually humans - their relatives and friends - suffering from a medical condition, and they are busy developing a cure for it!
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first, i think i want to foreguess of how the dinosaurs is still able to roam the earth when human don't, considering that if animal can roam freely on land, any human should be easily though.
twoth, the afore comment was right,i think you should lower that number even more. maybe so that mankind is around a few million scattered around the world.
anyway, there's some way your scenario can work out
1.**a handwavium virus, or a manmade virus break lose**
indeed, there is never been virus that kikk that much people in the world. so you can get a handwavium, or for a better call, that virus was manmade. this allow you to design what the virus look like and it's effect, perhaps it's make human zombie like, or worse, a cannibal, but otherwise a human. but that just an extreme example. as any virus that kill that many and has no cure yet would make any healthy human to get away from the virus as they could, this can be done in one way by, well,underground bunker.
2.**a post nuclear world**
for this, you should make the nuclear apocalyse fatal enough to kill humanity and keep them underground but not fatal enough to kill other animals. one way you could did it is that the animals that were up on the ground were made stronger to radiation by human intervention pre war or any kind of handaavium. thus the dinosaurs can be explained as the work of pre war scientists that were let loose.
3.**the combination of two**
this is, i think can be considered the most "logical" answer among the other answer. after the nuclear war, a manmade virus went rogue and kill of mkst of mankind. this virus is incurable, and as such the healthy dig themselves underground. meanwhile, the dinosaurs and many other animals were left free to roam the earth. the dinosaurs, once again, can be explained as the work of pre war scientists.
[Answer]
A [mantle plume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_plume) erosion causing [traps formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps#Formation) can eventually get rid of 90% of humanity.
[Answer]
Well, this ALREADY HAPPENED.
Europeans brought many diseases to the natives and, as they probably weren't that protected against them, the population decreased A LOT.
Maybe some contact with aliens/some space exploration attempt might provoke an unprecedented contact with microorganisms that could take advantage of our body and it's lack of defense against them?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sVvZv.png)
[Answer]
Industrial nanite swarms have been reprogrammed by a virus to replicate and treat humans like outdated machines (they "deconstruct" them). It began as malware written by some kid having serious mental health issues who wanted to protest against some country invading some other country.
It escalated too quickly for anyone to react in time. Since nanite swarms where in use for manufacturing and building everywhere, only people already inside bunkers or living far away from the cities had any chance to survive. Walls of nanite swarms are roaming the surface like locusts, and they maintain all the machinery. Apart from replacing lost nanites, no new structures get build. No new inventions are researched by the swarms. But all the factories and infrastructure are still in mint conditions hundreds of years later because they are well maintained by the self-replicating nanite swarms.
A perfect world with no humans required!
And yeah, global warming is still a thing because the tipping point was reached a hundred years before the nanitecalypse in 2020...
So the dinosaurs that where cloned from frozen DNS and held on some islands are now roaming and flying around everywhere as the nanite swarms don't care about them while they aren't actually damaging their precious infrastructure The swarms do hurt dinosaurs a lot when they protect their property. But those beasts are huge and can take a beating, so they normally manage to wander off the protected properties before they take lethal damage.
Or just have aliens invade the planet, terraform it to an athmosphere not breathable by humans and then bringing their pets too. Aliens at some time go away for some reason. Planet with unbreathable athmosphere, underground humans and alien-engineered dinosours are still there.
[Answer]
About 10 percent of the world population is of white/caucasian descent. So a disease/virus that is deadly for most people but somehow doesn't affect people of white/caucasian descent so much would suit your needs.
[Answer]
The old Internet classic End of Ze World <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMwKPmsbWE> has a pretty good list:
* The ice caps melting (floods the earth)
* A meteor crashes into us (this is what killed the dinosaurs; it would be poetic if it's what allowed them to return)
* The ozone layer leaving (have some nasty industrial chemical like Freon that destroys this and then any number of bad things happening)
* The sun exploding (a solar flare big enough to causes mass cancer, which could also be the necessary mutation event that causes dinosaurs to come back)
* Nuclear war (around 60% of the world lives in urban areas, and there would be more casualties from fallout and the ensuing climate disaster)
[Answer]
a new violent glaciation era! maybe not 90% of the people would not survive but imagine your nice sunny days are long done , the summer averages -50 degrees celsius and winters -100..
this is sci-fi..
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[Question]
[
The SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) foundation is an organization devoted to the containment of scps: dangerous supernatural anomalies or individuals that pose a threat to humanity's existence. It functions as a privately owned entity, receiving funding and support from wealthy donors and governments around the world. However, it operates without governmental oversight or restriction, allowing it much freedom without accountability.
In recent years, another group has risen to prominence, referred to as the GOC (Global Occult Coalition). While similar to the SCP foundation in it's decree to protect humanity, it has fundamentally different methods and goals. The entity is devoted to the destruction and termination of all supernatural anomalies and individuals, regardless of threat level or neccesity. This stems from an "just in case" mentality, reasoning that these anomalies can never be fully understood and as such will always pose a hazard. Unlike the foundation, it is subject to governmental oversight by the United Nations, making it far more organized but restricted in it's operations and proceedures.
These two groups have often clashed with each other due to their opposing outlooks and goals, which has occasionally led to one stepping on the others turf. This has resulted in violent confrontations at times, which potentially makes a situation worse. Given the situation, it would make the most sense for governments such as the U.S. to pick one over the other.
What would make governments continue to support groups with competing goals when the stakes are so high?
[Answer]
They have the same exact goal that they are offering to potential funders: protection of humanity from supernatural entities.
While their approach to achieving this and the philosophical outlook behind their decisions are entirely different this is not particularly important to the governments.
1. First, they care about the result. Not the philosophy.
2. Second, as a general rule politicians should avoid dictating or
choosing the practical approach chosen for the simple reason that it
is surprisingly difficult for them to do so. It is much better to
fund based on the goals and the estimated odds of success and leave
the details to people with expertise on those practical details. So
being favoured approach would mean extra funding and not favoured
would mean reduced funding. Making a yes or no policy decision
should be avoided.
3. Third, they have no idea which approach is better and the only
practical way to find out is to try both with reasonable funding. If
they knew one approach to work better they wouldn't fund the other
but they do not so they do.
4. Fourth, they do not know whether one or both of these projects will
fail spectacularly. Both approaches taken have significant
unavoidable political risks attached. Politicians do not want to be
responsible if those risks actualize. If they committed to single
approach, they would be responsible for that decision and thus
politically responsible for issues with the chosen approach. As long
as they fund both, they are simply experimenting and not committed
to and responsible for either.
And lastly ... *from the long discussion in the comments because I probably should have mentioned this...*
>
> The thing is *which of the reasons is most important* depends on the
> person. It depends on which way you are looking at it at the moment.
> The others are then complementary to that. Different people in the
> same government will see it differently. Different people evaluating
> the same decision will see it differently. Same person looking at it
> in different context will see it differently. I specifically do not
> want to make this decision in my answer because I do not know the
> context in which the OP explains the reason.
>
>
>
[Answer]
**A Government Is Not A Single Unified Entity, Particularly Elected Governments**
Government priorities change over time, often swinging back and forth between different ends of a particular country's political range. Not every policy put in place under one administration is repealed under the next, even if that policy would not have been passed by the new administration.
Additionally, at any given time there may be faction opposed to a policy, a faction supporting the policy, and factions indifferent to it. If around 30% of legislators want policy A but are opposed to policy B, 30% would be persuaded to vote for either or both A and B in exchange for votes on unrelated policies, and 30% actively oppose policy A but support policy B, both policies can be passed with greater than 50% support, *even if A and B are not consistent*.
Even in countries where policy is largely determined by a single executive, the executive will usually have advisors with differing opinions, and the full implications of the policies each advisor is pushing may not be made clear to the executive by the advisorpushing it (and indeed, may not be made entirely clear to the advisor, who is also informed by a set of people under him, etc).
**In practice, a single government is not, and cannot be, entirely consistent**
And that's ignoring the unconscious inconsistency of individuals, like the atheist who insists there is no supernatural, but knocks on wood when someone talks about having an accident.
[Answer]
Old "divide et impera".
As long as the two factions fight each other they will:
* depend on external suppliers of goods and services, in which the government can play a role and get an earning
* waste their resources in the mutual fight and not dedicate them to some other scope
[Answer]
Why would a government support organizations with completely opposing goals?
**Because while the goals are philosophically in direct opposition, in practice their services are both necessary, even if neither side is willing to admit it, the government sees this.**
* The GOC destroys objects they get their hands on that can be
destroyed, and they're better about learning how to destroy them than
the SPC is, but they've probably had their fair share of failed
destructions gone wrong of items that could potentially be
successfully contained.
* The SPC contains dangerous objects that no one has any idea of how to
destroy, they've tried, and they're much better at containing the
objects than the GOC is, but they've had their fair share of failed
containments gone wrong of items that could potentially be
successfully destroyed.
With both of these methodologies, they would both conduct research that the other side couldn't, or wouldn't, in furtherance of their goal. This is research that might even prove beneficial towards protection of the planet outside the scope of their own goals and the subject of the supernatural anomalies.
As to how this is read from the government side of things? Perhaps the governing body is split with half of them acknowledging one side or the other, all of them half right and securing funding. Or maybe the governing body just uniformly realizes they're both needed. Either way works, or maybe some other similar way. That part is pretty flexible in how you want to interpret it.
[Answer]
# They Are Special Interests
The two groups here more or less fit the definition of a special interest group. They have their own philosophy, and they push the government to align with their interests as much as possible. To a certain extent, the governments' interests will align with the interest groups', but it will rarely overlap entirely.
Any government always finds itself pulled in multiple directions at once. Witness the real struggle between the content industries (copyright maximalists) and the large coalition that opposes Big Content's constant land grabbing.
# Having Ties With Both Helps Keep the Peace
The government is going to want to have influence with both of these groups. The carrot is usually a better go-to tool than the stick, and that means co-operating with them to a certain degree is the order of the day.
It simply is not true that it would make the most sense for the government to pick one group or the other. One of the main purposes of government is to keep society functioning and civil. These two groups have a culture clash. Left unchecked, it will probably be strong enough to likely turn into outright war.
On the one hand, the GOC will want to destroy SCP. They will view it as an unacceptable risk. They will view SCP's even limited tolerance towards the supernatural as an existential threat. SCP, in turn, will regard GOC as an existential threat (because SCP management aren't idiots).
It is the job of government to make sure that these two groups' feuding does not turn into an honest-to-goodness shooting war. Therefore, it is in their best interests to develop a hybrid policy.
When something like [The Hiss](https://control.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hiss) shows up, the government will call GOC, because *come on*. When dealing with less obviously sinister goings-on, they'll call SCP, because it keeps their options open.
More importantly, funding and backing both groups gives the government pull. They can call GOC top brass and tell them to back off or they'll cut funding and co-operation. They can use their ties to GOC to pressure SCP to agree to give up custody of Dangerous Things the government decides are too big a risk.
A good compromise leaves everyone pissed off and feeling like they got the raw end of the deal.
[Answer]
**The government will support organisations with completely opposing goals because the electorate supports organisations with completely opposing goals.**
What a government cares most about is staying in power.
To do this is needs to appeal to radically different demographics.
How?
It will face one set of voters and say "No-one cares more about protecting the fatherland than I, the proof is that my government has consistently supported the GOC. People like you should therefore vote for me"
Then it will turn to another demographic and without blinking say "No-one cares more about the rights of all beings and the sanctity of life than I, the proof is that my government has consistently supported the SCP. People like you should therefore vote for me".
In reality the government doesn't particularly care about the fatherland OR the sanctity of life, it just wants to court a full rainbow of voters, because if it doesn't, a rival political party with broader (more inconsistent) appeal might boot them out at the next election...
[Answer]
The easiest way to defeat your enemy is to be the one leading it.
Suppose the government wishes to, in fact, **not** contain, nor eradicate these dangerous anomalies. However, for some reason or another, the time to release them has not yet come. Suppose the people find out the government is hiding something and want to put a stop to it.
In order to ensure that this will never happen unless the government has full control of the situation, the government fabricates a story through a medium which is believable, for example, an "experiment" pushing the boundaries of science at a local university has gone "wrong" and weaker versions of these anomalies have been produced. Weak enough that collaborative effort from regular people will suffice to handle them.
The government sets up a resistance organization, or maybe two, or as many as the narrative will fit, with the sole purpose of containing these anomalies whenever they're spotted. People wishing to fight, or study, said anomalies will join these organizations, not realizing any content in the sense of "new anomalies" is in fact orchestrated by the government to keep them busy, while the government can pretend that it's working for the best interest of the people.
[Answer]
**The government is not monolithic**. Powerful donors back both groups. Both the GOC and SCP work to get their own politicians in places of power. The politicians may or may not care one way or the other, but need someone to back them, and need an enemy to run against.
**The more cynical outlook.** The powerful donors are all in collusion. By supporting both groups the government can keep either side from winning and becoming too powerful. The conflict keeps the populace weak and helps the powerful stay in control.
[Answer]
A few possible explanations:
* Ambiguity: The government does not recognise the key philosophical differences between GOC and SCP. This may be especially the case if the SCP is fine with killing the supernatural in self-defence, which may occur regularly if the SCP are constantly in contact with the supernatural. This could lead to the government labeling the two groups as effectively the same with slightly different modus operandi.
* No concern: The government only cares about the end goal of containing the supernatural and doesn't care about the means. In such as case, all the government may care about is keeping the peace, which is may or may not be able to back up with force.
* Politics: some people in government, say the President, may clearly favour one or the other. However, he will have to deal with other groups who may not see eye to eye: the courts, congress, corporations, lobbyists, public opinion, factions within his own party etc, the UN, etc. The motivations for each of these groups could be completely different.
* Farce: if the situation continues to change rapidly, it will be hard for the government to definitively pick a side. For example, the govt may be on the verge of backing SCP, until supernatural forces go on a human-killing spree. What now?
* Uneven support for both: the government prefers one (say, the GOC) but allows the SCP to operate as long as it doesn't interfere with the activities of the GOC.
* Lack of information: The government has very little information about the occult to make a definitive choice, opting to let things play out further.
* Hidden motive: The government (or parties therein) have a hidden motive for allowing the SCP and GOC to play off against each other, or (alternatively) allowing both to co-exist. One less sinister example might be: a particular politician was responsible for a bill which founded the SCP, but the GOC has been much more effective in practice. While the politician supports the GOC, he cannot denounce the SCP as it would be an admission of his own bill's failure.
[Answer]
Mostly for temporary goals, it's what Hitler did with the Soviet Union during WWII, he partnered up with Stalin, helping to defeat the pols, they collaborated for temporary benefit, but each knew that they would soon turn against each other.
[Answer]
Nature conservation and environmental protection, for example, can often have opposed goals. It seems common that different government agencies have different goals, and sometimes clash (although that normally means paperwork and not violence). And are in fact designed in a way that they will, and have to, clash.
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[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/149800/edit)
I am working on a close earth-analog. History has progressed into a modern-equivalent age. For purposes of the answers, current earth may be assumed.
For a period of about two weeks; death stops. Everywhere, for all humans. Accidents that would normally be fatal are no longer so, assassinations fail due to circumstance, diseases are halted or are cured entirely, and all other methods of death either fail, are of lesser impact or otherwise resolve.
Yet, none of this is noticed either during this time or after death resumes.
I am having trouble justifying this lack of notice, even if the individual circumstances behind survival all seem at least plausible. What other world element could I use to justify it, or use to distract the population (but which would not carry grave consequences of its own past the no-death period)?
[Answer]
I don't think you have to have it go unnoticed, just go unremarked.
As people have said in comments, people will notice. Emergency departments will have a drop in critical cases, but some of those 'plausible circumstances' will also include the fact that because the numbers drop, those that *do* come in will have more attention applied to them, and therefore will be saved. People in palliative care, who are very close to dying, can hang on for some time in cases.
The undertakers will of course notice, as will the newspapers who don't get the obituary notices that they are used to either. But of course, the real question is whether or not any of this matters.
One of the beautiful things about probability distribution is that many inherently random sequences of numbers look like there's a pattern to them. I shan't rehearse the entirety of probability distribution mathematics here as most of it would be out of scope but the important point is that many of the anomalies we see in data as scientists can be exactly that; anomalies brought on by some reasonably random element. It's the job of science to determine whether the anomalies are in fact manifestations of causality or some externally introduced noise.
Most statistics we keep on a given population is published at the monthly level. Unless someone had a legitimate reason for looking deeper, if your two weeks were spread over last week of the first month and first of the second month, people would notice a drop on both months as a point of interest and move on with their lives. Even if someone looked at it and said 'Hey, there's a two week gap of ANY death data here', it's likely to be dismissed as an anomaly in the data collection, rather than the actual death rate.
"Oh dear, the Births Deaths & Marriages Bureau is having trouble collating all the data from the registry offices again." It's the most reasonable explanation. If someone suspected something more sinister at play, standard practice would be to take some of the deaths that occurred immediately after and investigate them...
"Oh no, Sir. That person really died on that day. I remember because it was my RDO and when I came back to the nursing home they were gone..." The accidents would be even more difficult to investigate because by your own rules some of them just didn't happen, and the hospitals are not about to give up the positive outcomes percentage stat by admitting that they had more time to put into the urgent cases because less people were coming in over that period...
"Oh, no, not at all! That person was saved that day because of the skill of our doctors, not because of luck..."
After all that, it will likely be put down to a statistical anomaly, especially given the fact that the afore-mentioned anomalies can and do occur, and every attempt to prove it to be otherwise has failed.
Bottom line is that you can't stop people noticing; that's impossible. It's far harder though to get people to care about it enough to be paranoid about what will (with the exception of some specific localised examples) be seen as nothing more than a statistical anomaly.
[Answer]
**Impossible.**
>
> I am working on a close earth-analog. History has progressed into a modern-equivalent age. For purposes of the answers, current earth may be assumed.
>
>
>
That's your basis and in this world there is no way that such a run of zero death would go unnoticed.
>
> For a period of about two weeks; death stops. Everywhere, for all humans.
>
>
> Accidents that would normally be fatal are no longer so
>
>
>
So every ER department and hospital will notice zero deaths for two weeks ! That alone would cause an instant investigation as to why. At the very least medical people would want to know *how to keep making that happen*.
I wonder if any major hospital has ever experienced a *day* with zero deaths.
But that ain't all.
Just a few people monitoring and watching closely will be insurance companies (believe me - they'll notice all the money it's not costing them - that they'll keep !), first responders ("Hey, that guy who was decapitated is still alive !"), the morgue ("That's the hundredth corpse that got up !") and the odd suicide case ("but seriously I used explosives - what do I have to do ?").
>
> assassinations fail due to circumstance
>
>
>
Assassins don't just try and if the first attempt fails for unknown reasons they give up and go home. "Finish the Job" means everything in that business. They're going to notice because eventually they're going to try smashing someone's skull to pulp with a large blunt object and that's not going to fail expect in very, very, very, very ... you get the idea. The thing to remember about murder is that leaving a live witness is absolutely not what you will opt for. Try, try and try again is the order of the day.
The same, incidentally, must be said for the military. Military bosses tend to get very irritated when they send people to wipe out something else and it doesn't happen. Not happening continuously for two weeks ? At some point people are going to start pointing weapons directly at the people who "fail" and when that doesn't work ever, they will think how odd it is.
>
> diseases are halted or are cured entirely
>
>
>
So the patient with dead kidneys, rotten liver and a completely dead brain is going to be cured and you expect no one to notice this happen the many times it will in a hospital ? In ICU life support is turned off and a clinically dead person just stays alive ? You think they won't notice this happen ?
And you think they won't be even more suspicious when death "turns on" again and for no apparent reason the same people spontaneously die ?
Medical people tend to be curious about little things like that.
>
> , and all other methods of death either fail, are of lesser impact or otherwise resolve.
>
>
>
So even if you ignore all the terminal cases and murders that fail despite repeated attempts, there's no way hospitals, the police, administrators, insurance companies and all those myriad of organizations that not only can't avoid death but in some way exist to serve it (the word "undertaker" leaps to mind) won't notice a 100% drop in work.
Think of the hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos on all those mobile phones capturing all the miracle not deaths. No one will notice ?
They'll notice.
>
> Yet, none of this is noticed either during this time or after death resumes.
>
>
>
And this is even less likely.
For *decades*, maybe even centuries, people would be curious about why no deaths occurred for two weeks. Think of all the relatively minor historical mysteries whose resolution can have no bearing on our lives but which some people are still researching. Humans love mysteries and people will certainly notice.
But it's even worse than that.
Not only would they notice it but people would, during that two weeks, start experimenting and trying not death-defying, but certain-death stunts in the "certain belief" they'd survive. This will happen a lot and then, suddenly people will start dying again. Whoops. People, even idiots daft enough to try these things (many YouTubers leap to mind) will spot that the magic no longer works - but not spot it for long.
And then people will really start asking questions.
So your idea is, if I may put it this way, a dead duck. Eventually. :-)
[Answer]
Any global supernatural force capable of neutralising death in all its forms should be equally capable of inducing amnesia about death itself. Therefore, no-one will notice that death has stopped happening.
In the case of morticians and funeral operators they will all believe they are on holiday from their usual occupations.
Obviously the agency responsible for the temporary cessation of death is capable of foiling the circumstances leading to mortality is both selective and exhibits intelligence. Therefore, as an adjunct to stopping death it should be able to influence brain function too. So, global selective amnesia about death is the obvious route to make death going on holiday go unnoticed.
[Answer]
I'm going to add to the "Not Possible" crowd but for reasons other than "undertakers."
Big Data. In the U.S. alone, you have Federal and state laws which mandate death statistics be collected, kept and analyzed. People are going to notice a periodic dip to 0 of fatalities because AI is going to chew through the statistics. Insurance companies are going to alter their business plans. Movie studios are going to attempt crazy stunts. Drug companies are going to do massive testing. The list can go on forever.
The best thing you could probably do then, is to turn this certainty of detection into a sub-plot. It could be serious in tone, or joking like Lois Lane being fooled by eyeglasses. It doesn't even need to be fleshed out completely, just enough to let the observer see that something is off and for whatever reason most people haven't noticed it, but he ones who have are exploiting it quietly. perhaps that creates danger for people who look too closely....
[Answer]
The people most likely to notice a lack of death would be morticians and funeral celebrants. Their business relies upon people dying, so people *not* dying should be noticed in their bottom line.
So how could it not be?
The question implies that an outside agency is preventing death, and is using non-obvious methods, but is also not concealing the lack of human mortality.
The nature of a business in the post-life industries is that mortality is unpredictable. Statistics will show that there is a predictable human mortality rate, however this mortality rate is only predictable over relatively long periods of time. On a day to day timeframe, a certain number of "customers" can be expected, but random factors can mean that those numbers can vary significantly on any particular day, from many times the usual daily number, down to none at all.
Perhaps just before the non-death period starts, there was an upturn in the numbers of deaths where the next of kin request embalming and other more expensive and time-consuming funeral options, so funerals wouldn't necessarily stop, as they would be delayed pending completion of the arrangements. This would still occur even without any upturn in expensive funerals, though to a lesser degree.
Funerals for suspicious deaths would also be delayed for a considerable amount of while the deaths were investigated.
So, workers in the funeral industry would no doubt notice a downturn in business, but it wouldn't outright cease. Perhaps the next of kin went to the competition...
Then, after the non-death period, there would likely be a large number of people who, instead of dying, 'merely' fell into a coma. If their lives were being sustained, it is reasonable to expect an upturn after the period. So... people weren't dying, but more would die afterwards, so the funeral industry members individual bottom lines wouldn't necessarily be greatly altered on a yearly or even on a monthly basis. "It was just a statistical blip".
Only if people around the world started comparing experiences might they begin to become suspicious, but the increased numbers deaths after the exemption period would tend to make the people most likely to question it too busy to take the time.
As for doctors and nurses, their business is saving lives. They would hardly question their good fortune if none of their patients died.
[Answer]
Although the global death rate is predictable, it's not when you look closely at a small town over a short period. The individuals concerned are used to days when nobody dies on their watch, and can't tell that it's happening to everyone else.
The bigger problem comes with the people who see the bigger picture, like the registrar or crematorium. Our local crematorium holds several funerals a day, booked half an hour apart with an hour off for lunch, but they have to schedule about 3 weeks ahead to get such a smooth flow. If people suddenly stopped dying, they'd have 3 weeks of bookings to work through before they ran out. For the first week they probably wouldn't notice anything because they'd be dealing with events from the previous week. In the second week the might notice, but they don't normally spend all day taking bookings. They've still got other tasks to keep them busy.
Even if they notice that they've recorded no deaths for a week, they don't know that it's happening everywhere else.
A month or two later, someone would collate the statistics for a wider area and they would notice that something unnatural had happened.
[Answer]
**Impossible**
Someone is going to jump off a very high building and survive. Some serial killer will decapitate a victim. Someone is going to go on a rampage with an AR15. Some car bomber is going to detonate in a crowded market.
All the miracle survival stories will pour out and into the media.
Reminds me of a story I read about an American newspaper that had on average ten obituaries per day. One day the lady who did them when on holiday and they had none placed for the two weeks she was away and when she returned, they went back to ten a day.
[Answer]
Not possible without some influence from whatever is preventing the deaths in the first place.
At Christmastime last year New York reported zero murders for six days in a row for the first time ever. A period of two weeks without deaths would be an internationally notable event even if it was restricted to murders in one city.
[Edit] I was thinking more about this. You could shorten the period significantly to like 1 hour and then this would work. The entire world could go without death for an hour and I don't think it would be immediately obvious, especially with your stipulation that people aren't unkillable, they would just not end up in situations where they would die.
[Answer]
As others pointed out: no, this is impossible. Not in our current world.
In order to make it possible, you have to change something. If you can somehow make people not care about the lack of death, then it could work. However, this has to be a ***VERY BIG*** change - not just trying to distract them, that won't work. You can't distract everybody and you can't occupy the attention of absolutely everybody for that long. You have to somehow make them have a complete blind spot in their mind for this phenomena. Here are some suggestions for how this could work:
* This is the realm of mind magic. Very, very powerful mind magic that affects the entire world. Some magician manages to just make every single person in the world turn a blind eye to otherwise miraculous survivals. A guy gets shot in the heart and walks away - onlookers should just shrug and go on their way.
* The sufficiently advanced technology equivalent is some sort of brainwash devices or waves. I can imagine satellites that can instantly brainwash the population.
* A slightly different approach is to consider "death" as metaphysical concept. Since it is eliminated (somehow), that doesn't just mean "nobody dies" but *the whole idea* of death is gone. The two are metaphysically linked, so not only can people not die, but now (for the next two weeks), nobody can even conceive of death. It's as if that was never a thing.
These approaches still leave gaps but somehow, these also need to be covered up by whatever method affects the people. For example:
* there would still be graveyards - the previously dead would stay dead, after all. It seems odd that nobody can die and yet there are these dead people there from before.
* Weapons that cause death of individuals like pistols are now mostly useless. These are wide-spread but...now they don't have a reason to exist.
* There are people who directly build their business dealing with the dead. For example, undertakers. Without death, why would they exist?
My personal idea is to half-acknowledge these but still turn a blind eye to them. After all, every single person somehow forgets death existed, it's not too much of a stretch to also have them engage in some [doublethink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink). People can still go and visit the graves of their relatives and keep a gun around even though they *know* nobody can die. Undertakers might go to work every day and lament the lack of clients even though they simply *cannot* have clients.
A slight alternative is for the clashing ideas to manifest in some (possibly odd) justifications that people come up with due to the [cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance). They will know *of* graves but might forget that there are dead people in them. They could still go visit but as more of a habit. They'd know it's something about paying their respects to aunt Alice and uncle Bob but somehow don't make the mental connection that they are dead. A gun might find unorthodox uses - opening jars, or more extremely - as "toy" for children to play tag with. Undertakers might go and take care of the graves - they don't have anything else to do right now and that's sort of what they did before. They can go and tend to the "memorials" that definitely-don't-have-dead-people and have them nice and clean.
The utter inconceivability of death does require more changes than simply reconciling it with the existence of death before. The thinking of people needs to change and people should reconsider the intend to kill
* if the military wants to do an operation against an enemy force it would be weird to expect shooting to get them anywhere.
+ Maybe they alter their plans to just blow up key structures - doesn't need to be "non-lethal", perhaps burying the enemies alive is accepted and expected. It is, after all, now the only way to incapacitate an enemy.
* criminals that wants to take out a target by shooting or stabbing them would be strange
+ Instead the criminals might resort to torture or blackmail.
+ In extreme cases, the old "bury a body in cement" or "let them sleep with the fishes" still works - the target *is* silenced, even if alive.
* trying to eliminate somebody for inheritance or other sort of gain would similarly undergo a change.
+ ...OK, I thought to bring up the point but I've been racking my brain and can't think of a good alternative. Not without resulting with basically the same as "criminals" and dropping the rich uncle into concrete. But without death, that's not going to net you inheritance. Not to mention that "inheritance" would also not work, unless the cognitive dissonance somehow makes people enact that if a person is "missing".
When death comes back, so should the knowledge of it. It *could* be very jarring, however, if eliminating death also made people forget it, then perhaps reintroducing death also "magically" makes them immediately know the concept and not notice the difference. Not *at first*. This way you could have a more of a slow burn for the realisation. It might be a day or two until somebody notices and even then it might not immediately be noticed around the world. It could start with somebody going to the fridge for a pickle and suddenly thinking "Wait, Why did I use a gun to open this jar of pickles, *I could have killed somebody*". That doesn't immediately cause the discrepancy to be noticed but people will gradually start remembering acting differently for those two weeks without some discernable reason. Eventually, somebody is going to figure it out and connect some dots that nobody died, however that gives you more leeway for the reveal, not everybody suddenly going "WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY DIE" the second the two weeks run out.
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# Just make people feel like they don't want to kill anybody during those two weeks.
As others have mentioned, while it's still possible that the lack of natural deaths or accidents goes unnoticed because of statistics perks, it's very likely that a living person with a totally smashed skull attracts the attention of the crowd.
So why not make that during those two weeks people don't have the desire to kill anyone, or have a very weak desire to do so?
All of a sudden, generals in war order a "fortnight period to study enemy's positions" instead of attacking. Missile launches are put off or canceled in order to verify some technical issues once more. Assassins who don't succeed at the first attempt are ordered to withdraw and wait for a more favourable moment. Would-have-been murderers just stop a bit and reflect about their life and find a better way to solve their ongoing situation. And so on.
This goes unnoticed because all those people simply genuinely want to do something else. Those who kill people professionally still want to do their job, just *later*. It's not that they don't want to accomplish their mission, it's that *there's something more urgent to do now*.
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You're going to need to cut off communications and drive people apart. I suggest a mega typhoon. Or maybe a whole set of them. Storms across the globe of epic intensity such that no one is really communicating, and they're all just grateful that their little corner of the world is wet but no one is dead. They can compare notes when the sun comes out.
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You basically have a patch that will stop people from dying.
The basic test is to intentinally kill someone.
In 2002, the statistic was one murder every 60 sec. Human have been testing your patch since the beginning of time. And scaled up into a stress test. People will notice. Most of the South America are currently trying to ddos, stress test and pen test the new rule.
Drug cartel, gouv, terrorist, military will notice.
And will come up with new test. And try to find limitation.
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In advanced countries with bureaucracies that rule most of the people on the planet, all deaths are supposed to be reported to official statistical bureaus. Depending on the average number of death reported per day to a specific organization, it may take days, hours, or minutes for someone to notice a big drop in reported deaths, and if they try contacting people to see why they are suddenly slow to report and learn that there are no deaths to report so far that will be news.
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[
In my previous question, I brought up a hypothetical society where children aren't raised at all by their biological parents. Instead, the children are taken care of by hospital staff for the first year of their life. Then, children ages 1-5 are taken care of by daycare staff. Finally, children from the ages of 6-18 spend most of their lives in a boarding school (with opportunities to go on outdoor trips and vacations). In this type of society, there is no home life or households in the standard sense, and family units aren't really a thing. Children are entirely taken care of by either the government or private institutions.
The reason for this type of society is simple. It decouples reproduction from childcare and romance. In more conventional societies, adults are expected to marry someone they love, procreate, and raise children in a household. A society's population growth is based around people being good lovers, good parents, and having high reproductive fitness. If a lot of people fail in one of those three categories, it causes major demographic issues.
With communal raising however, people don't need a life partner to raise children with, nor does a person need to spend a lot of time and money raising offspring. There are 4 main use cases for communal raising.
1. Hyperproductivity. With communal raising, all adults can reproduce naturally or artificially however they want, and then completely focus their lives on working and relaxing.
2. Eugenics. Normally, two people marry and procreate based on love (or inheritance in the case of royal marriages). With communal raising, those aren't a factor. Instead, people who are determined to have good genes (either physically or mentally or biologically) can reproduce a lot and beget high-quality children. Once artificial wombs are invented, women don't even need to bear children anymore. Any donated sperm can be matched with any donated egg and any desired child could be formed.
3. Parentless Settlement. This is pretty speculative, but I had this idea of zygotes and babies being sent to a continent/planet that is undesirable to live in. The fetuses grow in an artificial womb and all of the children are raised by robots. This idea started out as a social experiment, but it seems like an efficient way to quickly populate a location where the locals don't known any better and have no preconceptions.
4. Promiscuity. If neither biological parent has to take care of the child after it is born, men and women can engage in a lot of casual, unprotected sex without child-rearing consequences.
Overall, communal raising seems like it could be an effective way to maintain a nation; even though no real life nation does anything like it. My question is are there any hidden downsides or complications that would make the communal raising model infeasible?
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Here is the most benign example I can find: [the kibbutz communities 1935-1980](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_communal_child_rearing_and_collective_education). Collective education started on the day of birth and went on until adulthood. At the time it was considered a natural outcome of the principle of equality, which was part and parcel of the kibbutz life. The education authority of the kibbutz was responsible for the rearing and well-being of all the children born on the kibbutz, taking care of their food, clothing, and medical treatment. Everybody received the same share of everything. Parents were not involved economically in the upbringing of their children.
One outcome was that when the children grew up they rarely married any of their childhood friends, as they think of them more like siblings.
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**Disastrous social outcomes**
"Children are entirely taken care of by either the government or private institutions." This sentence alone flags how fraught this idea is. When governments are responsible for looking after people, such as prisons, mental institutions, orphanages and aged care homes etc there are inevitably problems - it seems here in Australia that we have a Royal Commission into one or another of these areas every few years, which uncover horrific stories. Yet the bad experiences from government institutions pale to insignificance compared to what happens in privatised for-profit enterprises - look at the US prison system for some of the most well-documented examples.
What would make things so much worse in the proposed society is that no individual has a *personal* stake in any of the children going through this system. What often blows the lid off abuses today is when the family of a person caught in a bad institutional situation goes to the media - this could not happen in the proposed society. The kind of situation experienced by the [Romanian orphans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans) would probably become the norm as costs were cut, as per the first objective (use case) listed of "Hyperproductivity".
Unfortunately, history has shown that people who grow up with bad experiences as children often justify it as "toughening them up" and feel that the next generation "deserve" to go through it. (The name for this psychological effect of post hoc justification escapes me.) So we have seen institutionalised "hazing" in military academies and boarding schools continue for generations. When the majority of the society is made up of maladjusted people with a general lack of empathy and various antisocial behaviours. Look at the real, historical [Spartans](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/) for the kind of outcomes that are likely, rather than the glorified Hollywood version. (Then read the rest of the series for how Sparta measured up as a society and a state, quite apart from the experience of being an individual.)
On a final note, the question seems to float between two different situations, one in which there artificial wombs are possible and exist, and one in which conception, gestation and birth happen the old-fashioned way but the newborn babies are immediately whisked away. I cannot comment on how the former for the obvious reason that it does not exist, but I have yet to meet a woman who was not emotionally invested in the life growing inside her. Deciding on possible termination or adoption are amongs the most heart-wrenching decisions that people make. Some men *might* be OK with the "Promiscuity" use case, but making women go through the physical and emotional burden of carrying a baby to term just to take them away - I guarantee that 99% of women will *not* be on board with that idea! If they are forced then it will add more mental traumas to those inflicted on them by their institutionalised upbringing.
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We already have this with orphanages. Unfortunately orphans have a much higher rate of being dysfunctional adults than normal people. They're also sometimes abused or uncared for properly as the people looking after them have no biological vested interest in them.
Lots of societies like the Zulu and Spartans took over rearing the children at a young age, but none we know of did it at birth. There is just too much necessary interaction between a child and mother (dad not so important) to make a sustainable society with this method of child rearing, or it would have happened already.
At it's most basic, once you take away the nuclear family bonds, it's no longer 'human'.
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Not with today's concept of boarding school. Boarding schools are not meant to 'parent' children. It's assumed that the child has a certain maturity level that allows them to thrive without their parents, but with supervision, authority figures, friendships, mentorships, etc. (And children who do not have that level of maturity do not do well at boarding school.)
To attempt this from birth would require the boarding school to literally become the child's parents, and would require a quite different approach to the concept of schooling. Children need parental love, not just parental guidance and discipline, and not just friendship, in order to thrive. That would be a great challenge for boarding schools to provide effectively. I would say impossible.
Also, in your scenario children are raised by hospital staff for the first year of life and then transferred to boarding school. This would be traumatic in every case. Children who lose a parent in the second year of life are known to be at elevated risk of [Reactive Attachment Disorder](https://childmind.org/guide/quick-guide-to-reactive-attachment-disorder/) in later childhood - essentially an inability to form emotional bonds with others. The effects of separation from parents in infancy is an active (and challenging) area of study. But it would be a mistake to assume that just because older children and adults do not have articulable memories of 'what happened' during their first year of life, that taking an infant out of the care of the only people they have ever known carries no consequence for them.
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This society is **unsustainable because it provides no incentives to have children**. There is just no way for the children to contribute to the parents' lives, and even growing babies in artificial wombs or some other technological gimmick cannot overcome this.
They can't participate in the parents' household economy, not even by doing some chores, because they do not live in the same household. (And yes, there will be households; even if everyone lives on their own, that's a household of one.) (And no, your old age pension does not depend on you having children; you will receive the same amount regardless of how many children you had and how well or poorly they do in life.)
You won't get an emotional payoff of seeing your offspring grow and develop if you don't actually *see* them regularly.
You can't use your children's good manners or achievements to show off within your community, because you could not have contributed anything to make these happen.
And then the children grow up to be adults and compete for *your* jobs and sexual partners, *and will tend to win* because they do not need to hold back. Why would they? They owe you nothing. And you had to pay taxes to make it happen, which mostly went to children that aren't even *notionally* yours. That alone would create a powerful incentive to defund the child rearing programs, which if successful would mean that your society *did not* sustain the institutional raising of children.
And lastly, I'm sorry to say that the hyperproductivity argument is stood firmly on its head: if you don't have children to take care of, you have every incentive to kick back and relax. (And you do not need to buy things for your children, thus reducing overall demand in the economy, which then allows *others* to be less productive too.)
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**TL;DR:** If this were a society of humans as we know us today, this would be rife for failure and abuse
### Private Inequity
The abuse starts in with this line in the first paragraph:
>
> Children are entirely taken care of by either the government or private institutions.
>
>
>
While I will give your hypothetical government the benefit of the doubt and say they have the best of intentions when it comes to raising the next generation of their subjects for now, private institutions will have no such altruistic motives.
A private institution is out for profit -- In this case through child rearing. The people that run these private institutions won't truly care about the children or their welfare unless and until it affects their bottom line. They will cut as many corners and skirt as many regulations as they can get away with in order to squeeze a bit more profit out of the task of raising children. This goes double if shareholders are involved as they will want ever-increasing profits to take their dividends from.
And this does not count said companies lobbying/bribing the government for less regulation
The alternative is that the rich elites set up their own private institution for raising children that given them the best of everything and the most opportunities to get ahead in society. Eventually, they will use this social child rearing system to gatekeep their socioeconomic class and keep the elites at the top of the social food chain.
But government or Board of Directors, it will likely be that people that have little qualifications in child rearing that will make the decisions on the system that raises the children. Actual professionals are likely only advisory at best.
### Think of the Children!
As for the children, under the proposed system, they will be effectively abandoned by their caretakers at 1 and 5. This is going on the presumption that the three age groups have three entirely separate sets of workers.
The children will very likely be affected adversely with a society that won't care about that trauma because it happened to them. Plus, the people that care too much probably can't have a job in this field precisely because they care too much which would run counter to the more detached rearing in the question.
And this does not even get into the issues that may come up later due to these kids not getting the attention and love that they need in their earliest formative years. A friend of mine was at a parent/baby thing at their local library and they had a little earworm song about *four hugs a day at a minimum*. They needed a song ... to remind parents to hug their babies.
And now, boarding school. Great for people that might learn and thrive that way, and terrible for those that don't. While the school will have teachers and educators, they will almost certainly lack in parental substitutes. While the boarding school may become their home, children are vicious little turds and there probably won't be enough adults to enforce discipline. This will almost certainly lead to a situation of bullies and victims institutionalized within the school system -- even more than it might be now.
For reference, look at how siblings can sometimes treat each other -- and there may only be two of them and two parents to (try to) keep them in line.
This does not get into any child that, for whatever reason, doesn't fit nicely enough into this system -- regardless of the cause.
### Economics
People will have to pay money to raise children -- it will now be in the form of taxes to the government's communal child-rearing system and not be an optional cost (by having said kids). Everybody will be paying to raise everybody's children -- not unlike healthcare and public pensions in our society.
People will still have to raise children -- it is just now in the hands of either those that want to do the job, or can do it and are detached enough to be able to let go.
Also, as above, people will cost-cut either to increase profits (corporations) or to give out tax cuts (government). Cut funds will affect the level of care that is given to these children -- which may be the actual point.
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That's a common feature of SciFi books. I've read a dozen -- published "for real" (either in the library or a chain bookstore) where society handles raising children: creches, very complete day&night care, group marriages where some parents prefer to take care of everyone's kids, pods of small clone-groups; you name it. Readers aren't going to write nasty reviews about how your child-rearing is too unrealistic, since they already don't for all the other books that do it.
And it's just basic "Arc of Progress" SciFi. 150 years ago we decided society should educate children for 6 hours a day, complete with non-parental role-models. 50 years ago women didn't need to be full-time mothers -- they could work and use day-care. We've also had HeadStart for 50 years (which starts at around 3 years old) and are now pushing for pre-K for everyone. Baby formula. So why wouldn't that keep going to where a professional staff takes care of your crying 6-month-old, and so on?
But those reasons ... I don't know, man. Eugenics? Really? Google it and you get "racists", "immoral", "what went wrong?" and "Nazis". Only mention eugenics if your civilization is evil. Likewise efficiency. That makes your government sound Fascist. The sex stuff just seems pointless since the future already has near-perfect birth control (even Star Trek!) no matter how children are raised. Just have the 8-year-old main character talk about how her house-mate Ann is so embarrassed her crazy mom comes by every day, and not once-a-week like a normal parent.
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Hmm, the question in a way highlights something fundamental about how we view society in general.
**School Age Children**
Lets assume:
1. the success of each new generation is an overall benefit to all of society
2. we have a basic template for this in public education, which isn't boarding school, but rather readily a sort of sandbox or window for prototyping such a system
Since the question provides virtually no indication of the flexibility of this kind of system we can go two ways. Virtually unlimited resources or highly constrained resources. This is a large determining factor for how much can be accomplished. But for this purpose, we'll aim down the middle and see what it may look like.
Considering that this is a space colony, this suggests type I or close to type II, so functionally it would have technology that is on par with or better than planet Earth currently. That implies that we have some lessons to learn from our current systems. As for the technology, we can basically assume it will greatly facilitate this process. I would assume that in a few years we will have very good systems for guiding children on how to learn *if we focus on creating such systems* ( big iff ). We already understand quite a lot about human attention because we've done an incredible job at hijacking it with apps on smart phones and social media. This can be taken to the other end of the spectrum without a terrible lot of effort or advancement aside from considering it a little bit and reframing the problem of human attention around utilizing it to help people learn and grow, rather than how to suck profit out of them. It won't be perfect, nothing ever is. But it's squarely on the table and I think highly likely to unroll that way.
So the question then becomes about how to manage that many kids. And the answer from this perspective looks less like a teacher with a ridiculous ton of responsibilities and more like someone responsible for making sure the kids don't cause chaos if their devices aren't holding their attention well enough. In other words, someone who is trained, but not necessarily to teach one or more subjects. Probably more like a guardian and counsellor than necessarily a mentor. The whole system can be quite efficient. And without worrying about *how* the children are educated, it looks like it can be quite sustainable. Furthermore, with software that recommends educational content based on the interests of the children, we can easily escape one size fits all education and simply allow children to thrive and flourish in a way that they are naturally motivated to do.
Basically the answer to the question is I think that effectively educating children, regardless of how it is done, will tend to solve more problems than it creates. So the downsides are something that we can probably worry less about if we get the important stuff right. Because if we can do that, the kids will happily let us know what we're doing wrong and they'll be in a much better position to help us fix it.
**Infant Care**
This one is going to be more difficult and requires a higher ratio of adult to child. I won't pretend to know anything about infant care and I will give a fairly safe estimate of one-to-one. This is going to cost a lot of time and resources and a significant portion of society and of this system will revolve around ages ~0-4. For good measure, lets assume we can't trust children to not make terrible mistakes and die prematurely or incur considerable medical expenses for the society before the age of about 4 without close supervision.
Normally parents do this. But the idea here is that those who are naturally effective at infant care would be recognized and encouraged to engage in this activity *by the software which manages human education*. That's a critical factor. But it isn't to say that this is the only thing these folks will be expected to do. They may have other interests, do other kinds of work or plan their lives in any conceivable way. However, given that we are talking about a space colony where we can probably assume things are scoped and limited to a smaller scale than a planet, it may be that the emphasis on participation and utilizing human capacity receives more focus.
Presumably, folks who are *identified* as potential infant care workers and who are encouraged to participate in that way would not be aversive or otherwise opposed to infants. And ignoring other detractors, assuming everything else is copacetic, if they were effectively educated on the process to give them the confidence to do it, then they wouldn't be opposed to contributing to society in that way.
**Conclusion**
There are always light and dark ways to accomplish things. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey. If that's not your cup of tea, then you don't have to explain anything and can just as easily make people miserable and kill them and recycle their bodies if they really have a problem with your methods. That will help to keep the others in line. ;-)
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There are no "good genes" per se. Well, at least outside of groups thinking in term of "pure" or "master" race.
Lucky combinations of genes pretty much do exist and particular genotypes are pretty much advantageous in one situation or another, but for a group/society/species as a whole, the most important thing is the diversity of the gene pool.
**In this sense, what we call "love" is in fact a hard-earned evolutionary adaptation.**
Another important thing is the cultural diversity. This is important as well - esp. when the conditions change.
**You do have a standard for an institutional child care, don't you?**
If you don't, you don't get much of a viable offspring anyway. This is how industrial farms fail sometimes. If you do, ... well, you have a single culture.
Short term, human farming could work to some extent, but at a rather high price in competitive terms.
Institutional childcare spanning the whole childhood is not something that is not tried and tested. Even the best results are rather disappointing.
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The communists tried it.
In Israel there was this, in the kibbutzim.
It fell apart completely...
Many children carry with them very negative experiences...
If you want a company of evil monsters - try it...
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Assuming technology within the next century or so, what would it take for aircraft to fully replace naval vessels such that a navy and air force could almost merge?
While surface vessels and carriers seem like they could potentially fall to higher endurance aircraft and possibly something more exotic like airborne carriers or drone swarms, the harder problem seems to be submarines. I'm thinking would probably have to be something that could detect them fairly easily such that they are no longer able to remain undetected.
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A miracle.
Let's suppose you want to make a show of force against some rival, or in support of an ally. What's more impressive, a carrier task force showing up, or some radar contacts? Who can sit there longer due to greater endurance? Say there's a natural disaster and you want to provide assistance that could end up being several months in duration. Who do you want to be there, a naval task force or some aircraft hanging around overhead?
You're making the same argument that was made in the late 1940s when some generals in their brand-new USAF uniforms, along with several politicians, stated that the need for a navy was a thing of the past. With the new long-range aircraft (and even longer-ranged ones on the way, like the B-52), and new weapons systems, including nukes, there was nothing the navy could do that the air force couldn't faster, cheaper, and with fewer men and equipment.
Seventy-five years later, how's that worked out?
There is, coincidentally, a video put out by the Templin Institute regarding thoughts on planetary invasions recently that is applicable because of the analogy between being able to bombard from orbit versus being able to put feet on the ground that specifically uses the "If we have an air force, why bother with a navy?" analogy:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgN5yq362_s>
The main point to take away: a naval presence gives you a lot more strategic and tactical flexibility and ability to choose the exact level of engagement you want to have. So barring something akin to antigravity tech or some kind of absurdly compact yet powerful energy source that allows something like a SHIELD helicarrier (ie, the aforementioned miracle), an air force cannot replace a navy any more than they can replace an army.
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[**Wars Are Not Fought On Battlefields**](https://worldbeyondwar.org/wars-fought-battlefields/)
The glory-laden visual that a war is won by individual soldiers, armies, or dogfights is nothing more than a "sugar-high" designed to keep the support infrastructure motivated.
If the Navy ceases to exist then how do you properly protect your cargo ships transporting the necessities to keep your fighter planes in the sky?
Good luck getting this guy airborne:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUR2G.jpg)
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# Killing everything in the sea
Have a nanite experiment designed to fix global warming fill the sea with repliacting robots that consume metal and anything within them.
Anything that floats in the water will be consumed, and efforts to insert counter agents haven't succeeded. As such, all travel needs to be by air.
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**I figure you'd need a few things:**
Fast aircraft. Very fast. Say contingency-response time down to eyes-on-target in less than an hour. That's about MACH 27 (compare [Sprint missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile))). Globally, so including faff and round-trips say 30,000 miles (~50,000 Km) trip-length.
*Which would require:*
Huge amounts of energy to propel an object through the atmosphere, propellers won't do, jets have their limits too. Rockets need propellant, heavy. How about an [EmDrive](http://www.emdrive.com/IAC20212Gpaper.pdf) powered by fusion. (I'm not convinced the whole EmDrive thing's not an elaborate joke, but what do I know).
Also, very rugged ablative shielding, typically a blunt-ended affair, to direct the hot plasma created at high speeds away from the body of the craft. (Possibly also some elaborate mechanics at the front so it can be replaced in-flight).
**Or:**
The ability to create point-to-point wormholes between start and destination, you could still then have jets or even propeller-aircraft if you wished and refuelling would be a hop and jump, then out to fight again.
.............................................
Now, as to the submarine issue, competition between detection and concealment would make things unpredictable, as evolution is - expect it to come up with new/unexpected and sometimes unlikely solutions (as well as the run-of-the-mill convergent ones like shoals of swarming drones that look and sound like fish). Should be the topic of another question.
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**Portable fusion reactors**
The main disadvantage of trying to replace surface craft with aircraft is the much lower loiter time. What if that wasn't a problem?
There were brief attempts at designing and building [fission-powered planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft). If you could build a unit with the equivalent power to weight output of a jet engine that ran for weeks without refuelling, and without emitting too much radiation for nearby electronics or humans, you'd be able to have flocks of permanently loitering drones surveilling the sea. Behind them you'd have the airborne equivalent of the missile cruiser, a large (B52-size) craft carrying a selection of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles which could then engage threats over the horizon, guided by the scout drones and satellites.
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1. All airplanes need to become seaplanes without losing their tactical abilities;
2. At least cargo airplanes need to increase their payload capacity tenfold (so it can go beyond 1000 tons), without significant increase in operating costs.
Navy vessels have advantage of staying deployed for long period of time at a relatively low cost. All existing aircraft have very limited flight time, and refueling them in the air is logistically very difficult. Seaplane can land and effectively become a boat, but today it's a very poor boat and a very poor plane.
Navy vessels can carry a lot of cargo and personnel. Today, there is no way to deploy significant ground force to another continent without using a boat.
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Well.. with "next century", let's say in a 100 years, a lot can happen.
For aircraft, I'm more optimistic than Keith's answer. It will develop further.
**Combination is the key (now)**
Of course, the *combination* works best: ships have a huge range and provide a base to operate from. Aircraft carriers protected by ships provide the aircraft with a takeoff and landing place, aircraft will penetrate enemy territory.
But when aircraft would develop further, e.g. energy use would be limited, their range could become much wider, eliminating the need for carrier ships.
**Tactical advantages**
There are a few tactical advantages of aircraft.. Aircraft is much faster than ship. An aircraft can sneak in and *drop bombs*, missiles launched from ships and submarines are much longer visible, they could be intercepted.
Penetration advantage: aircraft can be deployed to reach visible targets inland, and cloaked using stealth radar deflection, which would become very expensive for larger scale objects like ships.
In 100 years, aircraft could use *beam weapons* to target anything anywhere, ships have a very limited reach for beam weapons (near aircraft, other ships, the coast)
**Scale advantages**
A large ship can cost billions. In next 100 years, unmanned military aircraft and drone swarms will evolve, endangering any large scale military object, with a relatively low cost operation.
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**War as we know it must change dramatically**
Every hour you spend fighting requires, depending on your platform, 2-10 times more time to be spent repairing or maintaining the vehicles. While fighting is important, every fighting force requires logistics, and needs to be resupplied in the field. Fighter jets are terrible at moving ordinance, it is more efficient to use cargo craft or even better, ships. The reason navies still exist is boats are efficient at carrying things long distances for low cost. An aircraft carrier is refueling rearm and repair station. Even extremely fast aircraft can’t beat a slower aircraft that needs to only go to the carrier instead of going back to a home base. The reduced cost of moving ordinance is also a big benefit.
**high efficiency, extreme speed engines**
If the cost of moving ordinance across seas is lower by air, planes can deliver comparable ordinance, and the speed of resupply is roughly the same as carrier operations, then airplanes will be better. If any of that doesn’t happen, it won’t happen.
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Ships have a tremendous advantage over aircraft: They are so cheap transporting things (airplanes, ordnance, missiles) to the deployment area that it is not just possible but even realistically done that you keep entire battle fleets permanently deployed, without driving your national economy into bankruptcy.
So for naval vessels to become useless, you have to make them useless in a conflict.
E.g. submarines are so effective in sinking ships that a carrier group is demoted from "threat" to "easy target". (Submarine staff tends to boast that they can sink any carrier without a problem, but I guess the high-level staff disagrees, else we wouldn't have carrier groups anymore.)
There was the idea of filling the sea with nanites, but that's pretty outlandish. Fleets of automatic killer submarines would work just as well. Essentially mines, but mines with a propulsion, and anything that moves and does not have the right challenge response gets attacked - those killer submarines have have to be cheap enough to be produced en masse.
Note that such a development would also kill international trade, and the basis for much of today's economy.
Land transport is just SO much more expensive than sea transport.
Also, land owners can block routes with relative ease, so you get a geopolitical situation where all land bridges (Egypt, Turkey, Panama) become hotly contested military hotspots. Islands (Taiwan, Japan etc.) would become horribly backwater.
UNLESS civilian transponders are allowed by all killer subs of all nations. This might actually work, but it would give each killer sub owning nation the ability to threaten that they kill international trade, so even with this scenario you'd have massive changes to geopolitics.
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**Advancement and spread in Suborbital Flight and Suborbital Space/Aerostations, combined with some catastrophic event that deters naval travel or terrestrial habitats.**
"Replace" is a very strong word. Naval vessels and Aircraft might broadly overlap in things they can do, they are extremely different things, used in entirely different areas. One does not make the other obsolete. One cannot be replaced without specific deterrant from using it.
Think about how CD-Roms, Fax Machines, heck, Pencil and Paper are still used today. The printing press didn't replace the pencil. The typewriter didn't replace the pencil. Computers didn't fully replace the pencil. Even iPads didn't fully replace the pencil.
Let's get back to Naval vessels. Did discovery of seafaring make caravans obsolete? No, not really, it offered an alternative route to the destination be it for trade or travel. Sea routes sometimes give a better direct path to the destination than by land, sometimes it doesn't, but sailing around a peninsula might help avoid bandits, enemy borders, or complex city infrastrucure in a developed world.
Okay, so that's just logistics. What about militarily? Sea and Air gives very different attack vectors. I guarantee even in a hypothetical Air/space-dominated future naval weapon platforms will still be used if only to get great coverage outside of civilian areas to launch nukes to destroy those aircraft. There's so much real estate in the open seas, why the heck wouldn't you use it?
So in order for the scenario to work, there must be some catastrophic event to make the seas unviable. Doomsday level event. Endless torrents, a new ice age, sea becomes toxic, etc. or WW3 happened and sea-level atmosphere is completely irradiated, forcing mankind to live in the skies.
As for technological requirements, we're actually pretty close if not there already. Suborbital flight is the future of commercial flights as it is much faster means of air travel and less costly in fuel etc. It should be feasible to construct a suborbital airport/station that seemingly hovers in the sky, though the bulk of the infrastructure might still be on the orbital stations.
Another way to make suborbital stations or perpetually airborne atmospheric stations/aircraft plausible would be greatly thickening the atmosphere. It is theorized that on Venus, it makes more sense to build aerostat habitats than to deal with the scorching, hazardous surface. If soem catastrophic event or asteroid collision causes a drastic change in the Earth's atmosphere to make it become similar to Venus, that could be a good reason for aircraft to fully replace naval vessels, but that's also a case of combination of ease of floating on the atmosphere and oceans having simply ceased to exist.
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Traditional naval combat was basically replaced by arial combat during WW2. In those days (and maybe even today, I'm no expert) the limited flight range of planes made it necessary to have aircraft carriers for delivering air power, but the various naval guns, smaller ships like destroyers, and submarines were all ultimately there to either protect carriers from planes or, in the submarine case, to sink an enemy carrier and therefore also destroy their arial fleet. If you just give your planes a very long flight range then you circumvent the need for the fleet entirely. Since this is a Sci-Fi setting, you could even give the planes a more-or-less indefinite flight range by having them be solar powered or wirelessly recharged from ground based power plants.
Also, stealth planes are a thing. So are, in principle, are satellites with weapons attached. Those could be options if you want to have an "attack from out of nowhere" type capability.
Edit: As far as I can tell, the OP is looking to give up combat vessels. They could still keep cargo vessels. Who's going to protect those cargo vessels? Well, the arial fleet can do that. That said, even if the OP does want to give up cargo vessels as well, I don't think that'd be hard to justify. As a general rule, they are fairly easy targets and it may well be worth taking the supply chain hit to just supply troops by air-lift. It's not like that's never been done before and, again, if flight-range isn't an issue then I don't see any reason this couldn't become the new standard.
Further Edit: It seems like some answers are basically saying that this can't be done because ships are needed to move materials. If naval power can't keep up with air power, then cargo and combat ships alike will be sitting ducks to air-power, especially if, again, the aircraft can stalk the seas without concern for flight distance. If the flight-range problem is solved and Navies can't defend against air attacks then it doesn't matter how much you "need" your cargo ships, they aren't an option. In short, it doesn't matter whether the logistics side of thing is worse in an air-only world.
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### Simple
Just wait for *Man-Made Global Warming (TM)* to do its work! They've been saying the oceans will dry up in the next five years for at least the last thirty years. One of these days, all that stock in Northop Grummond will make you a mint!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rt1w4.jpg)
It's not due to global warming, but there is one sea on Earth that isn't really a sea anymore. :(
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mVZlz.jpg)
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**Context :** my fictional universe is set in a time period akin to the european Middle Ages/Renaissance. Think of the 1400s-1500s for reference.
In most aspects (political, social, industrial etc.) my fictional universe closely resembles real life 15th century Europe, with two important clarifications:
1. Contemporary technology and metallurgy has allowed a given kingdom to develop steam-powered machines. All other innovations that can derive from this aside, steam power has in particular led to the development of steam-powered airships, that is vehicles closely resembling merchant ships or carracks but that are airborne using airbags/balloons. These airships are also used for war, i. e. for reconnaissance, transport, or bombarding targets.
*EDIT: To clarify, the steam and airship technology is enough for the airships to be effectively airborne (in a **fantasy** setting), but still relatively primitive enough for the airship's to be slow, clumsy, and with a low flight ceiling (let's say about 200 meters high). Also, their carrying capacity isn't too great and they can only carry about 10 to 20 men or the equivalent of a small to middle-sized fishing boat in terms of merchandise. However, they can be produced in relatively high numbers and are not a rare sight on the battlefield. Also, rival nations have started developing airships on their own as well.*
2. Gun powder does not exist in my fictional world. Whether this is because it hasn't been invented yet or because the universe's rules do not allow for this specific chemical reaction, Humanity simply does not possess it. So the main projectile weapons in use are the traditional ballistic weapons such as ballistas, catapults, mangonels, trebuchets, (cross-)bows, etc.
Assuming whichever kingdom that invented airships first gained a decisive tactical advantage thanks to them, and used them successfully against traditionally-built European medieval castles (for example by bombarding the castle structure and defenders with stones/arrows/other, lighting the castle on fire from above, or airlift and then drop invaders within the castle walls), **how would the architecture of castles evolve to adapt to the threat of an attack from the skies ?**
If you wish to contribute, feel free to give suggestions for active defense (i.e. weapons to fight the airships) as well as passive, more structural defense (i.e. the structure of the castle itself).
I also gladly take suggestions/examples from other styles of castle-building (Japanese, Middle-Eastern etc).
***Edit 2.0 : Thanks a lot for all answers ! I realise my premise is not the most plausible and may thus appear convoluted and difficult to work with. Nevertheless, I really appreciate the answers that tried to make do with my set premise as well as the various reality checks other contributors have given (which may help me make my setting more plausible/realistic). Cheers !***
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## Self-contradictory question is self-contradictory
1. *"My fictional universe is set in a time period akin to the european Middle Ages/Renaissance. Think of the 1400s-1500s for reference."*
2. *"Gun powder does not exist in my fictional world."*
3. *"Technology and metallurgy ha[ve] allowed a given kingdom to develop steam-powered machines. All other innovations that can derive from this aside, steam power has in particular led to the development of steam-powered airships."*
**That world has nothing in common with the western European late Middle Ages or Renaissance periods.** Or else, if it is indeed similar with the late western European medieval or Renaissance world, then it does not have practical airships.
Because:
1. In a world without gunpowder there are no fortifications resembling late western European medieval or Renaissance fortifications, because late western European medieval and Renaissance fortifications were developed and designed to resist siege cannon and infantry with firearms.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krak_des_Chevaliers_01.jpg)
*This is a pre-gunpower fortified castle, specifically [Krak des Chevaliers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak_des_Chevaliers), built in the 12th century in the County of Tripoli by the [Knights Hospitaller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Hospitaller). Note the nice regular shape, and those nice vertical curtain walls. Such shape and such walls would have made it easy prey to an army with gunpowder weapons. Photograph by [Bernard Gagnon](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bgag), available on Wikimedia under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later.*
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bourtange_1657_Merian.jpg)
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luchtfoto_bourtange.jpg)
*This is a Renascentist fortification, specifically [Fort Bourtange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bourtange), built in the the 16th century in Netherlands by William the Silent. Note the complicated star shape and squat sloped earthworks. The complicated star shape is designed to provide interlocking fields of fire to the defenders, so that the attackers have no safe area near the fortification. The sloped earthworks are designed to absorb cannon ball hits. Top, plan from 1657; public domain, available on Wikimedia. Bottom, aerial view, our days; picture by user [Hannes](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Hannes), available on Wikimedia under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later.*
2. There is an indestructible link between technological development and social development, or, as we would put in Marxist historical and dialectical materialism terms, between the economic base and the ideologic superstructure, or between the social existence and social conscience. *You cannot have a medieval or Renaissance society with steam engines and airships.*
To have steam engines and airships you need a vast horizontal industrial base, with vast armies of relatively well-educated workers, who can read and write (so that they can operate the advanced machinery), who work for good wages, who must be fed, clothed and entertained by an even vaster army of service providers. You must have a small army of engineers to design your machines to make the machines to make the machines which make the engines, and the gas cells, and the cloth, and the lifting gas, and so on. To sustain this vast armies of economically active workers and service providers you must have a lively economy, with swift trade networks and pervasive financial services. *That is not the late medieval or Renaissance world.* It just isn't, in the same way that modern China with its enormous industry is not Mao's China.
3. Ah, and how would it be credible that the people in the proposed world have advanced steam engines (no, primitive steam engines *most definitely* don't work in airships) and advanced metallurgy and advanced chemistry *but don't have modern-ish explosives*? In the real world, [guncotton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose) (a.k.a. nitrocellulose) was discovered in 1846, when airships were still half a century in the future, and [TNT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT) was discovered in 1863.
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The good news is that without gunpowder and its derivatives, there's a limit to how much damage your airships could do. They don't have bombs or rapid-fire guns, and while they could drop incendiaries (like flaming oil) or just toss heavy objects over the side, they're severely limited in how much of either they could carry. Their main threat is probably troops dropped from above. Bows, crossbows, slings etc. would be a threat to exposed defenders but probably not to the structure itself. In short, while they would be valuable support, they're not going to replace a conventional army.
To mitigate damage, you'll want to avoid exposing too many people to airborne sharpshooters, and closing off potential points of access from above. Use tall, steeply-angled roofs wherever possible, and roof off the outer walls and galleries. Make sure the roofs are sturdy and well-sealed, and resistant to incendiary attack. Minimize the number of open courtyards, keep them away from vital areas, and make sure you have a plan to seal them off if attackers seize them. Avoid features like flat roofs or open-decked walls and towers where your enemy could congregate. You might consider where the enemy is likely to end up if they try jumping on your roofs anyway, and arrange spikes where appropriate, or just make sure that if they fall, they fall outside the castle.
When an attacker is spotted, your priority will be to get everyone under cover - at the very least under a roof, but preferably away from any courtyards or other locations that would make good landing points. Ensure that any troops that do land are isolated and can't attack your defenses from behind or link up with other attackers. Counterattack would be an option but I think it's wiser to focus on your enemy's main force first, then mop up the balloon corps if they haven't already taken the hint.
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**Air ships would not be worth much offensively.**
Sun Tsu: "the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities".
<https://suntzusaid.com/book/3>
But if you gotta - consider: the walls are thick. Knocking them down is going to take repeated action - a ram, or many stones thrown, or cannonballs. If you are on the ground you can scavenge stuff to throw and you can get leverage for your ram against the ground. Up in the air neither is true. You have to carry aloft anything you are going to drop, at great expense.
The people in the castle will see you coming and hide. Your dropped boulder might make a hole in a roof. OK. Then you have to go back for another boulder.
But what about flaming liquids! You could drop those and burn everything up.
People in a castle who know that blimps with flaming liquids might come will not build out of straw. They will build the exterior out of nonflammable materials.
The roofs will already be steeply sloped if there is snow in winter. Roofs will be made of metal or slate or tile because those make great roofs. You will not allow wooden or straw roofs within the castle walls. Flammable liquids will burn on the roofs, or on the ground, and go out.
The offense balloon could have attackers rappel down ropes. How many of them can come at once? You can only fit so many people in a balloon. If you have a lot of balloons and you are keeping the defenders busy with your land forces maybe some could get in. The problem is balloons are not Trojan horses. They are obviously bad. The defenders inside the walls will notice the balloons and kill the intruders as they come down the ropes.
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Defensively, however, balloons rock hard. My scheme for the siegebreaker balloon.
<https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Siegebreaker_20balloon#1269461429>
The balloon would be tethered inside the walls. Charcoal for the hot air / ammo / sandwiches could be sent up to the crew via pulleys. Even a powerful catapult set up outside to assault the walls would be within range of the archers in the balloon.
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First defenses coming to mind are passive ones, such as
* smoke curtains, to prevent the airships from actually seeing their targets
* fire updraft, related to the above, a large fire can cause a strong updraft which could disturb airships
* anti-air crossbows, which should reach the flight height of the ships, possibly with incendiary arrows
* barring nets, kept in position by hot air balloons (this is applicable only if the defendants understand the basic principle of hot air navigation)
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As the saying goes, fight fire with fire.
Your castles will want to develop their own airships for defense. If an enemy fleet can park over your castle and drop firebombs from outside of bow range, you're pretty much done. Making fireproof structures is really expensive, and while your Castle might be solid stone (on the outside), the village surrounding and supporting your castle will be quite flammable. Most sieges are about attrition, and continually razing the farms and hovels of the field hands would hurt.
Materials available to this period for the lifting bodies (even handwaved a bit to make this work at all) will be relatively frail and, more likely than not, flammable themselves.
An ideal defense would be your own "Hot air balloons" that have no heavy navigation equipment and are simply tethered, and can therefore achieve a higher altitude. The defensive airships could use their altitude advantage to fire flaming arrows at approaching ships to take them out / keep them at bay.
In direct combat between equal airships, the priority will be damaging the airships lifting bodies and forcing them to the ground. So flaming projectiles and "grapeshot" rounds will be your most effective weapons. Keep in mind how the cabin part of modern blimps hangs minutely under the massive lifting body though, you wouldn't be able to shoot at much of a vertical angle without hitting your own lifting body.
If you can figure a way to mount archers on top of the lifting body, you'll gain a substantial range advantage over the enemies, however.
Defenses on the ground will be sturdier roofs, less exposed flammable supports, ballistas on towers, and smoke screens to make it harder to be targeted.
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The real issue is common airships would render the very idea of castles obsolete.
Castles and other fortifications were not just built randomly, but to defend important places like transportation routes or nexus points. So long as ground transport predominated, castles and other fortifications were of great importance. Even after the development of gunpowder and effective artillery, fortresses simply underwent an evolution of their own, from bastion forts, to "Third System" forts surrounding the American coast before the Civil War to the Maginot Line built prior to WWII.
Airborne and airmobile forces (and the increasing independence of forces using cross country mobility to reduce dependance on road, rail and canal networks have reduced the importance of permanent fortifications, and of course bombing and nuclear weapons also have made fixed fortifications far more vulnerable.
If airships are common as suggested by the OP, then the forces which use airships are effectively free from their dependence on roads, canals and rivers. Raiding forces, or even expeditionary forces can be delivered "behind" enemy lines without any reference to the fortifications, and supplies can be delivered without much chance of interruption by forces sallying from the fortress.
The main issue with air portable forces is they are essentially light infantry, and very dependent on the continuing delivery of supplies by air. Failure to do so will result in disaster, such as the British Parachute Division at Arnhem, or the French at Dein Bein Phu. This requires a great deal of thinking and planning by the users of air mobility, essentially finding prime points where air delivery can casue maximum disruption in the enemy rear, and creating conditions where the air assaults leave the enemy spread out and unable to concentrate against the main thrust (or even decide where the main thrust actually is).
So the main effect isn't going to be so much about rebuilding castles and forts to repel air attack. Rather it is going to mean the dispersal of forces to cover larger areas against airmobile troops, and the downgrading of large, elaborate forts to distributed barracks and strong points. The key change to warfare will be the discovery, isolation and destruction of airmobile troops before they can be reinforced or resupplied. Cavalry and quick firing "artillery" weapons like crossbows or ballista will become much more important as a means of countering airmobile forces, and light units like Rangers or Jagers will also become much more important as well.
A secondary consideration will be disguising or hiding important facilities from air observation and attack. Near the end of WWII, German industry was dispersed among small "huts" hidden in the forest, yet despite this aircraft production actually increased in 1944! Other examples are tunnel networks that the Vietnamese forces dug to prevent observation and air bombardment by French and American forces during the Indo China wars. More modern examples include siting facilities among civilian populations and in "protected" sites like hospitals and schools. How far along this process goes depends on how much airpower comes to dominate the battlefield.
So old forts may become abandoned or downgraded (much like many Bastion forts are now the centre pieces of modern cities), while military forces spread out and become lighter and more mobile to deal with incursions by enemy airmobile forces.
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You just needs artillery that can shoot up by 200 meters.
This is actually available: The trebuchet. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#Reconstructed_counterweight_trebuchets> for a rough idea what these things can do; since the airships are going to be pretty fragile, just have each trebuchet shoot 10 kg of bricks, and a single brick hit will take the airship down.
Trebuchets have a few limitations: They are expensive, they require a minute or so to reload, they are heavy (your towers and walls have a weight limit), they are hard to predict.
On the plus side, they have excellent repeatability. So trebuchet engineers will just fire test shots, put notches on the trebuchet so they can repeat that shot, and record the flight path. The real challenge will be to have observers that can quickly and accurately observe the view angles to an incoming airship; afterwards, it a question of having quick communication from observers to trebuchet positions, and a trebuchet overseer who knows what trebuchet is known to shoot through that point with what prerecorded settings. Plus enough experience to adjust for airship movement during the delay between observation and actual shot.
For the attacker, this means your airship have become an attrition weapon.
Which means you can't send your elite troops, and even normal troops will have to be forced to board those airships (a battle loss rate of 10% was considered atrocious before the invention of cannons).
Which means that even an insufficient set of trebuchets can be enough to deter an air attack.
Airships will have to get in in moonless, overcast nights.
Which places airship crews into a submarine-like state of mind: If you're spotted you are dead, so hush up everyone, no lights, and just pray to your god(s).
Of course defenders know that they are at risk, so they will try to light the sky. Send up balloons with bright fires, for example.
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If the flight ceiling is 200m, I would just build my castles on higher ground. At 200m, the airships cannot even get above your castle. At 120m or so, your archers can easily hit the balloons on an airship.
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In the time of wooden sailing ships fire ships were effective defensive measures. You now have likely flammable and fragile airships, use the equivalent of the fire ship, a fire blimp or fire mine if you will.
How might this work?
Off the top of my head you could go as simple as taking one of the airbags that would be used to float an airship and attaching outward facing blades to it with the hopes that if launched from directly underneath an enemy airship the blades would tear holes in their airbags once it rose high enough. This would make it immensely cheaper to produce than an airship.
Another idea would be to create a sort of basket on top of the airbag to hold a fire and a counterweight on the bottom to ensure that the fire basket stayed on top again with the hope that if deployed underneath an enemy airship it would rise and cause fire damage to the structure or airbags.
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As already said, without gunpowder or other explosives the attack value of airships will be low. To smash walls an onager, a ballista or a similar war machine would be more effective. But airships would be great for reconaissance or to drop command troops resp. assassins - but they would have to come in low for the drop.
Nets (spanned between towers) could provide passive defense (esp. if coated with shards), active defense would be arrows shot either by archers or by catapults. Even slingshots could effective if used by trained warriors.
If the airships had something like greek fire, now that would be a problem for the defenders. But it would make the airships even more vulnerable, too.
But air reconaissance could change the tactics in the open field. Troops would seek shelter in woods, buildings and so on, wherever possible; they wouldn't want to be counted by the enemy. Tight formations in battle could be prone to air attacks even with dumb stone bombs and so on.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/90957/edit)
[According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_square):
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> With their famed discipline and in combination with heavy cavalry like the gendarme, the Swiss pike squares were almost invincible on the late medieval battlefield.
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Is there a medieval way (without gunpowder technology) to beat this combo? Why are they so powerful anyway? A man is just holding a long pike, has little of armor and no shield. The way I see it, sprinkle them a little with the longbow rain and their fabled invincibility is gone. Or perhaps there is something else I do not know?
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Yes, this formation is vulnerable to ranged fire. Light but strong steel armor that became relatively cheap at the time was important, because it improved protection against arrows for pikemen who didn't use shields. Still, it was not enough and a pike square could be well defeated by archers as happened at the [battle of Falkirk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Falkirk). Firearms had way better projectile energy, so were even more effective than bows, as the battles of [Marignano and Bicocca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bicocca) showed.
If pikemen broke formation then they become vulnerable to swordsmen and cavalry, see the [battle of Ravenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ravenna_(1512)).
But the Swiss had good discipline, unheard of for the feudal and mercenary armies of the time, and used flexible formations and aggressive manoeuvres. They knew their weaknesses and compensated for them.
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Short answer: Yes, you can defeat pike formation. The longer answer is a bit more complex.
As anything in warfare, pike squares or pike formation was conceived and deployed to counter a very specific threat: Namely the cavalry charge. A disciplined body of troops in a shield wall with spears, and later a pike square, can take and repel a cavalry charge.
The problem is, a pike wall is *only* good against a cavalry charge. Granted, armored cav was like the tanks of the day, and it represented a major threat on the battlefield, but smart commanders could - and did - manage to find ways to destroy them.
A classic example would be the [Battle of Cynoscephalae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cynoscephalae "Battle of Cynoscephalae") fought in 197BC between a Macedonian army made up mainly of phalangites and the modernized Roman Republic army of legionnaires and their allies. While a full discussion of the battle itself is outside the purview of this answer (and is available at the link), the battle demonstrated the pike square/shield wall's major weakness: They were almost impossible to maneuver. A phalanx is oriented forward and can advance only forward. It depends on light infantry and cavalry to protect its flanks are rear. Any commander that manages to drive off the cavalry and light infantry can basically attack the flanks and rear with impunity because that phalanx isn't going to turn to defend itself. In Cynoscephalae, the Roman legion also managed to take the Macedonian spears on their scutums and closed with the phalanx into gladius range - which the Macedonian phalangites with their small shields and tight formation weren't able to counter.
A medieval pike square was a little better because it was a square. It could repel attacks from four directions. The problem with *them* was that they didn't move. They couldn't. The strength of the square depended on its ability to ground their spears. Again, this was a formation that was dependent on combined arms to succeed: They needed the cavalry to drive off enemy infantry and archers. The example above from the battle of Falkirk is a good starting point. By the late 15th century, however, plate armor made an appearance and was developed well enough that pikemen in [Munition armor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munition_armour) could shrug off arrow hits. (Yes, contrary to popular myth, longbow arrows didn't really penetrate plate armor - which was designed specifically to counter this threat. Thus longbowmen fired at close against armored targets and the shots were taken mostly for their blunt concussive hits more than anything else).
Thus without gunpowder, the easiest way to break apart a pike square is to hit it with artillery. Ballistas and catapults could be quickly assembled in in the field, and pike squares are fat, juicy targets for them. Of course, then you'd have to protect your artillery with your own infantry and cavalry, and also engage their cavalry and light infantry. Once they break and run, you slaughter them.
Also, disciplined cavalry sometimes did manage to penetrate and disrupt enemy squares. Trained warhorses/destriers *will* charge a pike wall. If your heavy cavalry is disciplined and skilled enough, and the enemy pike square isn't as disciplined and skilled, you can charge your cavalry in and destroy them.
[Answer]
The tactics, competence of leadership and the training and experience of the troops can often be more important than the equipment type alone.
To illustrate it, I present an extreme real historical example of a tercio being defeated by a frontal assault of light cavalry. (the tercio was the successor of the pike square, equipped with musketeers to give it ranged capability, and it was the most successful formation of the battlefields until muskets became advanced enough in the 18th century to make pikes obsolete)
A tercio would normally be easily capable of defeating a heavy cavalry assault even when being outnumbered by them. How could it then be defeated by an assault of light cavalry, where the cavalry had numbers approximately four times *smaller* than them?
Here is what happened: In 1631 in the Principality of Transylvania, [Apafi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_I_Apafi) was elected Prince, but the previous Prince, [Kemény](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kem%C3%A9ny_(prince)), didn't acknowledge the results, which led to a brief civil war.
Apafi, heavily outnumbered, barricaded himself in a city, and Kemény proceeded to besiege him. Before the siege could have been started, an army composed of light cavalry came out of the city (why Apafi's infantry didn't participate, is an interesting story in itself, but would be off topic here).
The besiegers didn't take them seriously ("what could such a small band of light cavalry do against proper tercio infantry?"), and thought they were only out for harassing them, a tactic not uncommon for light cavalry. They expected they will exchange some fire with each other from afar and then retreat (the whole thing being done only to slow down the perparation of the siege), as was common for that troop type, so they sent their musketeers forward. The light cavalry started to get closer. The musketeers fired from afar, obviously causing next to no damage, expecting the light cavalry to be skirmishers and doing the same. However, this is when the light cavalry rushed them without firing a single shot. Surprised, and not having enough time to reload, the musketeers ran back, and got intermingled with their own pikemen when the horsemen crashed into them. The pikemen couldn't hold the line due to the swarm of their own musketeers fleeing through their ranks, and they broke. Thus, most of the army started routing, and in such a case, troops standing in the back don't see what's happening in the front, don't see that they alone would be enough to win the battle, they only see their own comrades panicking, throwing away their weapons and fleeing, so they join the rout instead of staying there.
Kemény's heavy cavalry was nearby and tried to intervene, but couldn't reach the position, having to plow through their own fleeing infantry. Some of them got stuck in them, others trampled down their own infantry, and that situation was no longer salvageable, the army routed from a force less then one fourth its size.
This example was meant to illustrate, that there are situations, where even an army which would otherwise be "invincible" against its opponent, can lose due to incompetent leadership, a surprise attack, or just a combination of good timing and good luck from their opponent's perspective.
[Answer]
If you hold high ground above them, you can roll heavy boulders or burning barrels of tar to a pike square without any form of artillery. On a plain you'd need something like a [Trebuchet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet) but even a small one could deliver incendiary projectiles.
Fire has the ability to break even a disciplined formation, and penetrates in ways simple projectiles don't (hence [flamethrowers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower) against fixed fortifications in the 20th century). Of course [Greek fire projectors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire#Projectors) could be similarly employed.
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The interesting thing about Pikes is that they're only really effective against two things, Light/Medium Cavalry and Light/Medium Infantry. Cavalry Archers peck pike formations to death from range. Heavy Cavalry will get badly messed up doing it but full armoured knights on barded horses can actually charge home over the top of a pike formation due to shear momentum. Ranged Infantry whether with bows or muskets goes about the same as the horse archers only slower. Heavy Infantry wearing full armour and carrying swords and shields can grind through a pike phalanx, it hurts but given equal numbers the heavies tend to win, there are specialised formations for doing it faster as well. Against less than full armour pikes have a serious advantage; light/medium horse can't take the hurt and charge home anyway so they're neutralised while the formation holds together, light/medium infantry is at most only as heavily armoured as the pikemen and can be held at bay by the longer pikes taking losses without inflicting them.
That's all when you take pikes as a solo field force, when they're part of a mixed arms force with reactive cavalry and are being used to shield artillery and other ranged elements they can be next to impossible to deal with.
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Aside from mixed crossbow formations, I think pike square formation is vulnerable to pike square formations. I'm pretty sure Landsknechte did something similar to handle things. If I recall correctly it wasn't really a good solution either. Someone referred to it as bad war. There's also another tactic that Landsknechte employed involving knocking the pikes out of the way with Zweihanders. Really the hardest non-gunpowder counter to a square pike formation is good armor - I'm fairly certain Landsknechte also had this. Pikes are good at relatively fleshy targets. They're not so great for hard targets. I don't think this is a great solution either in all honesty.
Of course, someone could just beat this formation by being better at war. I fail to see how square pike formation holds up to lighting most of the area the pikemen occupy on fire.
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[Question]
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My question stems from [What would a space fighter look like?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12354/what-would-a-space-fighter-look-like/12369#12369)
After reading through @dsollen's question [can a human fighter pilot fully grasp 3 dimensional frictionless movement in space?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12408/23503) I started questioning how the pilot would control the ship.
My interpretation of the ship is a sphere with multidirectional thrusters, and guns on multiple sides so that the pilot can shoot in any direction at any moment:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/plu2T.png)
My issue is that the pilot would struggle to do anything inside this ship if it were rotating (which is extremely likely in any situation). How would the ship be able to rotate the pilot to face the direction of travel, and how would the pilot be able to control their orientation manually?
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Please note: The idea of a human-piloted fighter has already been established and this question is *about* them and *not* about whether they are in any way useful or effective.
[Answer]
Okay, time for me to weigh in, a question like this practically invites me. Unfortunately this is difficult to answer without far more information about your world, and in particular what you have done to justify humans fighters instead of AI or missles being used.
For this answer I'm starting with a key assumption, high G manuvers are common. This seams likely in a close combat battle unless you go out of your way to prevent it. Much of this question is potentially invalidated if you remove high G meanuvers, either by making it too costly in terms of fuel, adding innertial dampeners, or some more complex handwave such as my claim that shields worked best with low acceleration thrusters.
This answer also presumes a number of thrusters on a ship. If you limit the ship to only say 3 thrusters or had a primary thruster that was stronger then the others (both plausible for cost reasons, it may be cheaper to make fewer thrusters or lowe output thrusters an demend economical to trade off less meanuverable crafts for the ability to make more) then this answer may be invalidated. If the number of thrusters is limitd enough the control scheme could change, but this answer still is quite likely. If there is a single thruster with more output then others then that defines your 'forward' and this could redefine much of the answer.
**Where should the pilot face**
the pilot would presumably would reside within a control hub orb at the center of the craft. This orb rotates so the pilot is best positioned to tolerates the G forces associated with acceleration (see [Low-tech inertial dampener options](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17139/low-tech-inertial-dampener-options?noredirect=1&lq=1) ) This rotation is automatic and the pilot doesn't control it. The primary motivation is simply to allow the pilot to survive higher G forces by positioning his body in the most optimal position to endure the force.
In fact to prevent the pilot from crushing himself with G forces, while still allowing him the ability to make use of all acceleration he can handle, the craft would likely have some sophisticated soft (non-intellegent, just well programmed) AI that considers the pilots position before deciding how large a thrust to exert. The pilot will not be allowed to achieve 'maximum acceleration' when his body is in the wrong position because max acceleration would kill him. Instead he can only accelerate up to some acceptable G force, and then as his body rotates into a better position the maximum acceleration allowed to achieved in that direction will be increased since the computer determines the pilot can now survive that level of G force.
This is all done purely to protect the pilot, but as a side effect the pilot now has a very clear orientation. The direction(s) he is currently accelerating towards are 'forward' to the pilot. Keep in mind that the pilot will sense his 'forward' as being the combination of all forces on him, he may have three fruster firing at different directions & rates to propell him, but his sense of 'forward' will be the vectoral sum of the acceleration created by those thrusters.
In the case that the pilot is not accelerating at all then 'forward' will be defined as the last direction the pilot was accelerating towards. The pilot may have an option to override his 'default orientation' in situations of no (or very little) acceleration for his own covenience, such that he is looking the direction that he is most interested in looking, but during the heat of combat when he will constantly be accelerating in differnt directions he will always be using his acceleration direction as his default 'forward'. From a programing perspective likely he can set his default forward if acceleration is uner 1 G but the moment he experiences more then 1 G worth of acceleration the computer will immediately revert him to 'acceleration=forward' mode which is the prefered mode for heavy movment or combat.
**Eyes in the back of my head (and top, and bottom...)**
Now that we have a forward, how will it be displayed to the pilot? Most likely he will have a 180 x 180 (so up & down as well as 2 D plane) degree display, either actuall screens on the wall or more likely some sort of headgear that displays the screens infront of his eyes. He will likely have his screens split such that half his screens are 'forward facing' and half are 'aft facing', so he can see all degrees of the sphere by changing which screen he looks at. Actually the screens would likely be configurable and allow him to do things such as making his aft or fore screen view larger or break up more screens depending on his needs, one sign of a good pilot would be being able to modify his screens to give him the most 'optimal' view for him and each pilot may have a different prefered display, in much the same way that people playin MMOs may have widly different screens as they install and remove addons to configure their display to display information in a way they prefer. The point though is that he will have the overlay to display everything.
This overlay will constantly adjust his view as he is rotated due to changes in acceleration, to keep the center of his fore display facing the 'forward' direction (ie the way he is accelerating).
Actually, there is a slight translation time here. He can't be instentaniously rotated towards a new point acceleration (there is some time from when he starts firing his port thrusters and when he is rotated within his cockpit so his port frusters are now his aft thrusters). It would also be confusing to have the screen transition immediately to show a different point of view as 'forward' to the pilot, he needs to watch the screen rotate to a new 'forward' direction so he knows where something relevant (like an fighter craft he is chasing) is relative to his new 'forward'. These two issues work nicely together though.
Presumably when he starts to accelerate in a new direction both his physical body and the screens sense of 'forward' will be rotated at the same time. He will see the screen rotating as he 'feels' the rotation, this will help to keep his orientation during the transition between the 'old' forward and the 'new' forward. While he is rotating his tactical display will likely depict an icon (and possible an 'arrow' along with it) that will show him where his new forward is (ie where he is rotating to face) with the icon rotating towards the center of his vision as he is adjusted towards the new forward.
**The Enemy's gate is wherever it happens to be**
Notice this makes direction entirely relative, there is no absolute direction, I can't tell you that the enemy gate is down with this approach. The enemy gate was fore a minute ago, now it's aft, sone it's port/fore/up etc. I don't consider this a problem. You don't really care about an aboslute position, all you care about is where you are relative to key tactical points and/or threats.
If were assuming a hectic close range space battle (again, probably not realistic in real life, but implied to be the case in your world) then things are changing all the time. Enemy crafts are moving around you, they are never at the same place twice. Unlike Ender's game there was no final destination you're headed to and that your done once you reach. You may think of your enemy capital ships as 'down', but your fight isn't over just because you reach them, your just fly past them and rotate around for another pass at them after all. Nothing is really 'down'. All you care about is where you are relative to the things you want to be relative to.
This information is better served with a good tactical display! You already are being provided some semibalance of a 360 degree display, so if you want to know where a gigantic capital ship is just look, it should take a split second to identify it in your display. To make it even faster (because in combat split seconds *matter*) your have more complex targeting and tactical displays overlaying your 360 HUD. You could arrange for a little colored arrow to be projected from the 'center' of your screen in the direction of key locations you care about, like your home ship and the enemy capital ship your attempting to bomb, so you know what direction to look to find them. You can toggle targets to have them lit up on your screen and similar color coded lines to show where they are. A tactial display showing you what direction your relevant points of interest are is more useful. In a sense you can have multuple 'enemy gates', ie points of tactical importance you want to always be aware of the location of, at one time.
**The enemy gate is also at starpoint 125x234x3**
Okay, so there likely is *also* an absolute direction that is predefined by every fighter's computers. This can be used for a pilot to communicate concepts such as "fighter inboud as 6 oclock " in a method that has meaning to other pilots. This coordinate system would likely be mostly invisible to the pilots though, instead of trying to figure out actual cooridnates they would ping some location on their map and their com system would relay the location to other's maps and simply know where to ping relative to the pilots sense of forward. Alternatively some third party would be feeding updated tactical information. So yes there is a way to give absolute direction, but it's not something a pilot needs to think about or consider in the heat of combat.
**that's one funny looking steering wheel**
I haven't said it explicitly, but al controlls would transition at the same rate that the pilot own vision was rotating. If he pushes the fore control his thrusters will push to move him in the direction he is currently 'facing' in his display, whatever that direction is. As his display rotates towards a new 'forward' his controlls will adjust their definition of what 'fore' is accordingly.
So how does the pilot use this display to steer? That's a more complicated question. Other's have suggested joysticks, trackbars, etc, they won't help. All the control schemes we currently use as human only really work for two demetions, not three. The 3 dimentional control scheme I can think of would litterally measure a hand's motion in 3 dimentions, but doesn't work well as soon as a force can cause the hand to move when not intended (ie, when you suddenly have 4 G of force pushing you down because you had to duck under an incoming missle and you can't suspend your hand as easily under that force).
As such I don't think a *single* control scheme can be used. I think we need two control schemes, utilizing your equivlent of a joystick for controlling two dimentions, but having two of them to combine to allow control of all 3 dimentions at once. To put it more simply, one joystick for each hand. So which directon does each joystick control?
I spoke about our sense of acceleration as being a single senes that tells us exactly what direction were traveling...but I lied. We actually have effectively two senses for acceleration, our sense of up & down is rather different then the others. In particular our sense of 'down' is far more accute, due to the major plummitting sensation in our stomach we get the moment we have more then 1 G of force facing down. As such if we have a two controll scheme it makes sense to have those controlls be one for the standard 2 d plane and a second for 'up' and 'down' plane, combining to allow controlling all four planes.
**Were facing war, you must respect the gavity of this situation**
full 3 D space flight, particularly with such heavy accelerations as I anticipate in space, suggest a new wrinkle withour controll systems. At any time you may be experiencing multuple G worth of force pushing in *any* direction. This means that no matter how you lay out your controlls it's possible that your pilot may have heavy G forces pushing the pilot's hand 'down', ie making the pilot push his controlls in a direction he doesn't want to because he can't hold his hand steady agains the G force he faces.
This situation doesn't happen in a fighter jet as much, but the pilot only risks facing high G in *one* direction at a time, and the controls can be adjusted accordingly. facing high G from any number of different directions at once is much harder to handle.
At the very least the pilot's craft will have to adjust partially for this. If the pilot is likely to face heavy G pushing his hand in a direction decrease the sensitivity of the controller (or even have the controlls actually 'push back' against his hand harder) by an according amount so that his pushing harder on the controller does not actually cause the controller to register that as a request to move faster in the stated direction.
Some other approaches, such as having the two different joysticks reside on perpendicular plans from each other, could also be used to address this, but I won't get into the subject much more then to suggest the possibility.
**Your pulling me in multuple directions**
One last hurdle to driving is the competing need to move in different directions at different accelerations. Remember, the pilot can only accept G forces up to a certain degree before they render him unable to fly, and, more importantly, the degree of G force he can tolerate is dependent on orientation of the force. He can survive g forces directed 'down' much better the ones directed 'up' for example. For this reason I suggested that the ship control the maximum g force allowed based of off the direction the pilot was facing.
This brings up an intresting question for how we define what it means to push our joystick as far forward as it can, ie we say we want to accelerate as fast as possible. Since 'as fast as possible' is different depending on direction were headed it can have odd implications. Imagine I push my joystick as far as it would go in a 45 degree angle, intuitively saying "I want to go as fast as possible in the fore and starbord directions" I can survive acceleration in the fore direction that are much higher then the starboard. Do I accelerate as fast as I can handle in each direction, meaning I don't accelerate diagonally as I might assume, but instead in a direciton that is far more fore then starbord? or do I limit my maximum acceleration fore so that I'm accelerating both fore and starbord at the same rate? The former seems confusing, the latter could get me killed if I'm trying to dodge a missle and my computer won't let me move as fast as I theoretically could to avoid it.
I believe thta the controlls always work like the later example, accelerating at the maximum allowed rate for each direction even if that means I accelerate faster in one direction then the other. However, a pedal (or other control) will likely exist to allow me to instead 'correlate' the directions, so that my acceleration is based off of the maximum acceleration in whichever direction I can least tolerate acceleration in. So basically the can toggle between most acceleration and more 'controllable' acceleration. If this were a pedel they would even get a degree of control between 'completely correlate these two directions' and 'don't correlate at all'. Though you could argue the inverse, where directions are usually correlated and a pedal allows maximum acceleration in any direction instead, as being the default. The key point is the likely can alter the control schemes.
**I tend to put on weight when stressed**
Again the computer is trusted to decide 'maximum allowable acceleration', but what is that? Humans can high g forces for short term that they can't survive over a long term. In addition a human who has been experiencing a high sustained G force for awhile may be stressed and less capable of surviving a suddent short term higher G force in another direction, even if they could have survived that under other more ideal situations, and of course some pilots can simply endure higher threasholds then others.
If we assume thrust is cheap (which it is if your having highly meanuverable crafts at all....) then the craft will likely be designed to allow thrust up to the max a human can survive even for short times, to allow more meanuvability. But the computer may not *allow* someone to try to travel at that for sustained periods.
I imagine there would be a(nother?) pedal that is the "Oh $%!#" pedal, this is the one that says the pilot needs to accelerate now no matter what to get out of the way of something. This pedal would loosen the definition of 'maximum' acceleration to allow higher G forces to be experienced by the pilot. When the pilot is willing to risk *temporary* high g to do a meanuvour he presses this pedal to allow it, but the pilot can't accidentally go so fast that he knocks himself unconcious unless he has pressed this pedal, it's the laxing of his own safety procedures when he judges it necessary. This is definately a pedal to allow more nuainced control of just how much 'extra' G force to allow, a slight press on the pedal may simply mean "I want to go at a higher sustained G then usual, but nothing dangerous" while a full press on the pedal says "I'm willing to pass out half a second from now because that's the only way to avoid coliding with a friendly fighter and killing both us.
**This is war, man up!**
Now an aside, the most realistic is that your fighter craft will have *at least* two men in them, much like modern fighters. This frees your pilot up to use him hands entirely for steering, no taking his hands off the controls for anything else.
This is relevant becuase my controll scheme has the pilots hands busy at all times. While this scheme can work with a single pilot it works far better if a second person was in the fighter handling controlls that the pilot can't afford to worry about while focusing all his energy on driving. Driving will be harder here, requiring paying attention to multuple angles and fighting the G forces to keep your hands on the controllers right etc, so the pilot won't be able to afford as much attention to other activities as moder fighter jet pilots can either.
A sophesticated AI, especially if combined with audio input to controll less-critical systems, could likewise help here if you don't want a second pilot.
If you have a single pilot expect the 'joysticks' the pilot uses to be very complex with many controls built around the joystic to be toggleable with button presses. Though only so many things can be on a joystick, some controlls *must* be placed moer out of the way to avoid accidental activation.
**Shooting down some suggestions**
Now lets address the related question of aiming the guns, which has been brought up We are already more then capable of writing a soft Ai capable of aiming a turret gun at a moving target with more accuracy then a human pilot ever could. Furthermore, it would take too much focus for a pilot to focus on both aiming and moving, one act would distract from the other. As such the logical option is that a soft (Ie, not intellegent, just well programmed) AI would be responsible for fireing. This has the added advantage of allowing firing at multuple targets at once, making full use of every turret despite the pilot only being able to look at one at a time.
Unfortunately it's also boringly practical, it doesn't feel like an interesting space battle if your only job is to drive and trust your computer to kill everything. It also makes your pilot feel rather worthless and just reiterates the idea that humans don't belong in space fighters, which is something you've clearly implied you want to make happen.
One option is to say that there are only so many guns on the sphere, that they can only cover certain angles of fire, and possibly that they have a slow recharge time before being ready to fire again. This places more tactical challenge on the pilot. He won't be aiming exaclty, but his job is to make sure an enemy is within range of the turrets that are ready to fire.
This would give a feel much like navel battle where one didn't so much 'aim' their cannons as they focused on trying to 'cross the T' to arrange for their cannons to be facing in the general direction of the enemy while the enemy wasn't facing them and trust the cannons to fire. The tactics are all about knowing where you want to position yourself to ensure a shot can be fired, and even more so knowing where your enemy wants you and *not* being in those spots. A skill pilot may even notice that the enemy just fired from his aft cannon and that there will be a X second recharge before that cannon is ready to fire again and thus he can move in for an easy kill while one of the gunns is unable to cover the pilots flank etc.
Alternatively you could add a *second* man in charge of acting as a gunner (there is no way the pilot can fly well and shoot well in this scenario, not unless you greatly limit both number of guns and thrusters). If so they gunner will likely have a setup similar to the one for the pilot, except that in addition to the usual 360 display he has the ability to toggle which 'gun' he wishes to control and he gets a zoomed in display with that gun but...well it really takes allot of work to justify having humans gunning and the solution for how/why the humans are aiming in this case depends largely on what handwave excuse you used to justify guns being mained by a pilot.
[Answer]
# The enemy's gate is down
While we know that in practice it would all be drones and allow no manual control, a story needs a hero and pilots make good heroes.
However as anyone who's played asteroid will tell you, even in two dimensions controlling flight with 0 resistance is a fairly difficult thing to do. That's where pilot aids come in.
Let the AI/autopilot or other similar system handle stability control. A feedback system from the joystick that maintains rotation while there's pressure and stops it when the joystick is released. Gryroscopes can track the actual angles involved, that's a very basic technology, the computer fires the thrusters to stabilise the movement. The pilot just needs to point and shoot.
This of course requires a switch to disable it for plot reasons. You'd be mad to disable it in practice, but the hero can cope, otherwise he's no hero.
There are multiple options here, you can have it accept lateral movement, correct lateral movement, accept or correct lateral movement only on command. All of these have advantages in a theoretical fight. Spin/tumble should always be corrected unless the pilot disables it.
# Additional notes
### More thrusters fewer weapons
6 thrusters only handles lateral, you need off axis thrusters to handle rotation. 6 clusters of 4 or 5 thrusters will do it.
If the ship has weapons in all directions, there's no need for the pilot to handle complex maneuvers. A bit of hand waving to limit his arc of fire to something along the primary axis of his ship.
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Have the pilot/gunner in a 3 dimensional rotating turret sphere that he could rotate to any orientation independent of the ships orientation with the weapon systems tracking the direction the pilot/gunner is facing. This could also counteract rotation of the ship (especially if the crew pod is centered on the crafts axis of rotation/ center of gravity) to keep the pilot/gunner facing in any desired direction.
The best example in fiction I can think of is the gunner seat in the Gunstar from [*The Last Starfighter*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter) movie. The pilot was oriented forward in the ship and flew the ship, while the gunners seat rotated to allow the gunner to point in any direction, and the ships guns tracked the gunners orientation and fired where he pointed.
Here is a fine paint drawing showing the concept.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yPuGI.png)
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I wouldn't worry about that operation. You only turn in the direction you are flying as a convenience. There's a wonderful scene about this in the book version of Apollo 13. They explain how they're going to do a burn to turn the spacecraft around to face forward. In the book, they explain that this is a completely wasted maneuver. They get nothing out of the spent delta-V. The reason for turning around to face forward: there's an army of engineers with slide rules on the ground making sure this flight goes smoothly, and they were worried that one of those engineers would get the sign wrong on an equation if they weren't facing in what terretrial-bound humans think of is "forward." It was decided that the wasted fuel was worth avoiding the risk of a human error in the slide-rule era.
The standard way to manage orientation is to have clusters of small attitude control thrusters. They don't have to be big. Changing the attitude of a ship is *way* easier than accelerating the craft in a meaningful way. You could also spin up gyroscopes to save fuel on small maneuvers like the ISS does. They have their limitations, but they are much more flexible than bleeding precious mass out into the void.
I'd give them a trackball control -- you only have 2 axes that matter for the purposes of aligning guns. Because the roll axis isn't as important, you could probably actually set it up so that the ball spins inside the socket to control roll.\* On their computer screen, you could have a visual like Google Sky showing the constellations as reference. I'd probably have two modes. Auto mode, where they point in an orientation and click a button to say "please orient me this way as efficiently as possible," and a Manual mode which is never used for any reason, but your hero will probably demand a manual mode so that they can override the computer. Heroes are that way.
\* I've never seen an arcade game that tracks the ball spinning in the socket, but now I'm a little curious if there was one!
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I will not try to optimize the 6 you found for the number of thrusters or your concept. Somebody build that ship, some very poor guy had to fly it into battle and it apparently started rotating sometimes because something broke perhaps. I will also not say that one needs a window to look out of, one should not ask too many questions about science fantasy concepts. A computer screen is necessary if only to help see - space is too large for human eyes. I will call the ship the "death trap" for historic reasons.
So the answer I think is rather simple: You need a computer program that rotates the pilot if needed. When would it be needed? Humans are not that great at being accelerated in any direction really (another reason why I wouldn't use humans for this), but we are best if it is in the direction we are facing. So if one accelerates quickly, you either press a button or the autopilot does it. A program could easily identify the need for rotation and start spinning the "chair" or "cabin" or whatever so the pilot faces in the direction of acceleration. I do not think it is so much an issue of "how can he/she still stay in control" and more one of surviving acceleration. So during those periods, you need at least computer assisted steering. This is where (genetic) enhancements come into play - improved humans could maybe survive more acceleration.
The other case would be if there was some kind of malfunction or hit or whatever that caused rotation. But as I see it, this would be the exception and the autopilot would easily correct this again with the thrusters. If this happens to be common, you can have your piloting cabin float in some kind of medium - so if the outside starts to rotate, the inside does it much slower, allowing time to counteract.
When will it not be needed? Any other time. **There is no need to constantly rotate the pilot** to constantly face in whatever direction is defined as forward.
So the computer will also counteract any kind of rotation that has happened for some reason. If both the thrusters and the rotating cabin malfunction, well, another reason why I wouldn't put a living human into that "death trap". Btw, think 2 sides fighting a war, one uses human pilots, the other one doesn't. The 2nd faction will have much faster accelerating spaceships and gain an instant advantage.
For manual controlling anything: Do not think so literal, we are dealing with advanced technology here. Even if there is no rotating, this is almost impossible to do. The pilot would see everything he needs via computer screens and can quite easily select a path, maybe even via touchscreen. Doing a calculation, especially with 6 thrusters, to find the right linear combination to do anything manually - now I'm starting to understand why the fighter keeps on spinning. My car already does most of the thinking for me, the same would be true for an advanced space fighter. It is very easy to calculate for a computer how the thrusters should be powered, but very hard for a human at the speeds required.
At the end, for the human it will almost look like a computer game or simulation if you will - he will have some input devices, maybe something fancy like mind control, maybe a good old joystick, maybe something very similar to what fighters have right now , and a computer program will translate that input for him.
*I once saw a demonstration of a medical instrument that allows for 3d movements and rotations of equipment (or something) during operations, I do not remember the name though. Something like this would also be possible here. If you do know the name, please let me know via a comment.*
Many modern cars one can simply buy already do most of the thinking, it would be insane to assume that spaceships have less advanced electronics. This is why I commented on cyborg and mind reading devices. It is really not that far fetched compared to space death traps. If you can directly input your thoughts, you are much more maneuverable in battle. People are already working on such devices. But once again, keep also in mind that self driving cars are already a reality.
So, in short: If you absolutely have to put people into fighter spaceships and then ask questions about how this is possible, use enhanced super-humans and pretty straight forward solutions to rotation
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In the movie "Apollo 13", the crew has to make a manual burn to adjust their orbit while the ship's computer is shut down. The crew (with some help from their flight controllers in Houston) aim at the terminator line on the Earth and use it as a reference point while firing the engine. While extremely dramatized in the movie (the real Apollo 13 did not bounce around like a pinball), this illustrates that manual orientation and navigation in space is indeed possible.
Unless you are using some sort of magical drive, real spaceflight is actually rather "slow and majestic". Distances are vast, and you make deliberate movements with your spacecraft in order to minimize the use of fuel and prevent things like over rotation or spinning out of control. Even in Earth orbit, you might have to take several orbits to close to firing range with your space fighter, so you will have lots of time to make adjustments, line up your shot and so on. (Of course your opponent is also using his time wisely.....).
The reality for near term and plausible mid future "space fighters" will probably resemble the way the former Soviet Union handled things. Long range radars track aircraft and ground controllers (or controllers on "spacecraft carriers") will be sending detailed instructions to the pilots to vector them onto the target. If possible, the controller will even set up shots for "beyond visual range" missile shots. The pilot is only released to engage once he is in visual range of the enemy, in which case the controller can't help anymore. The pilot uses his thruster clusters to point the nose or missile launchers at the enemy (probably based on a combination of visual and radar cues) and takes the shot. One the enemy is destroyed or the fuel warning comes on, the flight controller then provides instructions on where to point the spacecraft, what burn to make and guides the craft home.
[Answer]
One way to do it would be to arbitrarily establish "down". Our brains are evolved to think that way.
The ship would fix on some distant bright object and set that as down. Our inner ears do a lot to establish which way is up and which is down (the eyes help too). The inner ear works via inertia: movement of fluids in the semicircular canal and weight of otoliths.
image from <http://what-when-how.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/tmp15F75.jpg>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W9SpU.jpg)
INPUT FROM THE VESTIBULAR SYSTEM
>
> Sensory information about motion, equilibrium, and spatial orientation
> is provided by the vestibular apparatus, which in each ear includes
> the utricle, saccule, and three semicircular canals. The utricle and
> saccule detect gravity (information in a vertical orientation) and
> linear movement. The semicircular canals, which detect rotational
> movement, are located at right angles to each other and are filled
> with a fluid called endolymph. When the head rotates in the direction
> sensed by a particular canal, the endolymphatic fluid within it lags
> behind because of inertia, and exerts pressure against the canal’s
> sensory receptor.
> text from <http://vestibular.org/understanding-vestibular-disorder/human-balance-system#>
>
>
>
If these fluids and the otoliths were replaced by magnetic items of similar density, the pilot could operate normally during shore leave. In the ship, the ship could make a magnetic field corresponding with the predetermined arbitrary "down". It is not artificial gravity but the pilot would feel "down" and could orient himself.
I could imagine the ship swinging around to facilitate operations in a head up, tail down orientation for the pilot. If you are going to rely on human biology to do a job, it is understandable to make a few accommodations.
**ADDENDUM**
I see with @Aric Fowlers comment below I was unclear. I address this question from OP:
/My issue is that the pilot would struggle to do anything inside this ship if it were rotating/
I interpreted "struggle" to mean that the sensation of rotation is disorienting. Which is definitely true; rotation at varying speeds around varying axes sounds like the most nauseating type of carnival ride. My answer is to make it feel to the pilot that he is not rotating. Whether looking out a window or watching a screen it will feel as though he is sitting at a desk on land.
If the question is just the physics of how to rotate a sphere using "6 perpendicular thrusters" then the answer is you cannot. Draw the vectors and you will see why. One must have a tangential force to produce rotation. Your thrusters must come off of the perpendicular. If a thruster can bend at 90 degrees it can produce a tangential force and cause rotation. You could give 1 thruster 180 degrees of freedom and it could produce all rotation. You could give each thruster the ability to bend 90 degrees in 1 direction and a combination of thrusters can produce any rotation.
With the structure of the ship I can think of no reason to rotate on purpose, unless the pilot is peering out of a glass window. Even my 2008 minivan has a backup camera. The ship can move any direction and shoot any direction. It will have screens showing those directions. It is symmetrical; there is not really a front and back. Front and back is a relic of vessels that have a front and back.
That said, the ability to rotate the ship would be good because it might start rotating from an external applied force and you will want to stop that if the ship ever docks or lands. Otherwise it will act like a pingpong ball with spin on it and skitter off into the hanger once it makes contact.
[Answer]
I'd like to suggest a different approach, one which plays to the strengths of the human sensorium rather than fighting against our basic nature; gun systems should all fire in a single direction as dictated by the pilot's orientation thus creating an arbitrary "forward" to the ball ship, this removes 1. about ten years worth of training for your pilots by allowing them to pick an arbitrary external orientation set up that works for them (this orientation scheme can be set up fleetwide, and in fact it should be for ease of communications and maneuver) without requiring true three dimension, 360 degree awareness and 2. removes a whole mess of aggravation concerning weapon systems redundancy, duplication, and power/ammunition access.
I can't take create for this solution it comes straight off the pages of the *Lost Fleet* series by Jack Campbell.
[Answer]
**The pilot would set their orientation either to an origin point, a dynamic point, or an plane.**
And then from there they would probably constantly reset it.
What this means precisely is imagine the outer ship, with all the guns/thrusters (let's only really talk about thrusters) on the outsider. You can imagine this has a sphere for now, though likely you would have some stronger thrusters and weaker thrusters, which you rotate around in order to accelerate in the correct direction. Some of these thrusters are orthogonal to the outer ship sphere, and some lie tangent to the sphere for the purpose of rotating the ship (these tangent thrusters are unnecessary if you imagine the ship as having an infinite number of thrusters at all points on the surface of the sphere). A more advanced ship may have thrusters that are at an angle between orthogonal and tangent, but that's confusing and just accomplish a mix of what the other thrusters do.
Now, the pilot cockpit, is another concentric sphere, which always orients itself towards the **target**. Imagine computerized ball bearings between the outer ship and the cockpit, which as the ship spins or displaces, these ball bearings all adjust the cockpit such that it is looking towards whatever the target the pilot set it on.
Re-hashing what the target would be, it being the objective makes alot of sense. This could either being another ship, docking thing, a race track that updates to a new point along a arc as you advance.
Another possible target could be a specific point in space that the pilot sets. Since everything is relative, they hit a button, and maybe their current position becomes the target, and now as they fly around, they always look at it.
The last possibility I mentioned, would be setting it to an axis, like defining their current facing direction as looking at the x y plane, and then regardless of how they translate their ship, the cockpit continues to face the x y plane.
**This then requires the a joystick of course that allows the pilot to easily control their position relative to the target.** I like to imagine this as a floating ball in front of them (for simplicity, I'm sure there is a better control system), where they displace it in 3d space to control their thrust relative to target.
From there, if we have our sphere with infinity thruster density across it's surface, it's easy to imagine. If it is a mix of stronger and weaker displacement thrusters in different locations, with rotational thrusters, a computer quickly handles the orientation of the ship using the rotational thrusters in order to support the pilot's thrust decision.
**But in reality we wouldn't use pilots probably, just super sophisticated missiles**
[Answer]
In my imagination, I'd always imagined the best controller to be a little model of the ship, that you can pull around by hand, giving you the full 6 degrees of freedom.
The closest to this that I ever found, and the best UI controller I've ever found for universal-degrees-of-freedom gaming such as Descent, is the SpaceOrb 360, which I believe is sadly no longer produced:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dEPVO.jpg)
Unfortunately, it's a serial device, and the drivers aren't compatible with anything even if you manage to get one and a serial port adapter.
[If anyone's super interested in this,
<https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheBestControllerForFPSASpaceTecSpaceOrb360ControllerWorkingWithWindows7UsingArduinoAndOrbShield.aspx> has a great writeup about getting it working with newer hardware... while the OrbShield adapter is now called the orbotron, available at <http://www.thingotron.com/> maybe (been a while since that site was updated)]
---
As for which position the pilot should be oriented, I'd say the answer is "facing forwards". In a sphere, that's going to be the current (or, most recent) direction of thrust. A simple way to do this is to have them in a weighted, dampened gymbal, like a ship's compass: no need for computer control, then.
Some computer control would be nice, so you wouldn't flip around when braking on approach to other objects; I'd say just locking the gymbal once you get close to other objects.
Another option which would be intuitive to the pilot would be to allow the pilot to just specify an object (earth, sun, space station) that their velocity is to be measured relative to, and then face them "forward" in the direction of that velocity.
Automated gunning will be important. You don't need to have a gunner following the gun, just tap on a thing on your scanner to lock onto it and shoot it. A manual gunner would never get the relative math correct (yes, this makes for a less dramatic story, I'm sorry).
A number of other things should be handled by the ship, too: approach, docking and undocking with other things, avoiding running into its its own projectiles, and plotting trajectories and thrust directions. You tap in your destination, and the ship calculates the best path through the system to minimize time, or fuel, or whatever.
But that's realism. For drama, the pilot should probably be involved in some of this stuff at a lower level than simply commanding.
[Answer]
Here's my take on it. It's largely an argument against the need to orient the pilot of a space fighter, but I still feel it's a valid response to your question.
Firstly, my assumptions:
**Single Pilot** - To preserve the ideal of a fighter pilot in single combat, I've opted for a model where the spacecraft has a single crewperson.
**Direct Manual Control** - Assuming that the same restrictions that preclude computerised weaponry also preclude the use of computerised attitude control and so forth, we're left with direct manual control.
**Orbital mechanics** - Without a propellant several orders of magnitude more efficient than what we currently have, it's just not practical to drastically change course during spaceflight. So all spacecraft will utilise orbital mechanics to harness gravity as momentum.
The combination of these assumptions leaves us with combat based almost entirely on the skill of the combatants, but with minimal capacity to actually "fly" the spacecraft. We're a long way removed from the archetypal dogfights and flying aces. Instead, we're left with the:
**Sniper Mathematician Gunslinger Hermit**
The SMGH does not out-maneuver or evade their opponent, since both are all but locked into their trajectories. As such, they wouldn't really need to orient themselves. Instead, the outcome would be determined by a few things.
They would need accurate and up-to-date information on their target. If external data is susceptible to tampering, then they would need to be able to visually identify their target, and use available reference data to extrapolate the information relevant to making a shot. This would be akin to a sniper using a rangefinder based on the size of an average human, or a submariner using a ship recognition manual. I'd suggest that they have a ridiculous array of visual overlays, scopes, filters and reference manuals. Beyond that, it's up to you what other sensors can be used without risk of tampering.
The SMGH would then need to make complex ballistic calculations that account for their own velocity, the velocity of their target, and any external factors, such as gravity from nearby celestial objects. And unless their target is unaware or unable to return fire, they need to do this quickly and accurately.
You could make a distinction between ballistic weaponry and beam weaponry (if it exists in your universe) - where beam weaponry has the advantage of near-instantaneous effect, but requires line-of-sight, whereas ballistic weaponry could potentially hit a target on the other side of the solar system, as long as it didn't deviate from a predetermined course.
From those bones you build. Do your SMGH's live a life orbiting a planet for weeks/months/years at a time, honing their skills in preparedness for a single critical shot once in a blue moon? Do they hurtle after their enemy on carefully crafted parabolae and planning their shot over a period of days? Do your military heroes have a kill tally and a maximum kill distance recorded against their name?
Again, I acknowledge that this is really an alternate take on your concept.
[Answer]
The difficulty of piloting such a ship would be due to the pilot's biological inclination to be vertically oriented on a horizontal plane, and being held against it by acceleration due to gravity.
Through a neural interface, the pilot's consciousness could be disconnected from their biological sensors and integrated with the ship's own sensor hardware, designed to serve the needs of moving and being oriented freely in 3D space.
This would probably feel a lot like an out-of-body experience, where the pilot has the sensation of watching their own body or the ship it's aboard as if from a distant vantage point. This visualization would be simulated by the computer from sensor data, allowing the pilot to mentally shift their perspective arbitrarily in order to understand how things are positioned and moving in space.
It's even possible that enough training with such an interface could afford an indescribable ability to simply "understand" 3D flight, controlling the fighter as if it was a direct extension of the pilot's own body. The human brain has an incredible ability called [neuroplasticity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity) allowing it to rewire itself to process new information sources. In one real world example, the brain can be trained using feedback from [a specially designed device placed on the tongue](http://heliusmedical.com/index.php/divisions/neurohabilitation/the-pons-device) to replace data no longer available from the inner ear.
In short, my answer is that the orientation of the pilot's body doesn't need to factor into their ability to control this kind of vehicle at all.
[Answer]
I once played an indie space game that went for frictionless space and relied on space fighters (more like Firefly in that they were space trucks and you hauled cargo and made salvage runs. However, if you wanted to dog fight that was there too.). In either case, ships had a "correction system" that allowed for better control of the vessel. This was seen in the form of thrusters that would correct by caclulating to the speed of directional rotation and firing retro-thrusters to compensate when the pilot stopped the turn. (i.e. a ship making a right turn would fire thrusters on the right side of the ship in computer calculated bursts to counter the right turning momentum the moment the pilot stopped the turn... it was explained that the computer was quick enough and the thrusters were powerful enough to do this with little difference to atmospheric flight). The system could also be disengaged to allow for long distance travel, especially when conserving fuel and exploring areas of space that were not directly accessable by FTL. In game, most star systems had a warp gate for inter system travel and ships came with Jump Drives (essentially FTL by teleporting the entire ship to the new spot within a certain range of X, Y, and Z coordinates in space.) for shorter bursts within the system. Problem was that that the Jump Drives could only engage at maxed out speed, which ate into fuel supplies to get you up to that speed, and winning the game involved some exploration of space outside the starsystem. If one were to make a Jump Drive Jump, with the compensators off, you could essentially come out of the jump and not decellerate, effectively traveling at the highest possible speed in the game (which most engines couldn't reach outside of Jump Drive speeds), consume no fuel to maintain it, and stretch your jumps out for a much greater length of exploration before returning for a refuel. Since the game was continous space, anything within the map was accessible by flying like this given enough time and no enemy action (again, traveling too fast that they couldn't keep up with you), so I could do something for an hour, and keep an eye out for new worlds. Also was a viable way to get home if you realized you jumped too far and didn't have enough fuel to make it to safe harbors.
[Answer]
Interesting problem! I think you have to find a balance between two goals:
1. give the pilot as much information and as much control as possible, using as many senses and muscles as possible
2. shield the pilot's senses from overload - especially avoid him/her getting nauseous from the rapid rotation in dogfights
For 1) you actually *want* to make the pilot feel any rotation of the ship. So having the pilot seat statically attached to the hull would be the way to go, to convey any rotation to the pilot via inner ear. It would be a shame to leave that sense unused.
But for 2) you'd better have the seat decoupled from the hull, so that it is moved by the computer to always face the same direction. There will still be acceleration forces, but at least no rotation. The pilot then only uses normal inputs (screen or headset, headphones, maybe a haptic sensor suit) to get information. Controlling a fighter in space with the usual two-dimensional control could be challenging, though. But at least your pilot wouldn't go crazy from the tumbling.
I maintain that today's humans are simply not biologically adapted to fighting with high-thrust ships in microgravity and three dimensions. So I think you need to define how much your humans have evolved/adapted to be good at that kind of fighting, and how much assistance/babysitting from a computer they need.
Or you could actually set it up as plot point that some pilots prefer the raw nauseating dogfighting tumble, and others prefer to touch blinking lights on a screen to command their guns.
[Answer]
**Roller Gimbals**
There's lots of reasons why you might want to re-orient the outside of the craft, but as you say spinning the pilot around is uncomfortable. So avoid it altogether.
Take the idea of a monowheel, which comprises a rotating outside while the inside remains level. Extend this into three dimensions: the outer sphere rotates, while the inside remains stationary. Every time you spin the outer sphere, the wheel between it and the inner sphere should rotate in the opposite direction.
You can then give the pilot either a very large panoramic screen or an AR headset. No actual windows. Their joystick controls will then spin the *virtual* display they see, and the outer sphere with all the fixed gun ports on it.
[Answer]
If the fighter has guns and engines capable of firing in all directions, then it has no need to rotate at all. And it's probably not possible for a human mind to has 360° spatial awareness. You would probably need multiple pilots/gunners, each minding his own sector.
If you're limited to 1 pilot and you have the ability to rotate, you should focus at least weapons in only 1 direction, just to enable pilot to focus on all of them at once. Once the "forward" direction is established, you orient the pilot facing in that direction and that's it.
FPS game controls are great analogy, especially the evolution from sophisticated System Shock layout, where you could run, look and target independently to modern shooters, where looking and targeting are fused into one control, but with more independent lateral movement. Similar thing happened with Kamov Ka-50: the helicopter has turning response good enough that the main gun no longer needs fully movable mount - it's easier to aim the whole helicopter (the gun mount still has bit of travel to do the final aiming, but not a full turret).
] |
[Question]
[
I'm aware of the property of the number $2520$. It's divisible by all integer numbers from $1$ to $10$.
One of the factorizations of $2520$ is $7√ó360$.
It came to my mind to make a habitable planet that revolves around its star every $2520$ days. It has $7$ months (also the number of days in an Earth week) and each month has $360$ days (near the number of days in an Earth year). So the Earth completes every $7$ years about $36.8$ Earth days later than the planet does every one orbit.
But is it realistic to have $7$ months in a year?
Please read my own answer too.
[Answer]
The choice of the number of months in a calendar is very much arbitrary.
For example the Roman calendar before Julius Caesar reform had 10 solar months, 2 months and a leap year were added with his reform to synch it with the lunar cycles and with the seasons.
So the 12 months come from conveniently matching the 12 lunar cycles in 1 year, but it could have been 24, 36, 48, 60 and so on. Even the French revolutionaries and their base 10 systems left 12 months in the revolutionary calendar, only fixing the days of each month to 30.
If you want to make your calendar feel more real, try therefore to have some recurring astronomical phenomena having a similar periodicity, same as is the Moon for us. This could be, just as an example, a moon completing 7 cycles in 1 year, or 2 moons having 7 conjunctions in 1 year.
[Answer]
Humans have ordered days into weeks, months, and years to allow planning of their activities. Unfortunately, there is no *exact* match between the [orbital periods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period) of the Moon and Earth and the rotation of Earth. The mismatch between the lunar month and the year caused various workarounds and formulas, ending in the [Gregorian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar) calendar reforms.
So assume you have a world with an orbital period of roughly 2,520 (local) days. The people living there are *roughly* comparable to humans, who have a life expectancy of about 25,200 days (ten orbits), and who could be argued to be reasonably mature at 5,040 days (two orbits) and fully mature at 7,560 days (three orbits). Say a child should go to school after the first birthday, finish school and either go to college or an apprenticeship by the second birthday, not marry before the third birthday, and retire after the tenth birthday.
But this year is inconveniently long for many day-to-day purposes. So it gets divided into 7 'seasons' based on climate and crops. If they have 2,520 days between harvests, they must have a habit of growing and storing food for the bad times. Say some staple crops have roughly 360-day sowing-growing-harvesting period, and it is possible to fit four growing periods with a [crop rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_four-course_system) system into each year. It may be that in a bad year one harvest gets delayed, but then the old farmers will mutter \*'it ain't right, we should be planting roots by now, there will be a hunger winter.'
Call those seven 'months' *winter, snowmelt, wheat, turnip, barley, clover,* and *snowfall*.
Each of the month then gets sub-divided into equal sub-parts which are sized to allow e.g. the harvest or the threshing in one sub-parts. That's notional, you don't thresh turnips, and for things like paying rent or interest they're all the same length. 30 days.
[Answer]
**Why 12 months in a year?**
Firstly, this premise is wrong. The [Ethiopian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar) and [Coptic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_calendar) calendars for instance have 13 months. Turns out we have [a lot of calendars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars).
Secondly, even in our Gregorian calendar, there's a hint that there hasn't always been 12 months. *Septem*ber much? Does that sound like the name of a 9th month?
An ancient version of the [Roman calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Legendary_10_month_calendar) had 10 months, and *Septem*ber was indeed the 7th month. Romans adopted a 12-ish-month calendar long before Julius Caesar. 12-ish because it had shorter months, and thus an extra leap month every other year and February was somehow even more absurd than it is today.
The [Julian calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar), enacted by Gaius Julius Caesar, simplified timekeeping considerably by having 12 fixed months of fixed length, give or take a leap day in February. This was inspired by two things.
The first is the Moon. The Moon goes through approximately 12 lunar cycles a solar year. This is evident in lunar calendar such as the [Hijri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar), which has 12 months but about 10 days less per year (which is why the 9th month, Ramadan, starts on a different Gregorian date every year).
The second is Egyptians. [Egyptians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar) had a fixed 365-days calendar, with 3 seasons of 120 days, and each season divided in 4 months of 30 days, for a total of 12 months, again based on the 12 lunar cycles. The extra 5 days were shoved into a short 13th month. A proposal to add a leap day to that month inspired the concept in the Julian calendar.
The Gregorian calendar is largely the Julian unchanged, now with less leap days. What we can see through all these examples though is that 12, and occasionally 13, is the standard amount of months for a lot of different cultures through time.
**What about 7?**
7 plays a significant role in our calendar: it's the number of days per week. And the answer to why here is largely religious. And I'm not talking about the the hit book *The Bible*, whereby God creates everything in 6 days and then naps on the 7th.
Like most things Christian, this wasn't a novel idea. The symbolism of 7 comes from the Sumerians, who loved it so much that we got the [Seven Heavens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_heavens) out of it. Sargon of Akkad (an Akkadian and conqueror of Sumeria) is supposedly the first bloke to decree a seven-day week, a couple of millenia before CE.
The Sumerians though still had a [calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar) of 12 months, of 30 days each, and leap months every so often, once again based on lunar cycles.
Still, Sumerian culture is probably your best starting point for a 7-month calendar. An unexplained divergence (lost to time probably) could have happened that it was decreed that a year would be 7 months (with lunar cycles possibly recorded separately).
Or some later culture appropriates the Sumerian symbolism of 7 so hard they decide to change their calendar from a fairly standard 12-ish months into 7 months.
---
**TL;DR this far**: Sure, why not. All you really need is people who love 7 a lot.
---
**How to make your own 7-month calendar?**
First we'll assume 365.25 days per year, Julian-style. You can always adjust the amount of leap time later.
* Option 1: 7 √ó 60
Sumerians used a 60-base system, from which we got our 60 minutes an hour and such. So with that in mind, let's have 60-day months. You have 6 regular months of 60 days, and a seventh super special month of 5 days plus a leap day every 4 year.
Bonus, maybe that's what inspired Egyptians to have their extra short month. Or maybe you copied the Egyptians, dealer's choice.
* Option 2: 7 √ó 52
There are approximately 52 weeks of 7 days in a year, so by transitive property there could be 7 months of 52 days. You'd have an extra day to tack on to a month for 365, and another to tack on every 4 year (either to the same month or to another month).
Which month(s) you chose is up to you. The first one, the last one, the middle one, or generally the one with the most significance.
* Option 3: 7 √ó ?
A more esoteric system could have e.g. 50 days per month, with the extra e.g. 15.25 days shoved off the calendar either into a byzantine leap month mechanic (like a leap month every 4 years, then 3, then 5, then 4 again, or whatever the maths ends up adding to), or as an extra unofficial intercalary period between the years (an 8th month that people don't call month and don't count as such, but still exist).
This wouldn't be entirely unrealistic.
[Answer]
The division of a solar year into smaller periods is pretty much arbitrary. If you want to, you could make an Earth calendar with seven 52- or 53- day months.
But a 7-month calendar is probably *more* realistic if there's something “special” about a time interval of 1/7 of a year (or 360 days in your world). Possibilities include:
* The planet is a colony of Earth, and wants a unit of time close to that of an Earth year.
* The planet's largest moon has an orbital period of 360 days (cf. Earth's 29.53059-day synodic cycle inspiring 30-day months).
* The planet's most important staple crop has a growing cycle of 360 days.
* The sapient species has an average pregnancy period of 360 days. (This would work well in a culture that treats childbearing as sacred.)
* A particular volcano near the capital of the civilization that introduced the calendar has a regular eruption period of 360 days.
* The people there count in base 360.
Whatever cycle inspires your calendar need not be *exactly* 360 days, just close enough that it makes more sense to divide the year into 7 instead of into 6 or 8. So, between 336 and 387 days or so.
[Answer]
Month is not just something people arbitrarily came up with. The word "month" is derived from the word "moon"; there are 12 full cycles of moon per year (plus some). That is why there are 12 months.
There is probably some similar reason that makes sense that has made your people on your planet conclude it is a good idea to divide the year into seven epochs.
However, if it is not based on how a moon revolves around a planet, calling it a "month" might not be a good idea, etymologically speaking.
[Answer]
# Part One: The Orbital Period of Your Moon.
## Months on Earth
On the planet Earth, the sidereal day is 0.99726968 days and the synodic day is 1.00000 day.
The Sidereal orbital period or year of the Earth is 365.256363 days.
The sidereal month or orbital period of the Moon is 27.321 days, and the synodic month of the Moon is 29.530 days.
So a year of the planet Earth is 13.369 sidereal orbital periods of the Moon, or 12.3689 synodic orbital periods of the Moon.
A calendar month in the Julian and Gregorian calendars is based on the synodic orbital period of the Moon and is 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long. Other calendar systems have used months of different lengths.
## Moving the Moon
If the Moon was farther from Earth and thus took longer to orbit the Earth, a calendar month could be longer compared to Earth's year, and thus there would be fewer months in Earth's year.
The Hill sphere of a planet is all the space within a Hill radius of that planet. A planet can keep a natural satellite in a stable orbit inside the Hill radius.
The Hill sphere of Earth has a radius of about 1,500,000 kilometers. At that distance the Moon would have an orbital period of 210 days and 7 hours or 210.291666 days. So the year of Earth would be 1.7369 sidereal months of the Moon.
<https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/orbital-period>
>
> The Hill sphere is only an approximation, and other forces (such as radiation pressure or the Yarkovsky effect) can eventually perturb an object out of the sphere.[citation needed] As stated, the satellite (third mass) should be small enough that its gravity contributes negligibly.[2](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1209/1209.5323.pdf):‚Ääp.26ff‚Ää
>
>
> Detailed numerical calculations show that orbits at or just within the Hill sphere are not stable in the long term; it appears that stable satellite orbits exist only inside 1/2 to 1/3 of the Hill radius.[citation needed]
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere#Regions_of_stability>
So the outer limit of Earth's true region of stability should be about 500,000 to 750,000 kilometers.
At 750,000 kilometers the orbital period of the Moon would be about 74.333 days. An Earth year would be 4.9137 sidereal months long.
At 500,000 kilometers the orbital period of the Moon would be about 40.458333 days. An Earth year would be 9.0279 sidereal months long.
## Note on Synodic Months
Of course the synodic months of the Moon, which would be the months used in calendars, would be a bit longer than the sidereal months, and thus there would be few synodic months per year in the hypothetical calendars.
But if you want someone to calculate the synodic months of the Moon if it was 500,000, or 750,000, or 1,500,000, kilometers from Earth you will have to get someone else to do that.
## Examples in our Solar System
Sponde, the outermost tiny irregular moon of Jupiter, has an orbital period of about Earth days. So the year of Jupiter is about 5.8955 sidereal months of Sponde long.
Saturn LVIII, the outermost tiny irregular moon of Saturn, has an orbital period of about 1,624.2 Earth days. So the year of Saturn is about 6.622 sidereal months of Saturn LVIII long.
Ferdinand, the outermost tiny irregular moon of Uranus, has an orbital period of about 2,790.03 Earth days. So the year of Uranus is about 10.999 sidereal months of Ferdinand long.
Neso, the outermost tiny irregular moon of Neptune, has an orbital period of about 9,740.73 Earth days. So the year of Neptune is about 6.1797 sidereal months of Neso long.
## Long-term Stability
According to page 3 of this article:
<https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1209/1209.5323.pdf>
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The bibliography lists the source article for that as: Kipping, D. M. 2009a, MNRAS, 392, 181
Which can be found at: <https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/392/1/181/1071655>
But the giant planets in our solar system have outermost moons which have orbital periods longer than one ninth of the years of their planets.
Kipping was discussing the suitability of hypothetical exomoons for have having lifeforms, which requires that those hypothetical exomoons have orbits which are stable for hundreds of millions or billions of years.
But the outermost moons of the giant planets are believed to be captured asteroids, comets, or other small solar system objects. They are not believed to have orbits stable for billions of years. Thus their orbital periods can be longer than 1/9 or the years of their planets.
And perhaps the only story function of your planet's moon will be to serve as a basis of the calendar of the natives of that world for all of the thousands of years that their civilization might last. So as long as the orbital period of the moon doesn't change noticeably during the thousands of years that the calendar is used, it doesn't matter much to the story whether the moon will escape into interplanetary space ten thousand or ten million years after the end of the story.
## Tides
One problem with moons is that the more massive a moon is, especially relative to the mass of its planet, the more important the tidal interactions between the planet and the moon will be. Those tidal interactions will tend to slow down the rotation period of the planet, so there will be few planetary days during a planetary year, and also drive the moon farther from the planet.
## Visibility
You will want your moon to have a visible disc as seen from the planet, so the phases of your moon will be visible from the planet and and thus a synodic month of your moon will be an element in the planetary calendar.
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> The extreme crescent phase of Venus can be seen without a telescope by those with exceptionally acute eyesight, at the limit of human perception. The angular resolution of the naked eye is about 1 minute of arc. The apparent disk of Venus' extreme crescent measures between 60.2 and 66 seconds of arc,[5](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40746/how-would-the-characteristics-of-a-habitable-planet-change-with-stars-of-differe) depending on the distance from Earth.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus#Naked_eye_observations>
I myself have sometimes thought that the crescent phase of Venus might be barely visible to my unaided eyes.
And to make the phases of your moon more visible to the eyes of natives of your planet you must either give them much better eyesight than humans or make the angular diameter of your moon greater than that of a crescent Venus. I guess that an angular diameter of 120 arch seconds or 2 arc minutes should be the minimum.
A full circle is 21,600 arc minutes, so a radius of a circle is about 3,437.7496 arc minutes long. To have an angular diameter of 2 arc minutes, a moon should have a diameter 1/1,718.8748 of the semi-major of Axis of its orbit around the planet.
Assuming the moon orbits at 50,000 to 1,500,000 kilometers, it should have a diameter of 29.09 to 874.66 kilometers to have an angular diameter of 2 arc minutes.
And you may want your moon to have an angular diameter much greater than 2 arc minutes, and thus have a much greater diameter than 29 to 875 kilometers. Especially since even a diameter of 875 kilometers might not be enough to make the moon a spheroid in shape. If the moon is noticeably lumpy that will make its phases have funny shapes.
# Part Two: A Year 2,520 Earth days long.
Here is a link to a question: <https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40746/how-would-the-characteristics-of-a-habitable-planet-change-with-stars-of-differe/40758#40758>
The answer by user177107 gives a table with characteristics of different types of main sequence stars. One thing listed is the distance from a star where a planet would receive as much radiation as Earth receives from the Sun, which I call the Earth Equivalent Distance or EED.
The table shows that for an A5V star the orbital period at the EED would be 1984.29 days, while for an A2V star the orbital period at the EED would be 2,526.01 days.
So if your planet orbited in the EED of an A2V star it could have year 2,520 Earth days long.
But an A2V star would be much too massive and short lived to have a naturally occurring habitable planet. Unless your planet was terraformed to be habitable by some advanced civilization, it should not have an oxygen rich atmosphere that multi celled land life forms could breathe.
According to Stephen H. Dole in *Habitable Planets for Man* (1964) a F2V class star would be the heaviest star which could remain on the main sequence for as long as 3 billion years and thus possibly have an oxygen rich atmosphere. And some scientists might think that Dole was being too optimistic about F2V stars.
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf>
Anyway, a planet orbiting in the EED of an F2V star would have a year of 1,018.01 Earth Days.
**To be continued...**
Finally continued.
A F2V star would have a mass of 1.44 Suns and a luminosity of 5.001 Suns according to the table in the answer by users17707 to this question.
<https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40746/how-would-the-characteristics-of-a-habitable-planet-change-with-stars-of-differe>
A star with a luminosity of 5.001 Suns would have an EED at a distance of 1 AU multiplied by the square root of 5.001, or 2.2362915 AU. Using those figures, this:
<https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/orbital-period>
Orbital period calculator gives an orbital period at the EED of 1,017.8 days.
According to the same calculator, a planet orbiting a star with a mass of of 1.44 suns at a distance of 4.093 AU would have an orbital period of 2,520 days.
4.093 AU is 1.8302622 times 2.2362915 AU. 1.8302622 squared is 3.3498597, so a planet orbiting at 4.093 AU from an F2V star should receive 1 divided by 3.3498597 time as a much radiation from its star as Earth gets from the Sun. That is only 0.2985199 times as much radiation as Earth gets.
So the planet will be much colder than Earth unless it has an atmosphere which has more of a greenhouse effect than Earth's atmosphere does while remaining breathable for humans and/or the native lifeforms in your story.
A table in this article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-type\_main-sequence\_star#:~:text=An%20F%2Dtype%20main%2Dsequence,between%206%2C000%20and%207%2C600%20K.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-type_main-sequence_star#:%7E:text=An%20F%2Dtype%20main%2Dsequence,between%206%2C000%20and%207%2C600%20K.)
Gives slightly different figures for a F2V type star, a mass of 1.46 Suns and a luminosity of 5.13 Suns. A luminosity of 5.13 Suns gives an EED of 2.2649503 AU.
Putting those figures in the orbital period calculator, the orbital period of a planet at the EED becomes 1,030.3 days. The calculator indicates that a planet orbiting at a distance of 4.1119 AU would have an orbital period of 2,520 days.
4.1119 AU is 1.8154482 times 2.2649503 AU, so a planet with an orbital period of 2,520 days would receive only 0.3034116 times as much radiation from an F2V star as Earth gets from the Sun.
Can a planet be habitable for liquid water using lifeforms if it orbits its star at a distance of about 1.8302622 or 1.8154482 times the EED distance from its star?
Here is link to a table listing various estimates in the last sixty years of the inner or outer edges of the Sun's circumstellar Habitable Zone. By the definitions of an AU and of an EED, the EED in our solar system is 1 AU
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone#Solar_System_estimates>
There are fourteen estimates. Ten estimates give the outer edge of the habitable zone. Those estimates give outer edges of 1.02-1.18, 1.004, 1.05-1.08, 1.24, 1.37, 1.67, 2.0, 2.4, 3.0, and 10 AU.
So some scientific estimates do indicate that planets can be habitable for liquid water using life in general at or even beyond 1.8 times the EED of a star.
Part Three: can You Take the Pressure?
I note that the 2.4 AU estimate assumes a volcanic hydrogen atmospheric concentration of 50 percent. And 10 AU estimate involves a world having tens to thousands of bars of hydrogen in the atmosphere.
One bar is equivalent to 0.986923 standard atmospheric pressure, since 1 atmosphere of pressure is 1.01325 bar. It is also equal to 750.062 millimeters of mercury (mmHg).
10 bars of hydrogen would have a pressure of 7,500.62 mmHg, 100 bars of hydrogen would have a pressure of 75,006.2 mmHg, 1,000 bars of hydrogen would have a pressure of 750,062 mmHg, and 10,000 bars of hydrogen would have a pressure of 7,500,620 nnHg.
Going back to Dole, *Habitable Planets for Man* table 2 on page 16 gives the approximate limits of pressure of various non toxic gases that humans can survive breathing.
The highest values are for neon, 3,900? mmHg, and helium, 61,000? mmHg. The question marks indicate they are extrapolated figures. If those figures ae correct, a human could survive in an atmosphere containing up to 5.199 bars of neon and up to 81.32661 bars of helium.
There is no figure for hydrogen. Dole points out that humans can only survive in noncombustible mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen, and that a natural atmosphere is unlikely have large amounts of both hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen-oxygen mixtures are used by deep sea divers.
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> Hydrox, a gas mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, was used as a breathing gas in very deep diving. It allows divers to descend several hundred metres.[1](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1209/1209.5323.pdf)[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere#Regions_of_stability)
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> Precautions are necessary when using hydrox, since mixtures containing more than a few percent of both oxygen and hydrogen are explosive if ignited
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> In July 2012, after about a year of preparation and planning, members of the Swedish Historical Diving Society and the Royal Institute of Technology Diving Club, performed a series of hydrox dives in memory of Arne Zetterström, who was accidentally killed during the ascent from his record dive using hydrox in August 1945. The memorial dives were performed using the same breathing mixture of 96% hydrogen and 4% oxygen as was developed and tested by Zetterström in the 1940s. The dives were made to a depth of 40 metres (131 ft), just deep enough to be able to use the oxygen-lean gas mixture. Project Leader Ola Lindh commented that in order to repeat Zetterström's record the team would need to make a dive to 160 metres (525 ft), and even today a dive to that depth requires planning and equipment beyond the capabilities of most divers.
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> These studies scored a resounding success with a simulated dive to 701 metres (2,300 ft), by Théo Mavrostomos on 20 November 1990 at Toulon, during the COMEX Hydra X decompression chamber experiments. This dive made him "the deepest diver in the world".[7](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40746/how-would-the-characteristics-of-a-habitable-planet-change-with-stars-of-differe/40758#40758)
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox\_(breathing\_gas)#:~:text=Hydrox%2C%20a%20gas%20mixture%20of,to%20descend%20several%20hundred%20metres.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox_(breathing_gas)#:%7E:text=Hydrox%2C%20a%20gas%20mixture%20of,to%20descend%20several%20hundred%20metres.)
Dole believed that humans could survive with about 60 to 400 mmHg of oxygen. Thus a 95 percent hydrogen hydrox mix might theoretically be a breathable at pressure of 1,200 to 8,000 mmhg or 1.599 to 10.665 bars.
So maybe you should check the articles suggesting the habitable zone can extend beyond 1.7 AU with high hydrogen atmospheres. Possibly a lesser amounts of hydrogen will suffice at 1.8, and a world can have a atmosphere of several bars of nitrogen and only enough hydrogen and oxygen to warm the world and to be breathable.
Part Four: A Planet Not Inhabitable for Humans.
A planet with a 2,520 Earth day year could have liquid water temperatures and have liquid water using lifeforms but not be habitable for humans who would have to wear breathing gear or spacesuits when they visit.
Or a planet could have a 2,520 Earth day year and be much too cold for liquid water using life. There could be life forms using liquid ammonia or liquid methane. Humans could visit wearing heated clothing & breathing gear, or spacesuits.
Part Five: A Double star?
If a planet orbiting a F2V class star with a period of 2,520 Earth days might be too cold for liquid water using lifeforms, maybe having it orbit two F2V stars would work.
If an F2V star has 1.44 times he mass of the Sun and 5.001 times the luminosity, two would have 2.88 times the mass of the Sun and 10.002 times the luminosity. the square root of 10.002 is 3.1625938, so the EED around two close F2V stars would be at 3.1625938 AU.
According to the orbital period calculator a planet orbiting at 3.1625938 AU would have an orbital period of 1,210.4 days. And a planet orbiting two F2V class stars would have an orbital period of 2,520 days at a distance of 5.1565 AU. 5.1565 AU is 1.6304654 times 3.1625938 AU. so the planet with a 2,520 day year would be a little warmer in this scenario.
Part Six: A Quadruple Star?
So what if your planet orbits around four F2V class stars, arranged in two binaries which turn orbit their common center of mass? If the widest separation between the two pairs of stars is less than half an AU, the planet ought to have a stable orbit around the center of mass of the four stars.
Four F2V stars would have a combined mass of 5.76 Suns and a combined luminosity of 20.004 Suns. The square root of 20.004 is 4.4725831, So the EED of the quadruple star would be at 4.47258/31 AU from the center of gravity.
The orbital period calculator says that a planet at the EED would have an orbital period of 1,439.4 days. And a planet with an orbital period of 2,520 Earth days would have an orbital distance of 6.497 AU. 6.497 AU is 1.4526281 times 4.4725831 AU.
So someone might be tempted to speculate about a planet orbiting the center of mass of 8 stars with an orbital period of 2,520 Earth days.
But a star system with four F2V stars in two pairs with the two pairs close enough that a planet can have a stable orbit within the combined habitable zone of all four stars would be rare enough. Going up another level to an eight star system would be going too far into the statistically extremely improbable as far as I am concerned.
For a planet with a liquid water temperature to orbit around 8 stars the maximum separation of any of he stars would have to be less than a quarter or a fifth of the orbital distance of the planet. And I find it hard to believe in four pairs of F2V stars, each pair with sufficient separation between the two stars, and each of the four pairs of pairs having a separation several times that in each pair, and the two sets of four stars having a separation several times that in each pair of pairs, within the combined habitable zones of the four stars.
So it looks like someone who wants a planet with a year 2,520 Earth days long to have liquid water temperatures will have to put it near the outer edges of the combined habitable zones of four F2V stars.
And if they want human beings or other oxygen breathers to breathe the air they should search for gaseous elements and compounds which have very strong greenhouse effects and which are non toxic to oxygen breathers.
Part Seven: The Planet's Hill Sphere.
A planet's Hill sphere is the volume within the Hill radius of the planet. Moons orbiting the planet within 0.333 or 0.5 of the Hill radius will have long term stable orbits.
According to this calculator:
<https://www.vcalc.com/wiki/KurtHeckman/Hill+Sphere+Radius>
If the four stars have a combined mass of 20.004 Suns and the planet orbits them at a distance 6.497 AU and the planet has a mass of 1.00 Earth, the planet will have a Hill radius of 3,545,899.9 kilometers or 0.02370 Au.
The orbital period calculator indicates that an object with 0.01 Earth Mass orbiting an object with 1 Earth mass at a distance of 0.0237 AU will have an orbital period of 765.2 Days.
You want the orbital period of your moon to be one seventh of the 2,520 day orbital period of your planet, and thus it should be 360 days. The orbital calculator says your moon will have an orbital period of 360 days at a distance of 0.0143356 AU. Half of a Hill sphere of 0.02370 AU would be 0.01185 AU.
So your moon would be outside the region of truly long term stability and it would probably be a relatively temporary moon captured by the planet. But it wouldn't matter for most story purposes whether the moon would become lost into interplanetary space ten thousand or ten million or a hundred million years in the future.
I note that the synodic month of the moon, the period of the phases which would be the the basis of a month in the calendar, would be longer than the sidereal month of the moon, the period of the moon's orbit around the planet. If a synodic month of 360days is desired, an orbital period shorter than 360 days would be necessary, thus putting the moon a bit closer to the planet and giving it a bit more stable orbit.
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The short answer is yes, given the appropriate astrological movement that can be timed to that interval, and the absence of any other gravitational force in the planetary system that could disrupt this very fine balance.
The word for "month" and the word for "moon" are etymologically related; there are about 13 full moons in one year, and early calendars had 13 months in the year, consisting of 28 days each, for a total of 364 days. Obviously this isn't an exact division, and observation of "calendar drift" required an additional day each year to align the calendar with the seasons, and then an extra day every 4 years when it became clear the calendar was still drifting. Add in the meddling of various self-important Roman emperors adding days to their namesake months, and well-meaning but off by a few years Roman Catholic monks trying to match "year 1" to the birth of Christ, and we eventually arrive at the familiar 12-month calendar with just over 30 days each on average.
In your world, you can handwave that gravitational tidal forces produced a more interconnected planet-moon system that exactly subdivided the 2520-day year into 7 360-day months. You're the writer, and while that doesn't give you license to completely ignore the laws of physics, I don't find this so farfetched that I'd stop reading in disgust. You're asking me to suspend disbelief, if you give me a plausible high-level explanation for why this interval is near-perfect, I'll buy in.
Obviously other elements of this solar system need to be established; a planetary year 7 times that of Earth's would indicate an orbital distance somewhere just inside the orbit of Jupiter in our own system, which is outside the butter zone of Earth-like solar intensity (and thus temperature). The asteroid belt, in turn, exists because Jupiter is where it is and is as massive as it is; the planet's gravity keeps the material in this orbital belt in a constant though minor state of flux, preventing it consolidating under its own gravity into its own planetoid.
Your system's sun would need to be slightly hotter to produce the "goldilocks range" of human(oid)-habitable temperatures on your planet, meaning it will need to be significantly more massive; that's fine, stars up to 200 solar masses still follow the multi-billion-year "main sequence" of stable stellar lifespan that allows a solar system (and, ultimately, life) to form around it, so there's little wrong with bulking up your planet's sun a bit. Your solar system doesn't necessarily have to be devoid of gas giants, and in fact their noted absence in a system with enough available nebular gas to make a star even more massive than our Sun would be an eyebrow-raiser for any astronomy buffs reading your story, but their presence will also be problematic given you want a perfect or nearly-perfect relationship between planetary and lunar revolution. Big old gas giants tend to induce minor variations in any such perfect subdivision until it isn't perfect anymore. Jupiter has a minute, but measurable, effect on Earth's orbit; insignificant most of the time (or indeed for the span of a human life), but planetary systems have a *lot* of time for these relatively small influences to add up.
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One solution might be if there was a second planet in the system, orbiting much closer to the sun such that its year 1/8 times the length of your planet. It would then appear a bit like Venus with a dawn-star/dusk-star like behaviour, cycling through dawn-dusk-dawn star once every 1/7th of your planet's periods.
If the inner planet was large and had a very high aldebo then it could easily be the brightest thing in the sky (apart from the sun itself), assuming your planet had no moon.
You could increase the orbital radius of the 2nd planet so its orbit took 1/4 times your planet's orbital period, in which case the 'month' would be the time between the 2nd planet appearing highest in the sky (either as a dawn or dusk star) and being hidden by the glare of the sun.
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I just realized if my planet has a moon it's impossible for it to have a calendar with $7$ months of $360$ days.
Based on [this](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/) paper:
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So the moon should orbit around the planet in $280$ days or less. Of course this is the orbital period of the moon. We need the synodic period of it for the calendar:
For a planet-moon system we have: $\frac{1}{P\_b}=\frac{1}{P\_m}-\frac{1}{P\_s}$, where $P\_b$ is the planet's orbital period, $P\_m$ is the moon's orbital period, and $P\_s$ is the moon's synodic period.
Plugging in the numbers we have synodic period to be exactly $315$ days. So the calendar has $8$ months of $315$ days (we can say $4$ seasons of $2$ months each). (or more months with fewer days). We can even set it to have $12$ months just like Earth which has a synodic period of $210$ days long. But the problem is that the orbital period would be a non integer number of $\frac{2520}{13}$ in this case (about $194$ days). On the other hand if we have $210$ days as the orbital period then the synodic period would be $\frac{2520}{11}$ days (about $229$) which corresponds to $11$ months.
But if the planet doesn't have a moon a calendar with $7$ months is possible.
**Update**: Related to the question: Thanks to M.A. Golding's answer I calculated the innermost and outermost parts of habitable zone of a typical A2V star using the information on the [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-type_main-sequence_star) article (see the first table there), and using the formulas $\sqrt{\frac{L\_s}{1.1}}$ and $\sqrt{\frac{L\_s}{0.53}}$, where $L\_s$ is the luminosity of the star in reference to the Sun. The innermost and outernmost parts of the habitable zone were about $700$ million km and $1$ billion km farther from the star respectively. I also calculated the semi-major axis of the planet's orbit using the formula in [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period) article and it turned to be about $680$ million km! So it is about $20$ million km closer to the star than the innermost parts of the habitable zone. So life may not exist in my hypothetical planet at all to have a calendar.
That said I continued to find the properties of the moon. If it wants to complete an orbit every $280$ days as I told you before, and if it wants to be in a distance from its planet similar to the distance of the Moon from Earth, the planet should have a mass of about $5.77612√ó10^{22}$ kg (the Moon of the Earth is about $1.26$ times more massive than this planet!). Also, the hill sphere of the planet has a [radius](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere) of about $1.153$ million km in this scenario.
But if we say the planet is as massive as the Earth then the hill sphere would be about $5.4$ million km and the moon is in a distance of about $1.8$ million km.
Of course these were calculated using a $280$ day orbital period for the moon. The results surely differ for a $\frac{2520}{13}$ day orbital period (Hill sphere of the planet of course doesn't relate to the orbital period of the moon).
**Update 2**: If the orbital period of the planet is $27720$ or $360360$ days long then the non-integer problem of synodic or orbital periods of the moon that I mentioned above will solve. In fact, the synodic period will be an integer in $27720$ day planet's orbital period (if we assume the orbital period of the moon to be $\frac{1}{12}$ of the planet's orbital period). And both synodic and orbital periods will be integers in the case of $360360$ day orbital period of the planet if we assume the synodic and/or orbital periods of the moon to be again $\frac{1}{12}$ of the orbital period of the parent planet.
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I wasn't sure which StackExchange I should ask this question, but since the story I am writing is basically a historically inspired fantasy, I decided to present it here.
The story in question is supposed to be a fairly short pirate adventure set in a Bronze Age world. My protagonist is an admiral from a fairly wealthy kingdom (inspired by the kingdom of Kush from our world) who is hunting down the ringleader of a large pirate organization. I imagine that, after learning where the pirates' fortified base of operations is located, she would go after them with a fleet of several galleys each manned with archers and infantry (think the war galleys of New Kingdom Egypt).
Now, it's important to the story that my admiral gets captured by the pirates in a sea battle, which would require that their fleet overwhelms hers somehow. What I imagine is that the pirates' ships are dhow-type vessels which are individually smaller than my admiral's galleys, but their fleet is numerically larger. In short, it's a small number of large galleys versus a much larger number of small dhows.
How would such an asymmetrical sea battle play out in a Bronze Age world? The scenario I imagined is that some of the pirate dhows would cut off my heroine's galley from the rest of her fleet by ganging up and encircling it (a bit like sharks swimming around their prey in cartoon depictions) before flinging out the grappling hooks and then boarding it to capture her. But then what would happen to the rest of the protagonist's fleet? Couldn't they barge in and save my heroine before the pirates carried her off?
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Consider that the battle will let you display what sort of commander your female admiral is. I am guessing that if you made her female you will not want her to seem a blundering incompetent. With her superior force and strategic thinking, she should win the battle. And also get captured.
Option 1: After the battle is done, stealthy pirates return under cover of night and take her off of her ship.
Option 2: Pirate prisoners of war escape from their prison in the hold. They are grateful not to have been killed outright and so do not murder her, but take her away with them.
Option 3: Ben Hur style - although her forces go on to victory, her flagship ship is holed from below and sinks, leaving her in the water. She is presumed drowned and because of her armor this is very nearly the case. She struggles out of her armor and is rescued by a pirate vessel. Without her armor or insignia of rank, the pirates might not initially know who she is.
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Is the purpose to capture the protagonist or defeat her fleet? Those are not necessarily the same thing.
If the pirates have the advantage of knowing the waters, you, as the author, can arrange for there to be a convenient reef they know about that, when the tide is right, just allows them to pass over it with their shallow-draft boats while the larger ships of the admiral can't. So they lure the admiral's ship in (the tech of the time means the admiral is going to be leading from the front) and gets it grounded on the reef, while the ebbing tide means her other ships can't get close to provide support (at least the ones not already aground). That allows them to attack it *en masse*, overwhelm it, and capture her, then making their getaway before the tide rises and the other ships can finally move in.
If you want the fleet defeated as well, then simply have them sail in and fling torches or whatnot aboard the stranded ships.
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This battle would go like this in the Bronze Age:
The pirates break the oars of the admiral's ship with a daring pass, thus rendering it immobile. Even if the pirates' ship is smaller, this is a matter of speed and maneuverability.
Then, they assault the ship and it happens like a land battle. Slingers might be more lethal than archers because the distance is short but they need more space to shoot.
From the sources of the Greek-Persian Wars (yes, I know we are off by 700 years but naval warfare didn't change so much), the breaking of the oars was very spectacular, with deadly splinters flying around (the rowers are almost nude) and the men running to equip their weapons (most of the rowers double as soldiers), some of them even using the broken oars as improvised weapons to keep the enemies off of their ship.
You can't write about a ship ramming another in the Bronze Age, but this can be good enough.
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**Its a numbers game during Bronze age**
Sure they got Big boats, and as you have smaller ones, but your pirates dhows have better maneuverability than your protagonist galleys.
Their plan of attack:
The pirates will charge head on, since arrows will be the primary ranged weapon at this age, the galleys will have archers raining burning arrows at the dhows, one by one the pirate dhows sink and burn, but the attack does not cease. The pirates will attack the ships sides, throws hooks or burning arrows too into the galleys, some pirates board the ships and kill your crew with swords, others support them through ranged attack. The attack of the pirates will be relentless until they finally burned the last galley, capturing your protagonist in the process.
[Answer]
# Divide and conquer
The advantage of having a lot of small ships is that you have a lot more flexibility in your tactics and maneuvering. You likely have a shallower draft. Make use of this. Your pirates operate out of a shallow bay, scattered with reefs, with turbulent waters. Use their smaller ships to draw the large galleys in, and then send out fire ships to split them apart, and make them unable to follow each other. Isolate the flagship galley, then just ram it (bronze age should let you duplicate the ramming prows of triemes) with enough ships to allow your boarding parties to overwhelm what the troops on board can handle.
This approach also means that you can have the admiral have overwhelming force and still lose. Her forces cannot come to her aid: she only has her ship to bring to bear, as the others are floundering amidst the reefs and burning ships.
[Answer]
When I had to puzzle out a naval battle with a similar premise for a book of mine, I used a shallow bay with many submerged rocks. The larger ships had to maneuver slowly and carefully, so they couldn't come to each other's defense, while the smaller, shallow-draft boats could go where they pleased.
Another idea: if you've ever tacked upwind in a channel between two islands, then you know how the funnel effect makes each successive tack shorter and it seems you'll never get there. The point is, distance at sea is relative: supporting ships could be within shouting distance, and still half an hour away.
Your galleys are rowed, of course, but current does just as good a job. Supposing there's a tidal current past the mouth of the bay where the pirates are based. Being tidal, it changes quickly. The command ship, being larger and better crewed, can make way against the current just a bit more quickly than the other two vessels and enters the calm bay ahead of them. Meanwhile, the current is rising and effectively pinning the other two ships. Then the pirates attack.
Incidentally, did they have grappling hooks in the bronze age? I haven't done the research myself, but I'd be very skeptical. Grappling hooks require a lot of strong, long-length cordage *that you are not using for anything else* and *that you can afford to lose* when the enemy inevitably cuts it away. And rope was expensive. Check out [one of Linybeige's instructive and funny rants](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZfpQzV2GnM) about the value of rope in middle ages. I imagine his arguments are even more salient for bronze age.
[Answer]
>
> my admiral gets captured by the pirates in a sea battle, which would require that their fleet overwhelms hers somehow.
>
>
>
Not necessarily.
Ships of that age were not very seaworthy. Time and time again a power would send an impressive navy, only to see it destroyed by storms and gales even before it got to contact the enemy.
Even more modern and way better ships could suffer the same fate at relatively modern ages, think of the Spanish Armada sent to invade England (and that was from being a "one of a kind" incident), or the Mongol one sent to invade Japan.
For maximum effect your pirate base is surrounded by a rocky coast; when the enemy fleet appears the storm starts and most of the ships are driven to the rocks and sunk; those ships who reamain afloat are too damaged and its tripulation too exhausted (rowing against the wind to avoid certain death at the rock can be very tiring). The pirates just need to finish off a meager resistance.
If you want an actual battle, an option would be fireships. Those would be most effective against tightly packed ships; there are some scenarios allowing for them.
For example, fighting at this age was usually infantry combat on top of ships; in fact often ships were chained together in order to pass reinforcement from one point of the "line" to the other. So, tightly packed ships would be the default option for many commanders.
Of course, they would be aware of the risk of fireships and have countermeasures, so you need some reason for the countermeasures to fail; e.g. they believe that the pirates are not expecting them and the pirates ambush them, or they try to separate the ships but fail to do so because of the currents or because they are in a narrow strait.
Another options include classical ambushes (the fleet has to pass a narrow point and the pirates attack in the middle of the crossing, defeating the fleet by parts, or the night time attack).
The attacking fleet has to pass a narrow strait it could chose to try to pass
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# Ancient Naval Warfare was Broadly Melee
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UpyoN.jpg)
This is especially true in comparatively calm seas such as the Mediterranean. Often fleets would only aim to get across a few arrows (later cannonballs) before the fighting was decided by melee combatants.
This allows you to view each connected vessel as an independent battlefield, in which your protagonist can be losing locally even while the fleet is winning.
[Answer]
**It depends.**
Since the galleys are bigger than the dhows, that alone is not necessarily going to guarantee a win for the kingdom's fleet. There are several other factors you need to take into account:
* **Admiral's Skill**
Is your admiral a complete noob or are they the next Horatio Nelson? This could be the difference between victory and defeat for your kingdom's navy.
* **Numbers**
Are there more galleys than dhows or more dhows than galleys? Are the two forces equal in number? Again, this could be the difference between victory and defeat. If the kingdom has more galleys than the pirates have dhows, then the battle is effectively decided. If there are more pirate dhows than galleys, then the pirates have a chance
* **Speed/maneuverability**
If the dhows are smaller than the galleys, that means they are probably going to be much faster and easier to maneuver than the galleys. If the dhows are able to run circles around the galleys, then the dhows will probably win easily, especially if the battle is in a tight location (i.e. a narrow strait or some rapids). If the battle is in a narrow location, the dhows will probably win easily because the galleys would probably run aground from their own turning radius.
* **The Weapons on the Ships**
The weapons on each ship type can also easily determine how the battle will go. Based on the fact that this is the bronze age, archers and ramming will probably be the main method these ships used for waging war. However, it is not entirely implausible for a device similar to the Corvus the Romans used against Carthage in the Punic Wars to exist. The corvus is essentially a plank that latches onto the decks of enemy ships, allowing infantry to rush the deck and capture the ship. If any of your ships have corvi, they will have the obvious advantage in strength, but it will cost them dearly in terms of speed and maneuverability because the planks are so heavy.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine that you are president-for-life in a third world country in the 60's. USA supports you because you are staunchly anti-communist but they are growing impatient with your heavy handed dealing with the opposition. In order to put some constraints on your power USA gives you an ultimatum to make a constitution and hold elections or they'll stop giving you aid.
What kind of combination of [electoral system](http://faculty.georgetown.edu/kingch/Electoral_Systems.htm) & [legislature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislature) (unicameral, bicameral) would create the most fragmented and dysfunctional assembly that will be the least threat to your power?
[Answer]
## Historical examples
*"In order to put some constraints on your power USA gives you an ultimatum to make a constitution and hold elections or they'll stop giving you aid."* So make a constitution and hold elections; it's not hard. There is a surfeit of historical examples! It is actually harder to find a constitution which was *not* eventually subverted by a political elite...
* The Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact actually had constitutions and held elections. Some even had multiple political parties. Laws were duly passed by legally constituted legislative assemblies. And yet everybody was aware that the man at the top was all-powerful.
+ [Constitution of the Soviet Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Soviet_Union)
Notably, article 4 held that *"each one of the member Republics retains the right to freely withdraw from the Union"*; this was eventually the legal basis for the dissolution of the USSR.
+ [Political parties in East Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(East_Germany))
* The People's Republic of China actually has a constitution and holds regular elections. Laws are duly passed by a legally constituted legislative assembly. And yet...
* To go a little back in history, pre-WW1 Germany actually had a constitution and held contested elections; it even had a powerful Social-Democratic Party. And yet the Emperor somehow managed to convince them all that invading Belgium in order to conquer France was a smart thing to do. The trick was that the Chancellor (head of the executive and speaker of the upper house of the parliament) was appointed by the Emperor and was responsible to the Emperor only; the Emperor had legislative initiative; and he also held intersting powers such as the power to make war and peace.
+ [Constitution of the German Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_German_Empire)
* To go back a little more, the French Republic under the Directory and the Consulate, and then the 1st and 2nd French Empires had constitutions etc. etc.
+ [French Directory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Directory) established by the Constitution of the Year III
+ [French Consulate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Consulate) established by the Constitution of the Year VIII; Napoleon I becomes 1st Consul
+ [1st French Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_French_Empire)
established by the Constitution of the Year XII; Napoleon I becomes Emperor of the French
+ [2nd French Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_French_Empire) established by the Constitution of 1852; Napoleon III becomes Emperor of the French
* A very long time ago, in 27 BCE, [Gaius Octavius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus) (who was eventually to be known as Caesar Augustus by the Romans and whom we usually call Octavian) succeeded in subverting the constitution of the Roman Republic so that he (and his successors) would rule uncontested while preserving almost all the laws and appearances of the republic; this political structure we call the [Principate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate). Basically, what he did (and the rest of the emperors followed for two centuries) was to get rid of one tiny little unimportant custom and allow the same man (whom we call "emperor") to occupy simultaneously the positions of speaker of the senate, tribune of the people, commander in chief of the army, censor and great priest.
+ Notably, Octavian and the other emperors of the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, took care to let other people be elected consuls of Rome (i.e., notional heads of government). Nice touch this.
## Suggested recipe
1. Directly elected head of the executive (as in France, and nobody can say that France is not democratic)
* With legislative initiative (works for the UK, cannot be said to be undemocratic)
* With veto power over legislation (works for the USA, cannot be said to be undemocratic); require 2/3 of the total number of members of the lower house and the upper house to override an executive veto(Elections for the head of the executive are needed because even God-Emperors die eventually; in this way you pass the power to your successor.)
2. Freely elected lower house of parliament, with proportional representation and no threshold (maximum democracy this!)
3. Appointed upper house of parliament (works for the UK), must agree on laws passed by the lower house
If one cannot rule uncontested with such a perfectly democratic constitution one is absolutely inept at politics and should find another avocation.
[Answer]
Assuming you want to keep the semblance of democracy...
# Voting
Watch [CGP Grey's series on the problems with elections](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&list=PLEcHCTVM79BMISVn4AV5EXSglGDzRgwgG) and do them all.
## Use [first-past-the-post voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting).
This is the system used in most of the US, Canada, and UK. It means there's one round of voting, and the candidate with the most votes wins *even without a majority*. This system is vulnerable to [spoiler candidates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect); if too many similar candidates run with similar platforms they can split the vote and throw it to a minority. The party in power can ensure they only run a single real candidate in each district, and possibly even set up spoiler candidates of their own.
## No national elections for representatives.
Ensure that representatives must run individually and for their separate districts. No national voting by party, because that would stop...
## Use [gerrymandering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect).
Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping voting districts so a minority party gets a majority of the seats. Since any votes over 51% are effectively "wasted", you can dilute the majority's power by concentrating them in as few districts as possible.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYo1L.png)
## Give representation by province.
Gerrymandering can be enshrined by defining the districts arbitrarily, like every province gets the same number of representatives regardless of population. Need more support? Split a loyal province in two. Want to dilute the opposition? Merge some opposition provinces together.
## Enforce strict voter ID laws
These are known to [suppress turnout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression), especially among the poor, young, and minorities. Lower turnout usually favors the party in power. You can also play shenanigans with voter registration removing voters from the roles for whatever made up reason you like. Of course, be sure to correct them promptly *after* the election. Tell everyone it's to prevent fraud.
## Make voting inconvenient.
Place the polling places in areas convenient for your party. Have them open only during business hours on a work day, it's easier for rich folks to get time off work. Close polls promptly in locations unfavorable to your party, but leave them open a bit longer in favorable locations.
## Disallow former criminals from running for office.
Want to prevent political dissidents from running for office? Get them convicted for a petty felony. Strict drug and morality laws work well, as well as broad, sweeping anti-terror and anti-protest laws.
---
# Balance Of Power
## The legislature can make laws, but the executive funds and enforces them.
The legislature can pass any law they like. If you don't like it, underfund it, and instruct the agency in charge of enforcing it to turn a blind eye, or interpret the law however they like. Of course, be sure to strictly enforce the laws on anyone who imposes you.
## The executive can "review" the judiciary.
Even with no power, an independent judiciary is dangerous. Have judges be appointed by the executive who can also order their removal.
## Make the executive immune from prosecution.
Put the legislature in charge of deciding if the executive is guilty. Require a 2/3 vote.
## Put the executive in charge of the military.
## Allow the executive to suspend the Constitution in a state of emergency.
## Allow the executive to decide when there is a state of emergency.
---
I could go on, but this is getting depressing. For inspiration, look at the [ongoing constitutional crisis in Turkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_constitutional_referendum,_2017) and the budding one in the US.
[Answer]
I won't repeat already good answers, so consider this only an addition to existing answers.
One thing I should point out is that if your being pressured to pass some constitution not only do you need to pass *something*, you need to pass something that satisfies the people pressuring you. This means you can't be too blatant in crippling the government you generate. The big trick is to sneak things into the constitution that seem innocent or that US doesn't think it can argue against, but which you know you can exploit to keep power. I'll try to mention some 'tricks' for how to phrase some of these ideas in a constitution in a way that's more likely to *appear* like your trying to create a real democracy while still crippling it when I can.
I'm going to mention ways to control public elections, including rather they vote for *you*, and ways to control the votes in the legislature body to make sure that that body votes the way you want. Most ideas could be applied in both cases, but generally it's easier to control the legislature then control public votes in general when building the constitution.
**Everyone can vote, but their votes are public**
This is key and important. Everyone is allowed to vote for anyone they want, but of course you will know *who* they voted for. Sure you can vote for someone else it's fully your right to do that. If you happen to get audited on your taxes more thoroughly, or tend to get treated harsher by the police, or are just depicted as unpatriotic slime for not supporting your great leader, well that's just a random coincidence, it doesn't *stop* you from voting however you please.
There are plenty of incentives, and penalties, you can enact to 'encourage' the votes you want as long as it's known who is voting for what. If people are afraid to vote against you then your find votes tend to go your way.
Your probably only get the US to approve of legislative votes being published, with the general elections expected to be anonymous. That's okay though, the small number of legislature members means it's much easier to put pressure on them to vote appropriately then it is on all the country as a whole anyways; but if you can get general elections to be public as well all the better.
**Have means to remove elected legislators you don't like**
If someone isn't voting the way you want getting rid of them solves the problem for you. Of course giving yourself the power to remove anyone you don't like is so blatant the US won't sign off on it, so you have to be a little sneakier.
I would suggest creating a list of 'reasonable' reasons for removal of legislators that it your confident you can 'arrange' to happen for those you dislike. The best would be making certain crimes result in an automatic removal from office which you happen to be able to help encourage someone being found guilty of.
One good option here is to say any accepting of bribes or similar is grounds for removal, then create a system that otherwise strongly encourages and allows bribery, maybe even makes it such that someone likely has to bribe others to get into office in the first place or the pay being so horrible that no one could live off of being a legislator if it wasn't for taking bribes. It could become an open secret that legislators all take bribes. However, it just so happens that only those that do things that displease you are every actually investigated and found guilty of accepting bribes.
While much harder to manage another approach is to try to get a law passed which places requirements on the legislator's extended family to meet some moral/legal/genetic/religious standards. Noone has a perfect family so if you look hard enough your find some blacksheep you can use as grounds to remove those you dislike.
One example would be to say that any immediate family caught taking bribes of receiving any benefit that could be deemed nepotism results in the legislator being removed. This is one of the few examples that seems somewhat likely to be accepted by the US, since you can claim it's an attempt to combat corrupt legislators using their family as middlemen for bribes. Again it's likely someone in the extended family would be tempted to exploit their family member's position if you look hard enough, especially if you can bait them by offering a bribe and then arresting them if they take it. if you phrase your definition of 'nepotism' generically enough you can all but guarantee the ability to remove legislators since there are always some unintentional perks to having a famous/powerful relative even if someone isn't trying to exploit them which you can claim was intentional corruption.
**Have strong veto powers**
If you can veto every law the congress ever passes then let them have fun bickering all they like, nothing they do will ever affect you if you don't want it to. The US probably will not accept a 100% veto power, but there is plenty of room to give a strong veto authority to yourself if necessary.
Focus on some form of Pocket Veto, that doesn't require explicit vetoing something, as it's easier to put it in the constitution without people noticing/complaining as much, and it's a little less likely to create anger in your allies if you simply fail to pass a legislation then if your blatantly veto everything.
**Propaganda is your Friend, anyone that doesn't love Propaganda is a traitor to his state**
Control of propaganda is a major feature of all dictatorships. if you can control the news and information that filters down to everyday citizens well enough you can convince them you are great and powerful and doing everything in their interest and that they *should* want to vote for you. This may all be lies, but if you can control their information enough they won't know it.
Similarly propaganda that paints dissidents and those that vote against your party lines as evil, non-patriotic, traitorous, etc will help ensure the public votes the way you want. Creating an environment where everyday citizens police other citizens into following your doctrine is great!
Finding a shared enemy to fight helps allot with this. Be it the Sunni/Shiat/whatever faiths, Communists, Illegal Immigrants, 'The West', or evil reptile men if you paint some group as out to destroy you and everyone needing to band together to defeat them your get people far more willing to go along with the party line to spite those evil whoever.
**Help your friends to get elected to the legislature**
Create a system where you can support the election of those you know will vote the way you want helps you to rig things in your favor. At the smallest level this could simply mean having your already well developed propaganda network telling everyone that one person should be voted for over another, if your good at propaganda, and any dictator must be, you can greatly sway votes for the ones you choose to win.
Another good option is setting up limits on how people can campaign, such as how much money they can spend on campaigning, when public speeches can be had, etc etc. The more you can regulate the ability to campaign the more you can then shift things around to favor the campaigns of those you choose to win. At minimum making it harder to campaign means that citizens have less information available to help select who to vote for and are thus more likely to listen to your propaganda, as the only available information source, for who they should vote for.
**Those that vote your way get extra rewards**
Create a system where you can easily reward those in the legislature body you like. You probably can't just give them money, too blatant, but you could perhaps have some sort of cabinet/advisor/figurehead roles you can allocate as you please, which happen to have good pay and require very little work, which by chance seem to always go to those who do as you ask.
Having cushy jobs for those who leave office after x years that you can give out to those who were well behaved also works well here. You can claim your just utilizing those with experience ruling to do these jobs, but if can be an unspoken fact that these are pretty much empty, or just easy, jobs provided as rewards
**It's hard to vote**
Make it hard to vote for everyone to lower the total number of votes and then create incentives for those you want to vote to vote for you. The more you can limit the total number of people that vote the easier it is to 'ballot stuff' votes going whatever way you want since there are fewer negative votes to counteract.
**Have means to shift elections forward/backwards slightly**
being able to delay elections even slightly can be a strong windfall. If populous movement is swelling against you currently just delay the vote for a month or two to give your propaganda time to settle everything. In best case get a constitution that says that your have a vote within ever 'x years' but don't specify exactly when the vote happens. When things are going your way have votes slightly more frequently (ie a few months early) then your constitution requires, say your such a good sport that your being proactive when voting. What your really doing is giving yourself some 'wiggle room' to push back votes when you need time to do some diplomatting.
**You can do anything in absence of a law saying otherwise**
There are all kinds of systems you can put in place that give you the right to enact 'policies' when you need to, such that you can effectively do whatever you want unless the law explicitly says otherwise. Get in as liberal a 'policy' setting scheme as possible, usually by simply 'forgetting' to list powers that you don't have, listing only powers the legislature does have, and then after the constitution is passed you simply argue you can do anything that isn't explicitly against what you said the legislature could do.
This means you can enact your own 'laws' on the fly to do anything you need, including doing things to help you keep power like creating a law tailored to getting some dissident(s) arrested, last minute gerrymandering, messing with or punishing legislatures that don't vote your way etc etc.
**Encourage the legislation to not do anything**
Create a system where no laws are passed and then your effectively have full power. There are lots of ways to do this. One of the simplest is to limit the amount of time they have to work, build in lots of time when your legislation isn't in office, systems that allow people to get payed for doing minimum work when in office, even trying to make it such that any vote they do make is likely to lead to someone being angry at them so that it's safer to not vote then vote.
Going along with this have a policy where it's hard to get votes passed. Maybe instead of a 50% majority you need a 2/3 majority to pass a bill. Maybe you intentionally create a system where it's absurdly easy to fillibuster and if a discussion goes too long the bill will be dismissed, or *just* not voted on until the next legislature meeting. This means effectively one person can stop any law being passed, get one person on your side to fillibuster anything you don't like and no laws are passed and, in the absence of laws, you get to do whatever you want.
**Laws naturally expire rapidly if not voted to be renewed**
If you can create a system that gives you power in the absence of laws then any law is your enemy. Letting laws naturally expire removes laws and thus expands your freedom. Having laws expire rapidly helps to clear the books of laws sooner, and thus expand your power-base. If there was a particular you really dislike that somehow got passed you only have to live with it for a little while before it expires. It also can busy your legislative body with spending much of their time simply renewing existing laws instead of creating new ones you may not like.
**It's possible for the legislature to remove existing laws before they expire**
This is more iffy, but having a way to remove existing laws can be another means of removing laws your unhappy with. if they manage to get one enacted wait until you can replace, or apply sufficient pressure on, those that voted for the law then encourage the legislature to vote to repeal it. Actually It's probably better to simply write the constitution in such a way that it's easy to write a new law that overwrites the existing law, but the concept is the same. You can push them to remove a law faster if you don't like the results.
**Give them some actual power in areas you just don't care about**
All the tricks above could work, but remember if your being pressured to do this you need to do more then just create a constitution, you need the US to accept the constitution, and you need to give enough of an appearance of it working that they don't come back and pressure you to change the constitution all over again in a year.
The best option here is to give the legislature some actual power, just make sure it's power you don't really care about. This probably means allowing them to enact minor laws that affect the every day citizens, cut which you would never bother with because they are so minor details you wouldn't have time to micromanage them.
Creating a system where they can make decisions but you can implicitly override them somehow if you really hate them helps. One idea is to say you give 'grants' for intended uses that the legislature can then choose how to divvy up and spend. So you may say that you have granted this much money to be spent on education and let them bicker and fight over what schools get the money etc, most of the time you may not care about this as it's too low level for you.
of course there is a chance that they may decide something you really hate, like all the education money should be spent to teach students how great first world countries are doing and how much your leadership sucks in comparison. If that happens you don't veto that law, but you do drop the amount you are granting for education to some trivial amount, rendering how they divvy up the money a moot point since there is nothing to spend. Then you create a new money grant to spend money on say "continuing the educational superiority over those other countries". Extensible it's a new grant, in reality it's an education grant, but with some extra verbiage in how you write it that happens to restrict it from being used in the one way you want it.
Most of the time, if you write these money grants well, and your legislature knows to keep you pleased, they will spend the grants in a way that doesn't upset you much, mostly because you don't care to micromanage how that money is spent anyways so you would have let *someone* make that decision it may as well be them. It will look to outsiders like your system is working great, money is being granted out and the legislature is having a very real affect on how it's spent. But you have put in a loophole that allows you to undo their decision if it ever upsets you, in a subtle enough way that you don't create the outrage that a veto would create.
The more you can actually exploit this body to all the stuff you don't want to micromanage anyways, while keeping ways to undo anything that truly upsets you, the more you can keep the US happy about your legislature without giving up anything you really want.
[Answer]
* Make the political parties weak. If each candidate has to manage a campaign on his own, without an established party structure, he has to find funding and deal with special interests. So primaries are necessary, and running *against* his own party should be the main challenge to getting into the legislature.
* Individual electoral districts with a first-past-the-fencepost system will encourage a two-party system. While there is something to be said for a weak and *splintered* opposition, you'd rather want to limit the chances of newcomer parties. So any new guy has to deal with one of the established parties first.
* Take the right to *initiate* budget laws (and others) away from the legislature. Make it so the executive writes laws and the legislature can only say yes or no to the whole package. *"Do you want to vote against food for the poor? No? Then you have to approve the budget!"*
* Allow the person who writes the law (see above) to bundle unrelated things into it. *Fire safety and pension reform law.* Give the laws names that make it hard to argue against it. *Anybody Who Disagrees Is A Traitor Act* sounds so much better than *Law to Reform Section 1234 of the Income Tax Code.*
* The president should not be dependent on a vote of (no) confidence in the legislature, of course.
[Answer]
**The solution to democracy is more democracy.**
Make the legislature big. The more people you have talking at once the less it matters what any of them are trying to say. "To keep legislators responsible to their constituents we need small districts."
Support minor parties. Provide assistance to anyone forming a new party or spiting off from an existing party. Use election mechanics designed to prevent large party domination. "It's your government."
Provide strong guarantees of representation to many disparate groups. Those 10 families in the swamp behind the capital are a protected minority now and get to send a representative to the legislature. "Civil rights are important to us."
Encourage local issues. Make it easy for citizens to petition the legislature and require them to be debated. "Every voice should be heard."
**Ignore them**
Hopefully this will mean they can't get anything meaningful passed, but still the government needs to do work[citation needed] so provisional policy, temporary measures and interim appointments will be enactable by executive recommendation.
Let them be subject to a legislative veto or over-turnable by a more or less independent judiciary on a case by case basis. And if you have enough diversity in your legislature you can even require them to be based on something that has been debated.
To minimize the risk make sure that the review process is long, and limit the ability of previous outcomes to influence new cases. ie It takes two months to repeal rules you make but two hours to make a different enough version to restart the clock.
**Stay on top**
You obviously don't want to risk losing an election, so make president an appointed position. But be sure the people who select the people who make the appointment are chosen by you. Say the executive selection committee is chosen by lottery from the legislature in a drawing overseen by the (interim) minister of elections; your daughter-in-law's cousin.
[Answer]
Some of the examples others have given (Iran, China) are good starting points, but they rely on a cabal/party to rule; you're looking at one person.
The first step is to secure the power of the executive (you).
* Give the president effectively unlimited veto power (maybe allow the legislature to override it by an unrealistic margin, like 3/4 or higher)
* Give the executive's decrees the force of law.
* Give the executive control of the judiciary, including the power to dismiss judges
The second step is to make sure the legislature can't do anything practical.
* If the country has discrete ethnic groups or tribes, embed in the constitution the right of the minority groups to have at least a certain level of representation. Make it out of proportion to their actual population in the country, and make sure they know that they have you to thank for it.
* Make sure you can overrule any law the legislature passes.
Keep strong control of the military. Make sure that there is good representation of ethnic/tribal minorities in the military, and keep minority generals on your armed forces council. Do not let them become independent warlords, however. Make sure the armed forces are personally loyal to you and you alone.
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Require an 100% or at least a very large supermajority (80%, 90%) of the legislature to overturn vetoes. That would give the executive quite a bit of power.
To elaborate a bit on this: a way to give extreme power to an executive should have properties such as (1) not transparently unfair to specific groups in the population (2) a modification of an accepted (in the U.S. for instance) practice that balances power between legislatures and the executive (3) gives the executive a great deal of influence over the legislative branch and (4) does not give so much power to the executive that they can drive the nation to the brink of revolution without any feasible way for the population to 'push back' on the executive.
In the U.S. there are several mechanisms to balance power between the judicial, legislative and executive branches and also to impede chaotic changes in the government. These include the hard requirements for [amending the constitution](https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-amend-the-constitution-3368310) (2/3 vote in both houses of congress, then 3/4 of states to ratify).
One of these nice balancing acts is the requirement that 2/3 of each house are required to override a veto. [Apparently less than 10% of presidential vetoes are overridden.](https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/override_of_a_veto.htm) But we would expect that a (quasi) dictator would get more push back from the congress. So raising the requirement even a bit would allow the dictator-to-be to block almost anything (and give them a lot of bargaining power for legislation they want). A high enough requirement for an override would make the congress almost advisory. HOWEVER, by allowing some possibility of override, you could protect the dictator from his/herself, as there would be a way for the population to force through laws if they were overwhelmingly popular.
It would be hard for the U.S. (and other countries) to object to an 80% or 90% override limit, because it would just seem to be a quantitatively-slight deviation from what is practiced in other democracies.
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I immediately thought of the Sejm, the parliament under the Poland-Lithuania commonwealth from the mid-1500s to the 1790s when it disappeared. There was a King, but the Sejm could also pass laws and get things done without the King...but there was a mighty big barrier to doing so.
The Sejm had one session each year lasting for six weeks. All decisions on resolutions made by the Sejm has to be unanimous. A single person could veto any resolutions. By the 1600s, all resolutions in the Sejm were considered part of one large single resolution. That meant the Sejm also had to come to a unanimous decision on everything during the session or any other decisions they had made during the session would become annulled.
By that time, virtually any nobleman (and Poland-Lithuania had a large amount of nobility compared to other countries, most of them being quite minor) could attend a Sejm meeting and vote. Needless to say, very little tended to get done because any one person could torpedo the entire session by exercising a veto. Amazingly, there were sessions where things did get done: they just had to work together to find the bare minimum that everyone (and delegates numbered in the hundreds or even thousands) could agree on.
Anyone who wanted the Sejm to get nothing done could simply have a loyal delegate veto every resolution. The King and the powerful magnates who had the actual power didn't have much to fear from the Sejm.
They abolished this system in 1791, and the surrounding countries of Russia, Prussia, and Austria immediately decided to pounce on Poland-Lithuania, dividing it among themselves before a functioning system could emerge.
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Finally, I have done it. I have bought a large and beautiful four bladed windmill. A [smock mill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smock_mill) to be precise, really high and all functional. There is the whole ancient machinery in it, completely operational, I have tested it, just put sails on the blades and here I go, I can finally mill my own flour.
But wait, I don't care about milling flour, there are much better ways to do it ! And further more it is almost the winter, and I don't have any radiator to keep me warm, further more the ceiling is really high, it will be hard to heat... Oh I have an idea ! Let's transform this, yet useless, wind power into heating ! No idea how to achieve this though...
I am wondering **how to use the rotational mechanical energy that the windmill is giving me into thermal energy**.
I would try to avoid doing the mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> thermal energy chain, because it would be too complex. I mean, we are always trying to keep up the energy efficiency by making our transformation systems to make less... thermal energy. But this is what I want to achieve !
Is there a solution to directly transform the rotational to thermal energy ? What would be the cost and the power efficiency of such a device ? Can I heat my windmill only by relying on the outside wind ? What wind would be needed ? What temperature can I have ?
Note : Let's say I have restored my windmill a bit, and it is quite well insulated.
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# Stir water
Use the windmill to drive paddles in a pool of water. Have vanes and obstacles for the water so that it is made as turbulent as possible (and does not just set to spinning around with the paddles).
As long as the water acts as a brake for the windmill, the water will heat up, according to the [law of conservation of energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy).
Using water as a brake is advantageous because usually the braking force of water is the square of the speed of whatever is moving through the water, which means this thing becomes more or less self-regulating.
The only problem you might encounter is if the water becomes too hot and starts boiling. You need some kind of system that always keeps the pool full to the brim.
You can solve that by having a buffer pool next to the hot water pool. The buffer pool feeds into the hot water pool through a narrow opening. If the level in the hot water pool drops, then water will flow from the buffer pool to the hot water pool.
The buffer pool in turn is fed from the nearby natural stream. And that pool has outward flow as well so that when there is too much in the buffer pool, the excess simply drains back to the stream a bit further down.
This concept is really old; it was pioneered by [James Prescott Joule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Prescott_Joule), the very scientist we named [the standard unit of energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule) after. In 1845 he published "[The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_equivalent_of_heat)". The apparatus he was using looked like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjzes.png)
*Joule's apparatus ([Image source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joule%27s_Apparatus_(Harper%27s_Scan).png))*
# But a generator is still better
About the notion that it would be "difficult" to go use an electrical generator: no, you are wrong.
Again: the Law of Energy Conservation is non-negotiable. You are worried about losses in conversion. Well those "losses" are actually exactly what you want: **heat**. Normally people do not care about waste heat; it is just a nuisance. But you have a special case here: you **want** that heat.
So it is win-win for you, since you get both heat and electricity. I would say that you should in fact hook a generator to your mill, along with a big bank of batteries for the not-so-windy days. I think this would be much easier than to trying to make a swirl-pool.
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You could use the windmill to operate a [Heat pump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump). While known heat pumps are driven by electricity it should be easy to build one that uses mechanical energy instead.
When done right you could use the same heat pump to cool the mill in summer and you can use surplus heat to generate electricity.
Especially [geothermal heat pumps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump) work well for doing this.
Edit: For a basic principle you need two airtight tanks containing a medium that needs to be compressible. Those tanks are connected by pipes with valves that you can open or close. And at least one of the pipes has a pump that is driven by the windmill (many pumps use rotation). Now you open the inflow valve but close the outflow one and you start pumping more of the medium in. As it is compressed it heats up and you can use that heat. Once it cools down again you close the inflow valve and open the other one. The medium flows out, decompressing in the process and by that cooling down even more. Now you let it sit in the second tank, where it returns to ambient temperature. Rinse and repeat.
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Yes, it's extremely easy, just grind stuff. Or even don't bother grinding stuff, just let the millstones scrape against each other with nothing in between them. This will convert the kinetic energy into heat.
But wait, you might say (and indeed do say in the comments), surely this isn't the most efficient way to do it. But in fact it is! The reason is that the only thing stopping the blades from spinning faster and faster and faster in the first place is friction. *All* of the kinetic energy in the blades gets converted to heat through friction. Some of that friction is in the air outside (you can't do anything about that) but the rest is friction in the millstones and in the gears, shafts etc. in the machinery. All of that's inside the mill already, so just running the mill as usual is an absolutely 100% efficient way to generate heat. You'll have to make sure the mill is well insulated, though, which could be a bit of an issue in a lightweight moving structure that's not designed for it.
There is a better way, though. Better than 100? Yes, actually! By using the energy to run a [Stirling engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) or some other kind of heat pump to pump heat from outside the mill to the inside, you can get 100% of the kinetic energy (which still turns into heat from friction), plus a bit extra that you can pump in. There is a limit to how much extra you can get of course, but for a heat pump system efficiencies of somewhat more than 100% really are possible. (This is *not* a violation of thermodynamics and can't be used to generate free energy, before someone gets the wrong idea. It's actually a pretty commonplace way to heat buildings.)
Is any of this actually possible? Well, [it says here](http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-does-power-output-traditional-windmill-compare-modern-wind-turbine) that a traditional windmill can put out 14kW of mechanical energy, which is more than enough to heat a home, so you probably don't need to worry about the heat pump system. So if you can solve the insulation problem just run the mill normally and you will be nice and warm.
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Why not install a generator? Use the electricity for *anything*. Don’t constantly wear things as with leaving the brake on.
Also, start with you living/sleeping quarters. You complain about the high ceilings: build a small room within the space, further improving the insulation of the finished space and providing a smaller volume to heat.
With electric heating, you can use the least power by using an electric heated sleeping bag.
And you’ll have power to blast [*Danse Macabre*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Creek#Music) when clients come to [visit](http://www.shipleywindmill.org.uk/famous.htm).
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Well, the simplest way to do it is with a braking system. That converts mechanical energy into heat (plus noise). You'll need some kind of speed governor to keep the brake from stopping the windmill when the wind is low, but that's quite achievable as a mechanical system.
The easy way to distribute the heat through the building is to have a water pump, driven by the windmill, that pumps water through cooling pipes in the brake shoes on the main shaft, and then around the building to radiators, like a conventional central heating system.
The problem with the basic idea is that the heat available isn't closely related to the weather. On cold days with no wind, you need some other kind of heating. Warm days with strong winds are easier to handle: switch the hot water flow to radiators outdoors, or just swing the mill sideways-on to the wind and lock it.
The other problem is that you may not have enough power from the windmill. I can't find power figures for historical windmills, because the Internet is full of pages about modern wind turbines, which are much more efficient, as well as larger. But I'd be surprised if you could get more than 10KW of heat.
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A bit more detail when it comes to friction, hopefully using materials that fit your scenario:
Early (car) brakes were often made of leather pressed against metal. [Band brakes (wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_brake) are technologically simple - you just need a metal pulley, a strap and an anchor allowing you to tension it. You could probably use a stone pulley (your grindstone) though it would wear the band quite fast - perhaps sacrifice a few bands with a sand/water slurry to polish the wheel a bit smoother.
The thermal mass of the stone would help you if the wind was variable over the course of a day, but wouldn't be any use over longer periods.
Alternatively, by using the windmill to drive a bellows, you could burn a limited fuel supply more efficiently. If you could work metal to form a heat exchanger, you could push outside air in, warm it with the waste heat from the fire and then feed it under the grate for an efficient, clean-burning fire. You could also get your firewood (or other fuel) nice and dry by using forced air.
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Another option would be to use [eddy current](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current).
With a windmill that would be rather simple. You take a metal disk and add it to the windmill's axle so that it spins. Perhaps with a gear to make it spin faster. Now you install a magnet very close to the metal disc but without touching it, just as close as you can manage with your level of technology.
While the disk spins within the magnetic field it creates eddy currents which now generate their own magnetic field. Those magnetic fields oppose. By that kinetic energy is transformed into heat.
A positive side of this method is that it is simple to build and needs little maintenance because no moving parts touch and by that little wear occurs.
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**Friction.**
A windmill reportedly produces [18kW of usable mechanical power.](http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-does-power-output-traditional-windmill-compare-modern-wind-turbine) Since you already have in place all the machinery necessary to grind a huge stone against another huge stone, you can just use that.
Change out the gears to get more RPMs, cut down the stones to make them lighter and press them more tightly against one another. Now you have two stones rubbing against each other at relatively high speeds, which is sure to generate friction that in turn generates heat. Submerge them in water to get a pool of warm water you can use for bathing or heating.
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I am myself a retired french system engineer. I spent some time as a hobby, designing a very similar project as those mentionned above, using a windmill to heat by Joule effect, a remote building at high latitude locations. The multiblade 5m diameter windmill, is coupled to a water-stirrer via a servo-mechanism varying dynamically the level of water in the stirrer, hence the resistive torque, in order to keep the U/V speed-ratio of the blades permanently at optimum, and so the yield.
The system includes in the basement of the building, huge insulated water tanks sized to ensure a yearly heating autonomy of the building according to the weather conditions. The specific shape of the building in my project allows also to accommodate optimally some thermal solar panels that could eventually participate to the overall heat budget.
I went quite far into the design of the windmill, design and sizing of the system, but the project would still require skills from students of a university for instance, to finalize the details of the project. In particular using dedicated software-tools for the mechanical stresses design of the windmill wheel and water-stirrer structures.
Although not competitive versus traditional ways of heating a building, all the more as a first prototype, I am convinced this project could be useful in nordic countries where thermal solar panels are not efficient in winter. It could be sponsored by some industrials and implemented as a demonstrator for renewable-energy alternative developments. Simplified versions could then be derived for a more economical design, the target being that most of the parts of the system could be realized within a mechanical workshop with standard machine-tools and skills.
The address of my blog is: www.windmill-for-heating-buildings.blogspot.com
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Assuming spacecraft are using contemporary propulsion technology, and are engaging in a dogfight in outer space (whether they are manned, drone, or autonomous), would the movements of the craft be abrupt and jerky, or smooth and graceful?
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To expand on Cort's comment. Propulsion in space is too costly and distances too great for a dogfight to happen. With modern tech, space combat is limited to more of an artillery duel between satellites that are on more or less fixed trajectories. If they start trying to move around too much they are going to just end up falling into the atmosphere or flying out into space. They can also see each other way too clearly to ever survive long enough to get into dogfighting range even if they tried. Your armed satellites may have some maneuvering jets designed to make subtle course corrections for dodging, but high speed evasions would use too much fuel and need too heavy of thrusters to be an effective war doctrine using rocket propulsion.
So to answer your question... they would be "smooth and graceful" in the sense that they will not actually be moving around much to begin with.
Perhaps one day we will have some manner of technology that will make orbital mechanics and rocket equations a moot point in the face of overwhelmingly efficient and powerful propulsion systems. With what we've got today, just getting into a stable orbit is a trick unto itself.
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The short answer is jerky and abrupt, but the longer answer is far more interesting...
First of all, the preceding answers explain why fighter combat in space is really a bad idea; it's not an efficient use of propellants or fuels, and you're far better off doing what was done in naval warfare; focusing on a smaller number of larger ships with REALLY big, long range, powerful guns. But if you insist on putting fighters up there, the first thing you have to do is get the idea of air combat out of your head; space fighters and dogfights are going to look completely different.
Let's start with the fighters themselves. They are not going to be sleek, aerodynamic craft that bank and turn gracefully; they're going to be spheres.
The reason for this is very simple. In an atmosphere, the air itself gives the plane something to help the craft bank and turn; the wings effectively push air around themselves and shape it with control surfaces to move the plane in a desired direction; it's actually pushing against the air to go where it needs to go. In space you don't have that so every change in velocity (whether it be speed, direction or both) must be done with a maneuvering thrusters. To make your fighter as agile as possible, you want to be able to thrust in almost every direction so that you can react to the combat around you with a minimum of orientation changes (as these also cost fuel) and to do that, you want thrusters pointing out in almost every possible direction. That means a sphere.
Now, it's possible for you to thrust in almost any direction *without* a sphere if you have a thruster that can turn and spin around you; say 3 thrusters each at 120o from each other on a ring that can rotate and spin around your ship, but in a combat situation do you really want to wait the half second or so for your ring to put the thrusters in the right position? Probably not. So, sphere.
Now, dealing with the maneuvers; because you're not pushing against anything but firing a thruster every time you want to turn, and because you don't want to ramp up the thruster gently (time is not your friend in combat) you're going to have a very abrupt, jerky, but agile turning approach. You'll be able to pull off moves that are simply not possible in a plane, and most banking turns a plane uses will actually be inefficient for this kind of fighter, but you're in a different medium to begin with which is why you need to think in a different way as to how you move about in combat.
Realistically; for space fighters, you want them to be drones. The G forces and inertial effects on the craft are not going to be friendly to your pilot, who needs to be able to maintain some consistent frame of reference for 'up' and all the accompanying directions. You can't do that in a space fighter because every thrust is going to act on the pilot to reorient his 'down' to align with the thruster just fired. Also, because of the fact that you're moving in a way that planes can't most of the time, your pilot will suffer massive G-forces and won't last long in the cockpit. Further, not having to maintain life support for the pilot means you can make the craft more compact, making it a smaller target while also allowing it to be more nimble. It's basically a weapons platform surrounded by engines all pointing outwards.
The important thing to note is that cars, planes, and even boats can manage their smooth turns because they're all effectively pushing against something; a road, the ocean, or an atmosphere. Your space fighter has nothing to push against, so it must use its engines to do ALL the pushing. Once you get your head around that, smoothing the change in velocity means making the craft inefficient and before long, you're taking the pilot out of the craft for his or her protection more than anything else as you give your craft an edge (hopefully) over the enemy craft.
Put even more simply, if modern drones could be designed to make instant 90o turns in the air, they would be simply because it would give them an edge in combat. Your space fighters CAN be designed to do that, so they will.
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There won't be any dogfights in space without the [science-fiction](/questions/tagged/science-fiction "show questions tagged 'science-fiction'") tag.
The reason is that we have been toying with lasers for a long time. The [YAL-1 project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1#cite_note-atn1-9) was cancelled, yes, but it worked kinda well in 2014. If we are going to space, we are going to have better technology. The lack of an atmosphere will also make it much easier to hit stuff with lasers.
YAL-1 could deliver well in the range of 2kWh in 3 to 5 seconds. That is enough to really ruin the day of whomever is in the receiving end - too concentrated and you get holes in our hull, too dispersed and in the very least your instrumentation goes blind.
You just can't compete with lasers. The fastest acceleration we've ever managed for a rocket-powered vessel was with New Horizons. It passed the Moon's orbit within nine hours of its launch. Light, however, is much faster and will cover the same distance in close to 1.3 seconds.
So don't try to enter a dogfight in space - as soon as you are seen, you are toast.
Someone might say "oh come on Renan, this means acceleration will be jerky in order to avoid lasers". The attacker may simply spread the laser wide. As long as you are within the beam you are in trouble, for the same reason that laser pointers are dangerous to aircraft. The laser will not reach you as a small dot. And once you are blind, there isn't much point in doing random maneuvers.
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In space, everything is ballistic in nature.
It would be smooth, but not graceful. Both ships would be struggling to stay within their optimum ranges, and out maneuver the tracking speed of the enemy guns.
The whole thing devolves into firing mass drivers at each other from miles (and miles) away, then adjusting position, so that hopefully, the other projectile misses. Most of the time, the ships would be operating at such extreme ranges that the other ship would only be visible on instruments.
Imagine the scenario:
*Ship fires, several minutes pass.*
Gunner: "Negative hit sir"
Sensors: "Incoming projectile"
Captain: "Adjust heading to miss the projectile, re-target and return fire. Someone bring me a hot cup of Earl Grey."
If you have lasers, it's a game of "let's see how long it takes for you to have a hull breach", with both sides firing until either guns blow up, or the other ship does (from miles away, again):
*Ship fires, several minutes pass.*
Gunner: "Their armour is holding, and they are returning fire."
Captain: "Maintain fire, and deploy reflective plating. Keep an eye on temps"
*Ship maintains fire, several more minutes pass.*
Gunner: "Hullbreach reported by telescopics, and guns are starting to overheat".
Captain: "Good, cycle lasers and heatsinks, and find us another target"
Small, maneuverable ships could be used, but not for dog-fighting; they would be used in boarding actions, and as they would see you coming for literally hundreds of miles away, the casualty rate would be horrific(think world war 1 level losses). If you could invent some form of stealth tech, this could make for exciting boarding marine action.
The only way to have dogfights be viable, is for the ships to have reactionless, low inertia drives, which enables fast changes in velocity, with little in the way of G-forces. At this point, the motion of the ships would be erratic, making long range artillery utterly pointless outside bombarding space stations. At this point, the motion of ships would be jerky and erratic, as they try to do the same thing all pilots have since aerial warfare began: getting behind the enemy(where there are typically no guns), and shooting them.
This is your basic star wars/battlestar galactica, star trek etc fare.
So, for your world, You have to decide what space combat will be like:
1. Dogfighting, using "magic" propulsion which also gets rid of G-forces powerful enough to liquefy a man.
2. Long range artillery duels, using missiles, point defence guns, armour and mass drivers.
3. Ships with heavy armour on the front. These ships simply ram into the other ships, to cause as much damage as possible. Basically steerable missiles with a crew.
4. Laser combat. More long range engagements, with each combatant trying to melt through the other ship before the same happens to them.
Basically, unless you use some space magic, space combat is going to be dull, and uneventful, until something actually hits, then everyone dies, as the ship now has a massive hole in it.
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There's been a few realisic approaches to combat in space in various novels. I liked Niven's one in Protector - the assailant drops a bomb out the back of the ship, and a few days later there's an explosion as the pursuing craft hits it.
But, that's not going to make for good TV!
Perhaps the next best one is the approach used by Peter Hamilton, his ships get within reasonable distance and fire a huge barrage of missiles at the enemy, who does the same, only many of these missiles are designed to self-destruct in a big old nuclear explosion that will (if they've calculated things right) also destroy the enemy missiles coming at them, a bit like a futuristic version of ["missile command"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command#/media/File:A5200_Missile_Command.png). But that's pretty boring too - you may get a very sparkly battle, but its all fought with probabilities.
So maybe the next best is the C J Cherryh approach - your combat vehicle is a small-ish 4-man missile that is dropped near to the target by its carrier (that wisely keeps well out of harms way) and zooms into battle as fast as it can to avoid detection and enemy fire, dropping missiles as it goes that are fired at whatever enemy targets the ship can detect as it passes. Again, its all probabilities but at least this time its people in a ship doing things that make things go bang.
The point of probabilities is that space is very big, so big it makes your walk to the shops seem like peanuts in comparison. So any target will be far, far, far away. that means whatever you shoot at it will probably miss as the target will be somewhere else by the time your munition gets there. (see the Niven bomb I first mentioned). So computers will be tracking what they can passively detect and trying hard to be somewhere that the enemy computer didn't think they'd be when they fired their munitions at them. Payloads don't even have to be explosive - a small lump of metal fired fast enough will destroy any target you care to mention, but you'll be using self-propelled missiles to avoid being pushed away as you fire them.
So your space battles are far more likely to be like submarine warfare today. Lots of nervous waiting to see if there's a sparkly blip of light a few hundred miles away in the darkness, holding your breath to see if the enemy did see you or guessed where you'd be as a small lump of metal comes hurtling at you so fast you can't even see it coming before its ripped you to bits.
So movement: smooth and graceful .. and quiet and stealthy like its tiptoeing through the dark.
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Think Alchymist touched on a key point with the ball bearings. The battlefields would remain deadly (and therefore cumulatively deadlier (argh, got be a better way to phrase that)) after the first few explosions and/or shrapnel bursts.
Before long there would be large areas of left over small junk and/or deliberate shrapnel mines where it would be hard to operate in unless you had some sort of massive armor or deflector technology or the ability to somehow phase shift out to other dimensions.
We already have a problem with that now. So the answer to the question would be "neither after the first few encounters because both sides would be denied access"
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With contemporary technology, you really have two choices for stopping your path being purely ballistic. You can expend very large quantities of fuel to change your velocity rapidly (think Saturn V taking off) but you can only do this for a short period of time before you run out, or you can expend smaller quantities of fuel for low acceleration but one you can sustain for longer.
In the first scenario, either you hit the vessel that you are aiming for (with probably catastrophic g forces on both sides) or you get close enough to deliver some other attack. Then you travel past them at speed and probably don't have the fuel to return to the battle. This is similar to a kamikaze attack against a ship rather than a dogfight, or a strafing run if you don't intend to run into the enemy directly.
In the second scenario, you may be able to approach the enemy with a relatively small difference in velocity, allowing you and the enemy to each fire on the other, and maybe even seek to board. This is closer to naval warfare with sail, or even oar-powered vessels.
Neither seems much like a dogfight as you seem to envisage it. Both may be worse than just estimating where the enemy is heading and leaving millions of ball bearings in their path - effectively a mine field.
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With known technologies the answer is kind of both, but differing depending on perspective:
* The accelerations ships would need in order to evade fire at dogfight ranges (which is unrealistic given modern weapons options) would be brutal for the interiors of the ships, any crew, whether on board or operating on remote will have a jerky and chaotic experience of the battle.
* Due to the fact that 1. only direct counterthrust stops motion in a given direction and 2. that in battle you don't have any maneuvering fuel to spare for course alterations you don't *need* to make. The actual motions seen from the outside will still be fairly stately.
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How would cultures adapt to having to deal with large predatory dinosaurs being a part of their ecosystem? Specifically, cultures that are less technologically i.e. without metal.
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Take a look at the wikipedia on [Lion Hunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_hunting), with reference to the tribes people who undertake solo lion hunts with a single spear. A google search on 'lion vs velociraptor'(!) suggests that Lions are more powerful than these intelligent pack hunters.
Also, it seems that [Mammoth hunting](http://mammoth.psu.edu/society.html) was commonplace in the stone age. Mammoths are roughly t-rex size.
Conclusion? Stone age man could take down any predator that the dinosaur age had to offer. The really big herbivores may have been harder, simply because of the difficulty of killing something that big (although we hunted whales to near-extinction with pretty basic technology). But their young and eggs would have been easy pickings. Remember that stone age man is not some grunting savage; these are intelligent, planning people who train in the use of their tools and weapons from a very young age.
No doubt some people would have been killed by dinosaurs, but it would have mostly been the other way around. And that's with stone age technology. Once you bring hunting bows and iron tools into the picture it becomes even more one sided.
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Human hunted nearly the vast number of megafauna to extinction, why would dinosaurs be any different, dinosaurs will fear fire just as much as anything else does and fire was our primary weapon. The few predators we did not kill of we drastically reduced the range of, smart trumps nearly any other adaption. Of course thats assume human were actually able to evolve on a savannah with dinosaurs on it. Big predators tend to only survive by avoiding humans either intentionally or accidentally.
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Well, considering that Homo evolved in an environment full of predators like lions, wolves and sabertooth tigers, I would say that dinosaurs and men is not a big no no.
First, let's consider that for big bad fellas like T rex and the like, a single human would be just like an olive in a Martini: not enough to grant a sufficient energy intake, as we are not fat enough. They could try to attack a group of humans, but a group is always stronger than a single individual (usually the hunting strategy is to isolate a member of a pack). Definitely not worth the effort, unless the only alternative is starvation or an opportunity meal (like a wounded/elder individual).
Having seen that humans are not worth a systematic effort for the big hunters, let's give a look at the smaller ones. They would be more of a concern, as a single human would be a valuable meal and also could not massively rely on hiding in places where size matter for access. In such a case the ability to control fire and to act as a group would prove useful, again. Not a clear superiority, but enough to make humans and small hunting dinosaurs avoid each other as much as possible.
To summarize, developing in a world with dinosaurs would strengthen the group culture and the social binding.
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Some of these dinosaurs are social, so I would definitely try to tame them. Instead of hunting dogs, one might get hunting velociraptors. The herbivorous ones could become awesome beasts of burden. I would make a big lance out of a hard tree, tie it to my brontosaurus and charge against my enemies or prey.
Or I could use my tame dinosaur to make sling three traps or dig holes for the T-Rexes.
As others pointed out, small dinosaurs can be dealt with spears, the way Maasai hunters deal with lions. The main problem in this world is that humans would have too much meat to eat, so we'd all end up tall like the basketball players.
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These answers are seriously delusional in my opinion. There's a very good reason the only mammals around at the time of the dinosaurs were small shrewlike things that were only able to survive by hiding in holes.
Yes obviously modern humans would easily wipe out dinosaurs with the type of firepower we have today, but if you're talking about humans being able to co-exist with dinosaurs in the stone-age equivalent, there is absolutely no chance. We would have just been a tasty hors d'oeuvres to a hungry T-Rex. Doesn't matter if you have spears or arrows against a beast as big and savage as that, he's gonna get you.
Thinking we could cope because we managed against lions with spears and fire is just crazy. Lion= 190kg, TRex = 8 tons. So that's something 42 times bigger, still think humans have a chance?
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Assuming your world has a climate similar to earth's, I would think the humans would congregate in areas avoided by dinosaurs, such as the colder regions in the poles. Additionally, they would avoid permanent, large communities because they would be unable to defend them. Even well-fortified castles, I would think, wouldn't work because large predators would just wait outside for a snack. I doubt your humans would actually hunt dinosaurs because killing one would then force them to defend the carcass against more dinosaurs. I would think they would be scavengers who also hunted smaller animals. To survive, your humans would have to copulate like mad, in the way rabbits do, to overcome the tremendous losses they would suffer. Finally, I would think their culture would stress the value of protecting the group and focus less on individual worth. One last thought, it might be that they would be so busy fighting for survival that they would not have the time or the energy to develop a complicated culture.
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**Acceptance Criteria**
I am looking for an explanation that allows for a reasonable purpose for *both missiles and drones*, but I will accept answers that try to dissuade me from either.
Adding additional armaments is permitted within this technology base within reason. Ships should not be overly armed to stay more in line with current-era warships than with hedgehogs.
Comnbat drones should be armed with similar weapons as point defence for ships.
A drone is anything remote-controlled or any autonomous object that can maneuver freely, but has lower maximum acceleration than missiles, and its primary purpose is not to impact or detonate itself.
A missile is anything that has a drive and tries to impact or detonate close to a target and does not fall under the general drone definition.
**Technological Base for Scenario**
Ships have access to hyperspace technology, but will require substantial cooldown before making a second jump or will need to eject the hyperspace core without taking on its excess energy ("emergency jump"). Per-jump distance is limited by position and vector calculations of the target. A certain amount of uncertainty regarding the location and vector is to be expected.
A target point in space for the jump is calculated relative to an object, with higher accuracy the closer it is to the drive. This way, the vessel will have a close enough velocity vector to the target so that it gains the necessary orbital velocity to stay there.
Combat vessels are armed with relativistic/near relativistic weaponry, especially mass drivers. They are also armed with nuclear weapons like bomb-pumped directional plasma devices and fusion bombs (in missiles).
The main defence mechanism is the *barrier plane*, an energy field of fixed size, either of rectangular or circular shape and little depth. Its size and strength directly correlate to the number of projectors and the distance to those projectors. The further away, the larger the area gets, but the weaker the barrier is. The more projectors in use for a single plane, the stronger it gets.
Sandwiching of planes is limited.
The loss of projectors resulting in less than three projectors per plane results in dissipation of said plane.
Obstructing the projector beams path has the same consequences as losing a projector for practical purposes with regards to the barrier plane.
Adding a projector to a plane without calibration results in plane destabilization. A non-trivial amount of time is needed to calibrate a projector group.
Each projector group can only sustain one plane at a time.
Enabling and disabling planes does take a non-trivial amount of time.
Planes are inertially locked to the ship and will move with it. They also have no mass.
Planes can reasonably withstand a hit from a relativistic mass driver or fusion device before collapsing.
Barrier planes are completely opaque to all kinds of radiation from either side of the plane.
Ships rely on observation drones to see the enemy while hiding behind their barriers or need to temporarily shift planes to be able to see through.
Ships may be equipped with lasers and high rof low velocity mass drivers as defence against drones and missiles (point defence).
Principally, the hyperspace technology could be used to transport things without a dedicated drive on the object, this could be achieved by a *catapult*, with the same restrictions as the drive technology. One could teleport missiles or drones to a sufficiently close location to the target that they can maneuver reasonably with regards to the position of their targets, but not close enough to deny the target a reaction (well, it *is possible*, just very unlikely).
Assume that PDs, external C3-related equipment, sensors and ECM, and heat-management components are at least in some regards exposed, i.e. not under armor. (I mean, how do you armor an antenna anyways?) With this, also regard the heat problem as solved as long as there are enough functional heat-management components.
Assume, for the purpose of this question, that ships will not run out of fuel by burning and maneuvering, however the inertia problem is not solved, specifically g-forces on human personnel and hardware (yes, assume that ships have a human crew).
**Question Specifics**
How can I justify the use of both missiles and drones within a scenario like this, assuming the drones don't actually suicide?
Note:
*Why am I asking this question? It seems that there is little to no reason not to only use missiles and completely dismiss non-Intel/CounterIntel drones.*
**from the comments**
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> You want a drone for any situation whereby multiple less powerful shots are more useful than one big bang. That said, in a space scenario where loitering is essentially "free" the line between a suicide(-ish) drone and a missile might be very blurred. Is a loitering missile with shields or anti-anti-missile munitions (which could be used in an anti-shipborne-anti-missile-projector role) really a missile or a drone? But the real question is, why would you have people in frontline warships when you have drones?
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I think you misunderstand. I defined "Missile" as any self-propelled object whose primary objective is to detonate itself, the distinction to a "drone" is purely meant as a meta distinction to have a different word, to have a clear distinction between something that is clearly a one-use weapon and something that at least has a potential to be reused.
It's not necessary to have an all-purpose drone, I just want some justification of why there would be a need to have drones with point-defense like armament.
The role of humans in frontline warships is to make decisions, since there is no "near-almighty" AI and no realtime FTL communication. Drones have no FTL themselves, and the accuracy of catapult gates decreases with distance.
Also, for story purposes it's nicer to have humans.
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You have one reason for drones: from OP
/Ships rely on observation drones/
But those fall under non-Intel / CounterIntel drones.
To want drones you need them to do something a missile cannot do. The destiny of a missile is to blow up. The destiny of a drone is / not to impact or detonate themselves./
I can think of three types of offense against a ship: destroy, disable, capture. The missile can do #1 and possibly might wind up doing #2. It cannot help with #3.
Therefore your drones can help with offensive objective #3: **capture the ship** It might wind up disabling the ship also as part of that objective.
Consider what a huge resource and valuable prize an operating ship is. You would have to be exceedingly rich or without other options to destroy it as a first choice. Back in the days of sailing ships, defeated ships were routinely captured with flags switched over. Your drones could facilitate this - by bringing in ship-disabling tech (engine killers?) that must operate in close proximity or (for high drama!) attaching to the ship and allowing entry of boarding parties.
Consider also **defensive use** of drones. A flying missile is not that great defensively except in that a good offense is the best defense. A drone will not mind floating in space for a few days or months or years, waiting to see what comes, reporting in and then attacking it - maybe with missiles. Mines are good defense but drones would be great defense. One of my favorite parts of Aliens is when they watch their sentry gun drones fight off the alien incursion = <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDy-5IQvuU>.
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## Missiles: Very good at destruction... once...
Missiles, even the smart ones just charge towards a target and goes boom. Very nice and well as long as you don't mind enemies dying and the thing you're intending to go boom be far beyond salvage. A missile does this extremely well... once...
## Drones: Quite good at quite a bit of things... multiple times...
A drone however, can be used with greater precision, eliminating vital parts of the ship to ensure safety of own vessel and then simply keep the enemy crow hostage. You're in space, every resource is very far away. As an additional danger, there is debris; Where shrapnel on earth only goes so far, in space where it's in 0g with hardly any aerial resistance it gets really tricky really quickly with any extended battle involving missiles.
So, missiles for destruction, drones for precision. They can be used in combination with one another for greater tactical purposes and threats.
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To build slightly on Hyfnae's answer: "professionals talk logistics". If you can recover and refuel the drones after the fight, you can have another one; once the missiles are fired, they're gone. (This would work better if you were using energy weapons rather than ammunition-consuming ones, but the chance of a drone using *all* its ammunition and reaction mass seem fairly small.) This is even more true of observation drones: those need to carry worthwhile sensors, which are going to be big and expensive.
You can teleport missiles into place for a close strike, so that rules out the obvious missile-carrying drone.
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Consider a current military (and sometimes police) strategy: Covering fire.
When you engage in covering fire you do not expect to hit your target. Rather, your objective is to make the target avoid your fire, thus preventing him from firing on a friendly.
Lets apply this to your battles. You have drones whose job it is to pelt the ship with kinetic fire. There is no expectation that you will actually hit the ship, the objective is to keep the shields oriented to block it. Send several drones against the ship and it's got a big headache blocking and squirming away from your fire.
When the ship is struggling against this attack you send in the missiles. The ship can't squirm away from them (they can match it's movements, there's no lag like there is with the kinetic fire from the drones that is ballistic) and they can figure out how to attack from any unshielded direction.
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Your combat drones **are** missiles.
Your "drones" can create a [VDA](http://ovalkwiki.com/Very+Dangerous+Array).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RUqmc.jpg)
([link](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-06-24))
The only reasons to not load a warhead into your drones would be cost\*, or civilian applications.
\*cost or maneuverability (which is a again cost of a drive), or size (which is again cost of the parent vessel)
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**Because drones beat missiles**
One way this can work is if drones were reasonably effective at intercepting missiles. While ships can mount PD themselves, individual ships can become overwhelmed by large numbers of missiles, especially since only those PD guns in a certain specific arc can fire on missiles approaching from that direction. Drones meanwhile can easily re-orient themselves to protect ships from missile attacks from any direction, can position themselves in the direction of possible missile fire to offer ships the longest time to react, and if you have enough, can even crowd around enemy ships shooting down their missiles the moment they are launched.
Drones would be more cost-effective in this role than missiles, because each drone can potentially take out many missiles, and being more versatile they can knock out even the opponents' own drones. And PD weaponry would likely be better at sweeping space of small targets than direct collision. One other thing is that there is no problem with multiple drones targetting the same missile with PD, whereas an anti-missile missile would have to spend vital miliseconds communicating with its peers to make sure the entire formation is not dragged out of position by a single decoy.
In this situation it would be reasonable to use a mix of drones and missiles. Once your drones eliminate those of the enemy (and maybe can help damage enemy ship-PD), then anti-ship missiles can be launched to do the real damage. You don't kamikaze your drones because as long as your drones are present you've locked down their missile weaponry.
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I'll try to keep this short (it won't work)
Warfare in space should be a bit more dynamic than just shooting at the enemy with stuff.
Remember for example the often quoted Sun Tzu:
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> All warfare is based on deception.
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You know whats scary? 10 Fusion rockets coming for you.
But it is scarier if the missiles are equipped with a (short-lived) plane projector - because you have no way of knowing whats under it. The missile has to steer with data from a spy drone of course, but that shouldn't be a problem.
Now lets up it a bit: Send 10 big missiles and 50 cheap and fast drones equipped with projectors. The enemy has no way to know which thing he ***CAN'T*** see is the biggest threat.
And the next step. Those small drones? If the attack makes your planes flicker enough (or if matter can pass through it somehow) those are now sitting on your ship - too close for your point defense. And some of them have some kind of welding beam. Usually useless for combat since its range is a metre or so, but cuts through armor and is very energy efficient. They weld gun barrels shut, destroy your plane projectors, disable heat sinks, cut antennas...
maybe the missiles were less dangerous after all.
But wait! There is more! Remember I said "some" of them had welding beams. Some others carry tools to connect to your the ships intranet, others might carry a small container with neurotoxins. As soon as the welders found some cables and laid them bare (lets say under an antenna) the ship is suddenly victim of a hacker attack. NOT funny if that hacker could for example deactivate lifesupport or amplify gravity by a factor of 10.
And while the ships techies try to deal with that the third kind of drone tries to infiltrate the air circulation system and poison everybody on board.
Missiles explode and are gone. Sometimes thats the only thing you want.
Drones can be so much scarier.
Because I got propably a dozen more nasty ideas what drones might do in space.
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I'm going to suggest something slightly different.
The reason to use drones is to create weapons which are not limited by the presence of human beings, so are capable of greater acceleration, or can dispense with the mass of shielding and life support systems, or can mount single purpose weapons with far greater power than a manned ship of comparable size. In this conception of space warfare, the manned spacecraft is a command and control centre which can be a light second behind a cloud of unmanned spacecraft which carry a multitude of sensors and weapons.
So drones could be the analogues of the USN "arsenal ship" or USAF "arsenal plane" concepts of vessels as firing platforms for other ships or airplanes (or indeed anything. A recent USMC test had an F-35B detect a drone, then cue, fire and guide a missile from a nearby warship to destroy it).
Using a cloud of drones also allows you to conduct manoeuvres which could sandwich the enemy between two or more groups of enemy ships, or allow you to split your forces and make a run for the enemy portal with a portion of your force, or otherwise confuse the enemy as to your actual intention.
The use of distinctive manned command and control ships could be considered a good thing (both sides observe a convention of not firing on manned vessels or infrastructure, limiting the collateral damage in Space Warfare), or not (both sides make frenzied attacks seeking out the manned command and control ships in order to defeat the rest of the constellation of warships).
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Missiles and drones might have a lot of functional overlap, they're often both intended to destroy targets, but their approach to that can differ substantially. For example, missiles often employ high speed, some with deliberately erratic flight paths, and explosives to damage their targets. Drones can sneak in more slowly, they can tuck into blind spots, and because they're not jetting out propellant constantly they're harder to spot.
One simple way of splitting these is that missiles are used for overt destruction and drones are used for covert sabotage. Some might latch on and siphon power, cripple systems, or would chew through the hull using chemicals or high-temperature plasma beams. They can target with surgical precision. They could also carve open a hole to introduce even smaller drones into the interior of the ship.
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The division between drones and missiles in your scenario is basically comparable to the division between drones (or manned aircraft) and missiles launched from a carrier in the real world, so I think that's a useful analogy to work from. So in a world where various forms of missiles have existed for decades, and manned aircraft especially have clear downsides, why do we still have planes?
Planes and drones are generally, at least in principle, reusable. So if they cost more per airframe, that may be OK. In turn that means they can carry hardware that you wouldn't want to put on a missile or suicidal drone; an expensive but powerful sensor suite, for example, which may allow for more precise targeting or the ability to defeat some sort of countermeasures. They may be better-hardened against certain types of defenses.
Planes typically carry multiple types of weapons and ordnance, giving them flexibility to use different weapons for different purposes. Maybe kinetic or energy weapons are especially effective against certain targets or parts of a hostile ship. They can also attack multiple targets, which a missile generally cannot do. Target selection may be more effective than it would be with a missile; it might reasonably be done on-the-fly (autonomously or under direction from the mothership) and therefore with more information. To achieve the same effect with missiles might require firing off a salvo and hoping they work things out (if autonomous/"fire and forget") or hoping that you can direct them effectively once they reach the target (if able to accept commands), so you may end up wasting missiles (using them unsuccessfully or firing more than you actually needed). Then you have to do battle damage assessment, decide whether to fire more, fire them, wait for them to reach the target, etc., all of which takes time.
Related to the above is the ability to loiter. A fighter aircraft can fly in patrol of an area for quite some time (and a space drone could presumably just quietly sit in place near-indefinitely), then engage a target when an opportunity presents itself. But that sort of thing is not really compatible with what people generally mean when they say "missile". Imagine not a ship rapidly jumping across space, but one orbiting a planet for a while to collect data or resources, or conduct repairs. Or imagine a space station surrounded by a fleet of sleeping drones that can jump to its defense when needed.
Drones also open up the option of attacking from multiple points around a target, which would be a desirable way to get around the barrier planes as you've described them, as well as many other defenses. For any kind of missile that obeys physics, there will be some inherent tradeoff of maneuverability for speed; so just launching them "away" from the target and having them turn back toward it may be undesirable.
It may also be harder to defend against weapons fired from drones that fly in close, as opposed to weapons fired from the mothership, due to reduced travel time. Depending on the nature of the available defenses, surrounding the target with drones and then having them all fire simultaneously may be effective in saturating its defense systems, allowing you to do some damage.
Moving beyond the analogy somewhat, there may also be size differences between missiles and (some?) drones. Maybe I have a swarm of small, lightly-armed drones that my opponent can't easily distinguish from space debris. They may need to be slow (lack of power plus preserving the illusion of being debris) and they probably can't do a lot of damage individually, but they may be able to move undetected to their target. This becomes even more useful if my opponent has one really important ship surrounded by escorts. Those escorts will block or destroy a lot of missiles fired from the mothership... but maybe the swarm of drones gets through. And even if not, maybe that means my opponent wastes time and resources firing at actual debris for fear of this tactic.
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Look at David Weber's Honor Harrington series. It's heavily concerned with space combat, mostly using missiles. But most of the missiles in the series are drones by your definition -- they don't close to point-blank distance and explode, they close to stand-off distance and emit a bomb-pumped laser beam at the target. That's because close-in point defence systems are good enough to destroy missiles that close to point-blank range, but not good enough to destroy drones closing to a few million miles away.
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**Tl/Dr:** *War is too important to rely only on drones or missiles. No matter what you do, in any environment, you'll find a desire for both. This will come naturally out of the total nature of warfare.*
## Cost is everything
As per your definitions, the real difference between a missile and a drone is that a missile only has to fly once. It them does something spectacular and goes to whatever deity missiles worship. So how meaningful is that difference in reality? **It turns out the primary differentiator is *cost*.**
Let's flip it around. You have a fancy drone with all sorts of advanced sensors and communications and stuff. It can use those sensors to make intelligent battle decisions at the moment they are needed. This means it can find opportunities to put itself in a position to do serious damage. Let's use current terms. A modern Predator drone [costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator) \$4 million. A fancy F-22 stealth fighter [costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor) \$150 million. If I got the opportunity to make a Predator go *boom* and take out a F-22, I'm going to take that opportunity. It's a 37.5:1 win ratio, financially.
The real reason we don't see these sorts of things is because missiles specialize in flying once. They're cheaper, for one thing. Anti-aircraft missiles are typically much cheaper than a Predator. They also tend to go faster and be more maneuverable. Why? Because they don't have to return.
Which leads us to the interesting natural pattern. You'll constantly see drones getting faster and cheaper, lending themselves to more suicidal missions. You'll constantly see missiles getting smarter. The two naturally try to converge. **The only reason we draw a line between drones and missiles is we haven't hit the convergence point yet!**
## Heterogeneous Opportunities
Now the reality is, we don't really use one or the other. Consider the air-to-air missile. It can't get to the target on its own. It needs a host plane to fly it hundreds of miles before getting into position to be launched. Likewise, the aircraft really can't survive on its own. It needs the lethal energy of the missiles to kill the enemy before the enemy shoots down the aircraft. **The two are synergistic, not antagonistic.** Consider the reality that drones like the Predator have already been armed with Hellfire missiles.
So this is where it gets interesting. If you send a "drone" up into combat with a missile strapped to it, and it comes back sans-missile, did the "drone" come back in one piece? Or did only part of the drone come back? The phrasing is strange, but the reality of war is that we are always leaving valuable stuff behind -- jet fuel, missiles fired. When you go to war, you are expending resources to overcome someone.
## Pulling it together
So what it really looks like you're doing is trying to maximize how much value comes back in one piece. We like our spacecraft to come back in one piece, after all. That's why we're launching all these drones, missiles, and drones with missiles strapped to them.
What you really want is a heterogeneous environment where all sorts of weapons are recoverable, and all sorts of ships are sacrificable, and everything in between. What you describe isn't unusual for warfare. In fact, it is the reality of warfare. **Every single competitor in every single war that has ever been fought since the beginning of time has sought to minimize their sacrificed assets. Every single competitor in every single war that has ever been fought since the beginning of time was ready to sacrifice any and all assets needed to accomplish their goals in warfare. These are fundamental realities of warfare.** Thus you will *always* find that every army in your space battle minimizes sacrificial assets by deploying combat drones with which to better place their sacrificial assets for maximum impact. It will never not be the case.
The real question will be what is the balance. Space is an unforgiving medium. The delta-V requirements need to strike out and then come back are brutal. This currently favors missile style thinking. If you want more drones, consider making your hyperspace technology friendly for re-capturing drones. Perhaps there is some concept of a "hyperspace leash" which you can use to retrieve drones launched in combat. Alternatively, make combat more about sensory input. If breaking shields calls for nuanced skill rather than brute force, having enough sensors in the sky to target the missiles to their final resting place would be essential.
On the other hand, consider that we currently rely 99% on drones in space today. The *vast* majority of hardware that we've flung into space has been satellites, which are really just big drones. Only a tiny bit of what we send up has been sacrificial (mostly weapons tests). Right now, I'd argue the drones are winning. If you want more missiles, create a more hostile environment which makes it harder to preserve the value of a drone. Whether you intended to blow the drone up or not, a drone that gets shot down doesn't come back... just as a drone that blew itself up doesn't come back. Conveniently enough, this is easy... just add more missiles. Nothing makes space more hostile than a bunch of devices who have no self preservation instincts and a mean temper!
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The reason drones would exist? Cost and flexibility.
I could see what a handwavium-fast engine could propel a warhead to great speeds very quickly, with said engine destroying itself in the process. That's a missile.
The same missile, in a stealthy launch tube, floating in space, is a mine. The launcher detects a ship with a certain signature, roughly points the missile, programs it with targeting information, and launches it.
That's a lot of blunt-force trauma. And they are cheap. Having a similar weapons system would be a loser.
Thus the drone is more flexible. Sometimes pelting the enemy with a lot of missiles is not the best answer.
The drone has a real engine on it. It accelerates maybe not as fast as a missile, but it can maneuver, stop, start again, and return to base. It is stealthy. It could carry a hyper-light transmitter and serve as a communication mechanism between manned and unmanned ships in a battle and a command ship that's safely in the rear. Without FTL communications, even in-system decisions could be hours behind reality.
A drone could carry the best of weapons so when you absolutely must destroy a target, the drone could perform what's probably akin to an assassination. For example, another optional component for a drone is an anti-matter generator. You don't want that too close :-D When the need arises, the drone produces antimatter, puts the warhead into a missile, and shoots. This missile is probably very stealthy to increase the chance it makes it to the target.
The missile has a nice computer in it. The drone has a real AI, possibly with a biological (aka $$$) component.
Of course, only best offensive and defensive ECM gear are installed.
Another optional component could be a re-supply ship. The drone navigates a sensor network and blockading warships, disables satellites where it can, and drops supplies for marines. Then it escapes, causing (possibly non-lethal) havoc in the process, using ECM, decoys, etc.
The engines, communication systems, extra components, and weaponry are too large for a missile and too expensive, making it impractical to attach these to a disposable weapon.
Where the missile's shape is probably very familiar, the drone would be more like a small space ship.
If you're writing, a drone could be an antagonist or protagonist because of its AI.
Some games (like the outstanding [Letters from Whitechapel](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/letters-from-whitechapel/)) use a hidden movement system. So a game designer could work off the theme to create a cat-and-mouse sort of game where players hunt the stealth drone, or perform an incursion.
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Missiles carry a single projector, which they will aim at the barrier plane in their way to destabilize it, and an explosive warhead. Possibly armored so it can penetrate the now-instabilized barrier plane.
Now, the enemy ship would absolutely LOVE to shoot down your missile before it gets to do that - to prevent this, you send out a swarm of drones pelting the ship with constant fire. The ship can now either keep the barrier planes up and be unable to locate incoming missiles, or drop the barrier planes and risk having its sensors (and heat management, and projectors...) shot to scrap by the drones. If they keep the barrier plane up, it will protect the ship until the missile destabilizes and penetrates it... also a bad ending.
So obviously, the target ship needs drones too - those drones can fly around outside the opaque barrier planes and shoot at missiles (and enemy drones) to reduce the incoming (barrier-requiring) drone fire and prevent missiles from reaching the ship itself.
Thus we have entered an arms race, where every side tries to bring out more and more better and better drones to shoot down enemy missiles (to protect the ship) and drones (to protect their own drones and allow the ship to drop barrier planes and fire the main guns and/or PD guns). Meanwhile the missiles are still out there, either flying a holding pattern until the drone war is won or racing to the enemy ship trying to get at least one or two of the hundreds of missiles through the defensive drone (and PD, if enough barrier planes can be lowered) fire.
A hit from a missile would likely decide the battle, because that'd utterly destroy the projectors and PD in the affected area, so the goal is to prevent a missile hit. Main focus of any battle would thus be the drone skirmishes.
/edit in response to OP comment on another answer:
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Even more reason to try to MAKE the enemy have to keep up ALL their shields. Constant drone fire from all angles means either you cook yourself, or you let some drone shots through and allow them to damage your projectors (and radiators, and sensors...) - so offensive drones are even better, and defensive ones even more important
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As per your description of your shields, the use of combat drones would be preferable to missiles assuming the drone were fitted with energy weapons.
The shields serve to protect the capital ship but are also a hindrance. They block all forms of radiation which includes visible light, radio waves, microwaves etc which means the ship is blind when protected.
The ship cannot rely observation drones without leaving a hole which the drones can target. Drones would have to be AI controlled and in all likelihood all communication would be jammed. If observation drones were used, they'd be the first target.
The only real way to tell what is going on is to drop the defenses. Now this might only take a fraction of a second to do before restoring the defenses which would leave insufficient time for a missile to connect.
Drones would surround the ship and when it drops the shield for a quick peek, they would target the shield generators, point defense system, engines or any other weak points.
Now drones would be faster at firing than the ship because the drones can already be aiming before the shield comes down but the ship would have to find and target the drones each time because the drones move.
Missiles would have no role until the drones break the defenses.
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There are many reasons to have both Drones and Missiles. This assumes that the drones cannot cause large structural damage. Thus, drones are multi shot weapons and missiles are ship killers.
**1. Anti-missile.** As Fhnuzoag said, drones are good for anti-missile applications as well as anti drone applications. From the way your shields work, point defense cannot fire through them. That means that point defense is probably on pylons and will get scraped off after the first "hit" (near misses will do for scraping). Drones allow you to use anti missile point defense at a distance. This thins the missile swarm so point defense does not get overwhelmed.
**2. Anti anti-missile drones.** Since you want your missiles to get to the target, lace the swarm with anti-drone drones.
**3. Hull cleaners.** If any drones from a missile swarm make it to the target, they try to get behind the shields and take out shield generators and other useful targets.
**4. Anti-personnel.** Why send a manned vehicle when you need to strafe a soft target that doesn't rate a missile.
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I like some notions I've seen in the thread, specifically: drones shooting from various directions to exercise the enemy's shields; and drones protecting the missiles. Let's add in a couple more notions...
**Attention**
In addition to making the enemy keep shields up to protect against attacks from more than one direction, having drones flitting around being naughty does one more important thing -- it soaks up *attention* that the enemy could be paying to knocking down your missiles, or doing mischief to you. Any given drone could be the "secret weapon drone" with the new shipkiller weapon. Therefore *all* drones present a threat which has to be neutralized or at least evaluated and triaged. There's only so much attention to go around... you might be able to saturate the enemy's brainspace until he becomes distracted and vulnerable to otherwise-blockable threats.
**Missile Removal**
I'm assuming that missiles accelerate almost constantly on their way toward your ship. So the earlier you detect them, the easier they'll be to target. Your drones should be hanging around as close to the enemy ship as they dare, taking down enemy missiles as soon as they're launched while they're still going slow.
**Strategy Evaluation**
Your drones, being pre-programmed, have to encode certain assumptions about how the enemy reacts, what his point defense capabilities are, and what are good ways for you to hurt him. Your ideas about this will evolve over time, as he ... teaches you about his style. Your drones can have different versions of your Enemy Assumption package, so you can see which ones do best. They can report back via elint drones.
**Targeting**
Might be that drones have more computing power and better penaids than missiles. The enemy ship might be pretty good at deceiving missiles. So you can tell Drone B3395 to zip around *behind* the enemy vessel, and tell your missiles to target the drone. This tactic will probably be discovered either by mistake or out of desperation...
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[Question]
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Let's say a global law has been passed in the year 2000 that disallows any projectile, explosive or otherwise long distance weapon or put differently, only allows variations of melee weapons. Thrown weapons (like throwing stars) are also banned. The reason for this was that weapons became more and more weapons of mass destruction and after the success banning chemical warfare it was decided to go down that route a lot farther. So what kind of weapons would be developed in such a world? Do thus feel free to assume that 1) everybody obeys these laws 2) even more money than in the last 14 years was spend on weapon development, so weapons can be a bit fantasy-like/unreal from our perspective. and 3) armor might have gotten better.
I am looking for something that could develop within 50 years of the ban (so out to 2050).
To be precise, I am actually trying to think of the back story for the development of a very specific type of weapon and am trying to find out whether this would actually give rise to such weapons. I might self answer later with that line of thought, but I would absolutely love seeing what you guys think.
And just to be clear, anything that doesn't put the user physically in the battle, physically being connected to the entire weapon does not count. No javelins, laser beams, bullets, etc.
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I don't think that melee weapons would significantly change in 14 years of development, other than some re-purposing of tools designed for other uses. Lightsabers and other similar future weapons are, as of right now, purely in the realm of sci-fi, and aren't well supported by modern science. I do, however, see some changes to existing melee weapons, development of new weapons, and development of related battlefield technologies likely:
### Changes to existing weapons
Changes to existing melee weapons would fall mainly in terms of manufacturing process and materials. I imagine that something like a sword or a spear would consist of lightweight, durable modern materials like titanium and high strength nickel alloys, similar to what are seen in aerospace applications. Shock absorbant technologies have also progressed significantly, so work would probably be done in hilt/handle design to make weapons easier to maneuver in combat. It would also probably be possible to develop powered gyroscopic systems for controlling the rotational inertia of a weapon, making it easier to swing harder and recover from swings faster.
### Development of new weapons
Existing technologies like captive bolt guns might also be adapted as a way to increase the lethality of weapon users. Weapons could also be adopted from tools like chainsaws and jackhammers, though the weight of such systems may be prohibitive. Complex weapons with lots of moving parts would also be more susceptible to being damaged or broken in combat.
### Other technologies
For military applications, melee combat would put far more pressure on armoring and strengthening combatants, which would lead to probably the biggest technological shift in militarily combat: powered armor. This is a technology that's already being developed, and I imagine that a few hundred billion dollars could rapidly take it from something that is being developed to increase mobility in disabled people to a powerful battlefield weapon quite quickly. Without the threat of being destroyed by far cheaper weapons systems like RPGs, powered armor could make a fighter virtually invulnerable to the kind of damage that other soldiers could do with hand held melee weapons, no matter how advanced those weapons are.
Tactically, armored vehicles would have an even bigger advantage than they do now. A tank equipped with cutting blades could mow through infantry with impunity, since the elimination of explosives and projectiles would remove almost everything that infantry could do in response. I imagine the only thing that could stand effectively against a melee tank would be soldiers in powered armor, which would probably have better agility than the tank, and could effectively wield heavy power tools for puncturing their armor.
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With that kind of restriction, people are sure to turn to [Loophole Abuse](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoopholeAbuse) (warning: TV Tropes link).
The requirement that the user be holding or connected to the weapon while using it doesn't strictly prevent the use of *all* ranged weapons. Anything that is thrown, launched, or shot, but still held or connected by a rope, chain, or cable sounds like it would still be allowed. This would include things like meteor hammers, gladiator-style weighted nets, or, as GrandmasterB observes, a taser.
I picture people creating hand-cannons that shoot spears, cannonballs, or nets with light cables attached. There would be a mechanism for quickly retracting the cable, or, in case an enemy got ahold of it, detaching the cable.
This may not be particularly effective in battle, but they could be used a few times a the beginning of a fight before closing range--just like Roman javelins, except they're technically still handheld.
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I could see the extensive use of electrical stun weapons. From small, concealable hand-held stunners to long pike-like devices with a lot of reach. They are cheap and easy to make, effective, and can 'scale up' to be used against armored opponents.
Traditional 'Taser' guns might also be used, based on your boundaries, because the barbs they shoot are technically connected by wires to the gun.
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**Huge mindset shift is needed in order to make the ban happen:**
I am just going to list several "honorable mentions" of people or states or organisation *drastically changing their approach:*
* The Mafia everywhere, generally organised crime members will suddenly care about law... because laws should be followed.
* Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) will hand out all their weapons in fear of international sanctions. And we all know, that sanctions worked well against DPKR
* All protectors of [second amendment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) in USA will understand it the same way as I do, and it is: The right to have *weapon* means actually sword and not firearm
* All history freaks, doomsday preparation freaks and *everyone* will hand out their weapons
And yet...
After doing so, they will return home and Taliban will continue plan of attacking the World Trade Center, and George W. Bush will invade Afghanistan (using swords only) ... and so on.
To me, ultimately:
**If everyone will be willing to follow the "no firearms" law, it means world peace**
After handing out all their weapons, the *only* plausible way to continue is, that North and South Korea leaders will shake hands and say "we both are Koreans, so why fighting?" Taliban will apologise to US, African leaders ([Gaddaffi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi) was still alive to name one) will throw in democratic elections ... And world will become happy place.
So, the initial setup cannot plausibly lead to any meele only weapon
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**Any such rules against range weapons would be ignored.** In a battle, your goal is to **take any unfair advantage over opponent and kill him.** It is not about fair play.
Chemical weapons were banned because **chemical weapons do not give one side clear advantage,** killing often your own soldiers when wind shifted, and otherwise maiming mostly civilians. See that nuclear weapons were not banned, because they do give advantage.
Also, it would be impossible to remove all existing range weapons. It would be huge incentive to keep secret stash, because it would give you huge advantage over any opponent attacking with only a melee weapons.
And when you are fighting for your survival, you are not interested in fair play.
If you think that any rules apply in the fight of survival, you are naive and will be eliminated - only non-naive will survive long-term.
Different matter are **staged fights for entertainment or ritual reasons - like box, judo, medieval jousting.** Even mixed martial arts do have rules - because it is a sport, not real fight.
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I'll assume that trivially abused technologies such as hammers or chain weapons with rocket engines and shaped charge impact weapons are also banned. Same with chemical and biological weapons.
There also some important parameters unspecified in the question. Is it socially and legally acceptable to carry visible lethal weapons? Is duelling legal? Really, this is three questions: Optimal visible weapon to carry for self-defense AND duels. Optimal hidden self-defense weapon. And optimal formal duelling weapon. Of these the last two could really be anything depending on the legal and social parameters so I'll assume you are not interested in those.
For the first, I'd go with a sword. Swords have a tradition value that just cannot be beaten. And for a good reason. Unlike a gun that can be used for lethal damage or threatening with lethal damage, a sword can attack OR defend well, and even gives a degree of control over the damage you cause.
What kind of sword? Well, one reason "a sword" is an easy answer is because there is a sword for every need waiting for you in the history books. Some parameters: Is use of body armor allowed? Do the restriction s apply to actual wars or just peacetime use? From the question I am guessing you expect the restrictions apply during wars (unrealistic IMHO). That would imply needing a sword with reasonable armor penetration. A society like this would probably use augmented or powered armor. (Augmented = takes care of the weight of the armor, no power source strictly necessary; Powered = adds power source for enhanced strength and speed) With modern materials either could be essentially immune to small arms level damage. Explaining why the ban has a chance?
With those parameters a fast precise thrusting weapon with armor piercing point would seem optimal. That is generally called a rapier. With powered armor the rapier would probably be shorter and heavier. The weapon would be of modern alloys, corrosion resistant and almost impossible to break or bend. The tip, possibly the entire blade, would have hardened surface of something like diamond, sapphire, or silicon carbide, whatever is most convenient. There is no real point in giving the weapon enhancements for penetration as it is easier to improve thrusting strength mechanically at the armor. Even a light weight peace time street armor would have more space for enhancements than the blade does and give all the benefits of a heavy swung weapon but with better speed and precision.
It might make sense to give the blade an incapacitating attack after penetrating armor. Either an electric shock or a chemical injection of something like capsaicin would be simple enough to do, fair enough to be allowed, and quite effective at ending the fight. Which otherwise would be an issue with a weapon that is essentially an armor piercing point with some range. A hand-guard would be present obviously.
For off-hand I'd go with a shorter version of the same blade injecting less instant but longer lasting tranquillizers into opponents that you have temporarily incapacitated with the longer blade. Would also give more flexibility to melee range and be useful for parrying. As an alternate weapon maybe some sort of simple chain weapon for entangling the opponent?
And I suppose this would scale to "mecha" on battlefield, tanks and such being of limited use without cannon. The blades would be driven by high speed hydraulics and inject binary explosives. And the mecha might have four or six legs, probably with wheeled drive available.
The biggest change would be that without missile weapons, or some equivalent that would be equivalently banned, aircraft would be unstoppable. Troops could be rapidly and easily dropped anywhere in range, kept supplied, reinforced, and extracted. Ground warfare would be dominated by relatively light easily airlifted elite units adept at hit-and-run and rapid responses to hit-and-run. Such units would be based on the same the heavily defended bases as the aircraft that transport and supply them. Defenses would include "siege units", larger, heavier versions of the light units as well as static defenses. Similar defenses would be present at other strategic locations.
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I'm going to say energy weapons will become the next great wave, light sabers/ion blades etc. Things that can cut indiscriminately through as many materials as possible.
One movie years ago had a villain that had a 'laser' thumb. His bionic thumb had some kind of ion cutting rope/string that acted like a small whip. but if it wrapped around anything it would cut right through it. Of course he died at the end when someone took his thumb and wrapped it around his neck.
If light isn't considered a 'projectile' then laser guns would be a big one on the docket. Chances are it would happen anyway whether legal or not. Quiet, invisible, are to trace.
I might add more later.
Axes and pole-arms are good, don't need a lot of training to at least be useful.
Had another idea which I think those of us in the US would go for, sending in robots in our place. They aren't projectiles, but they do remove us from the action...
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You're looking for mechs, aren't you? Most advances in melee weapons that I immediately think of are going to be powered devices with several drawbacks for the common soldier. They will be heavy, they will need a power source, and they will have inertial issues that make them prohibitive.
That is unless you connect them to a frame with its own power source, has enough mass to handle the torque and inertia and mechanical assist to deal with the weight of the weapon. So, you need basically a mech. They'd start off human sized or slightly larger, but that would escalate quickly. You'd have melee weapons like chain-swords, probably with a blade nearly white-hot. I personally like a [Jaws of Life](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_rescue_tools) style weapon made to peel back enemy armor like tissue paper. Artificial Intelligence assist would be a must, leading to more arms with more weapons.
Armor meant to turn back a knife blade would be a secondary concern since your primary concern would be an EMP. This soldier would fail entirely if it wasn't armored in essentially a [farady cage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage).
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People don't carry personal weapons much any more; before firearms in Europe people carried rapier-like weapons, so those would probably return (albeit with slightly lighter and stronger blades due to advances in materials science). Swords are great weapons for civilian use: small enough to not get in your way most of the time, but almost all of the weapon is dangerous.
For wars--good grief, who would ever? Just drive cars or something into the enemy. Bus vs. pikemen = a bunch of dead pikemen. Bus vs. halberdiers = dead halberdiers.
This is all assuming you could even enforce such a law, which seems doubtful outside the context of alien occupation or some similarly vast technological gulf. (And then I don't think the lack of guns would be most people's first concern.)
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I would suggest this kind of sword
The blade is split in 2 halve. In the center, you have an explosive charge and an accelerometer.
When the blade hit something (a piece of software make the difference between a block and a hit) the charge explode adding much power to the blow.
Of course, you add a repeating system.
**-- Edit --**
[Hey! `Stuff made here` stole my idea and really made an "explosive axe"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7JnoRy2vng&list=TLPQMTUwNjIwMjE2zb5P84POFw&index=7)
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Better materials I'd guess.
The dune saga might be a good starting point - projectile weapons were *obsoleted* by technology development (in that case, shielding that worked against fast moving projectiles resulted in a culture where bladed weapons were common. There's *one* case where they used artillery on planet, and it caught everyone by surprise).
Not counting magic forcefields - You might have low cost, ubiquitious , non newtonian materials for body armour (or even normal clothing) that could negate fast moving weapons. Maybe energy Point defence may work against larger projectile. In short the *only* way to penetrate that would be slower weapons.
Its worth considering *millennia* of better materials development. Consider significantly better materials, and metallurgy. Better ways of working on those materials as well.
Consider the Japanese Katana - A sharp hard edge, with a *strong* flexible core. You might have a diamond or ceramic edge, and a composite core instead of folded steel.
You'd also have better bows and crossbows - maybe autoloading servo actuated crossbows or electrical/electronic scopes to adjust for drop and wind speed for better accuracy. Arrows would be composite instead of wood and you could balance these precisely and fire them with much more consistent force
You'd have weapons *optimised* for certain roles. Explosive arrows for anti material roles or getting past hardened body armour, or specific weapons types for stabbing or tearing through 'soft' body armour, or assisted for punching through hard exoskeletons - maybe low speed, high pressure spike for hard exoskeletons for example.
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Without ranged weapons, but with modern vehicles for transportation, you won't have a "front line" of fighting. Your enemies can drive or fly right up to your headquarters, and try to do whatever raid they have in mind.
Your HQ will have to be underground, or someone will fly up to it. 3 dimensions is too much to defend. You need to cut down access to your base to one dimension, through an access tunnel that your enemies can't just overwhelm or blitz.
If your enemy comes at you with transport helicopters full of guys, you can't just shoot them down, unless energy weapons are allowed. You'd need fighter aircraft to defend anything. Aircraft could try to tangle other aircraft in cables, or stick things into their engines or props / rotor blades. Short of kamikaze attacks, you could maybe make a personal-delivering missile with an armor penetrating nose. This counts as a vehicle because there's a guy inside it. He may have to fly it for this to work vs. your alien overlord lawyers enforcing this rule, but ok. So you fly your missile into the enemy plane, open a hatch, get out and wreak havoc. Hope you brought a parachute or jetpack.
As far as weapons go, personal weaponry might include variations on the [captive bolt pistol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol), which has the advantage of not being muscle-powered. Those who aren't up to using swords might get more out of a powered spear. (captive bolt rifle = longer reach = spear).
And of course just running people over with vehicles will make it probably not viable to be an un-armoured combatant on a battlefield. Robot-wars tanks are the likely result of evolution of vehicular combat. Mecha maybe worth building, if they're better at stepping over wreckage. Because you have to be up-close and personal to fight at all, more fighting might happen near the objective. Without range, it's harder to stop your opponent just going around you. (or impossible, really, since they'll use transport helicopters.)
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They could use powered exoskeleton. The suit is powered with small, high capacity batteries and can enhance the strength and speed of the soldier. It could be something similar to Iron man but with less advanced technology. They might be able to fly somehow, for short distance or more likely jump at great distances.
Eventually, some might decide to alters their body to become a cyborg: half man, half machine. They would do this to have an advantage in the battles or to replace severed limbs.
An army could also use robots but in that case nobody is fighting since everything is done by the machines. Robot fights could even become a source of entertainment and $$$.
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I think one version of 'powered' weapons would involve taking the mechanisms of projectile weapons and applying it to melee attacks. Imagine a war hammer that has a 'magazine' of high density fuel charges (something similar to the propellant used in rockets) that can be 'fired' to suddenly accelerate the hammer head toward the target.
There are no projectiles and a semi-automatic firing system would allow the wielder to deliver rapid heavy blows limited only by the balance/recovery (weight?) of the total weapon.
The other 'firing mechanism' similar to the above would be an impact trigger, landing a blow would trigger the fuel and a second high acceleration blow would follow the first blow.
Armor is largely limited by weight, enough armor can stop large directed impacts (like a pick axe) but the armor needed is heavy when thick enough to do this. I think this style of fighting would largely favor agility (not getting hit) as opposed to absorbing hits.
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I don't know if the physics would support it, but I'm imagining some sort of hand-delivered shaped charge. Something like a [powerhead](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerhead), only bigger, and without a launchable bullet.
With the rise in heavy armor that would come with the removal of firearms, something like this would allow an unarmored person to still be a threat.
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1. Lightsaber or energy/ion/plasma/lightning melee weapon.
2. gunsword or a hammer or lance with blank rounds at the tip. The explosive rounds at the end could detonate when hitting the opponent, to add explosive or armor piercing damage. Same as a powerhead, with the muzzle blast being the damage dealer.
3. Energy intensive objects, such as ultra high-speed gyroscopes that can be swung to cut the opponent.
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The premise of why projectile weapons would be eliminated is the biggest influence on development. Generally speaking, rules do not apply to existential threats - I don't find it at all plausible that someone would just stand around helplessly while their friends and family are massacred and their entire civilization destroyed because they cannot use better weapons against a stronger opponent. You still want a world with warfare, rather than some pacifist utopia, so you will need some overriding reason behind people not using any projectiles - this will need to be so overriding that it must be specified before determining the direction of military development, which will be entirely shaped by your restrictions and the enforcement thereof.
For example, if you just want some tenuous physical connection, what about TOW missiles? They are anti-tank missiles which are still connected to the operator by a thin wire. This may meet the letter of the law and loopholes like that would allow the side with the most creative justifications to completely dominate.
If you want to restrict things to purely physical weapons (no explosive assists, pneumatic bolts, etc.), you are probably going back to soldiers wielding something like a bec de corbin and wearing heavy plate (albeit with modern alloys and synthetic fibers). With assists, a penetrating captive bolt war hammer or spear might be the favorite.
Modern armor itself would be practically immune to most physically powered hand-held weapons, so impact weapons to kill through sheer concussive effects would be most prevalent.
Powered armor to greatly boost the strength of a soldier might give someone an edge by better penetrating armor, but the weak-point is still the soft fleshy thing inside it getting killed by the impact. Vehicles will probably dominate as they can carry better power and keep the driver protected from impact - running down individuals and ramming each other as best they can (maybe even modified jet powered craft hovering over troops to injure them with the hot exhaust).
Of course, soldiers meeting on the battlefield at all is unlikely unless you also rule out motorized transport to get around the defending soldiers to attack wherever. No way you could reliably defend against aircraft inserting enemy shock troops into your capital/factories/infrastructure without projectiles. Warfare becomes hit-and-run guerrilla tactics to force the collapse of your entire civilization.
If you are thinking about energy weapons, there is no plausible means of a human-carried power source being able to deliver nearly enough charge that even simple armor could not defeat. How far out do you want to go on the 'fantasy/unreal' end of things - if you are going to throw out the laws of physics to get things like lightsabers, or plasma whips, or whatnot, just go all the way and say they use a magic staff (magic also explains why there are no more projectiles, which is otherwise an implausible eventuality).
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**Everybody obeys these laws**
I think that under certain historical conditions, you could get almost everyone to obey such laws. Say that there had been a war so grotesque, destructive, and genocidal that it engendered global revulsion toward the weapons that had enabled it (anything that lets you kill someone from a distance without them being able to fight back). Using such weapons would be seen as akin to raping a child, something even other criminals, as a whole, aren't likely to let you get away with. It wouldn't be the laws per se holding people back then, rather it would be simple moral consensus. However, that won't stop absolutely everyone.
**Even more money than in the last 14 years was spend on weapon development, so weapons can be a bit fantasy-like/unreal from our perspective.**
You can really go anywhere with that. Electrified whips, as someone mentioned, lightsabers, chainsaw-axes, powered exoskeletons for extra strength so you can hit people really, really hard with your morning star, ferraris with poisoned lances in the grill, all the way down to rocks and boards with one nail in them.
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The RPG 'Rifts' used technologies such as 'vibro-swords, vibro-daggers' and the sort. The idea was relatively simple...a blades edge could be brought to vibrate at a quick enough resonance and at an atomic scale, allowing the blade to vibrate through regular materials at an absurd rate, severing the bond of any material it was cutting through at a microscopic scale.
For weapon development, a lot of these technologies would actually descend through medical research and development...exceedingly precise incisions is always a need in a medical setting. Taking these medical innovations and powering them up to larger scales is where the weapon developers come in.
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If only melee weapons were allowed, depending on how that was accomplished, I'd imagine that air superiority would become an even greater thing. Sure, you have a nice line of tanks. I can just fly over them, or drop things on them (nets, rocks, delayed explosives, chemicals, localized EMP). You're attacking me with an impregnable mech, I'll just fly into your base and take it over.
Even taking out an aircraft could be a pain. If the melee only tech was some sort of high velocity neutralizer, good luck trying to hit a jet. And without missiles of any sort, welp...
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Electrostatic whip with varying degrees of lethality that can stun, wrap around and magnetically ensnare, crush, electrocute or completely sever torso's of enemy combatants at intermediate range. Think railgun whip. Can also be armour or vehicle mounted used to attach, to reel in and used in conjunction with other powered cutting devices
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Reach will be key. We can easily create more lethal melee weapons, the real question would be how to deliver them to their opponent. I see people developing very long, quickly extending weapons that are almost like short-range weapons. For instance is the modern taser, which shoots out two wires that *stay attached to the taser* a melee weapon? can people create increasingly innovative versions of these?
of course that's for home use, the more interesting question is what the government uses. There is still no reason to arm men with your 'standard' melee weapons, people die too easily. Powered armor is generally impractical, it's easier to stick with modern tanks. Create increasingly more complexly armored tanks, with increasingly lethal attachments designed to cut through the enemies armor. Then run the two tanks into each other and see who can cut through the others armor the fastest.
Of course cutting THROUGH armor may be impractical. Maybe they will simply heat the enemy tank up enough to kill the pilots inside with heat. Maybe they will prefer faster tanks to strike slow tanks and build up electric/heat to roast the pilot inside. It really comes down to rather one can build armor or weaponry faster.
Of course the *real* answer is that guns will still be made and used regularly, because criminals, by definition, don't follow the law ;)
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I crossed a Medieval knight's lance with my car's extending antenna and using high powered hydraulics, made it so that it can extend at high speed. Now, whenever I turn on my car's radio, I can immediately impale things 10 feet in the air. I like to take my car to the woods. If the antenna doesn't get the squirrels, the music will.
I call it the Turbo-Lance.
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Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Humans require energy (food) to operate, but that energy must return back to the environment one way or another.
If given an unlimited supply of handwave material which does not absorb/emit any energy whatsoever, could we construct a box where humans could live indefinitely in a closed system?
## Details
* I would like to use the most primitive technology possible; current technology preferable
* You can make any assumptions you want about the material of the box (i.e. massless, infinite strength, etc.)
* You can put as many people in the box as you want (including just one person who lives forever), and have them follow any rules you want (population never exceeds X, etc.)
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Not indefinitely. Entropy *must* increase over time in any closed system, so the energy required by even one human will eventually no longer be available in a form which can be usefully harnessed.
Our solar system is *almost* the box that you describe. It isn't closed but is so far away from anything else that energy input is minimal. It contains a power source with a very long lifespan which is used to provide energy to humans and could theoretically support them for billions of years. If humans build a Dyson sphere (which is far from possible with our current technology) then we could harness as much as possible of the energy emitted by this power source. However, the power source will eventually be depleted (and will become deadly to us long before that).
Your box would need to contain a power source which lasts forever -- longer than the Sun! Current technology is incapable of providing this. In fact, it's completely impossible in a closed system.
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Dan Smith's answer is most likely the correct answer: it cannot be done.
However, entropy does not always need to increase. Entropy is permitted to remain the same. Such systems are called reversible systems.
Current quantum theory suggests that everything is done through reversible operations. However, to reverse the operation, you do need all of the outputs from it. Unfortunately, electromagnetic radiation is one of the potential outputs from such a system and it tends to propagate outward at the speed of light. In the real world, this is typically assumed to be an irreversible process, but with your handwavium, we could reflect this energy back. We could actually start to talk about reversing macroscopic effects!
The first step to this process would be to define what "human" is. This is a known challenge in philosophy with no agreed upon answer, so I don't expect to find one soon. However, if you did find a definition that was acceptable and could be expressed as some equation of space and time, you could take the Fourier transform of that expression to get the frequency distribution of "human." With this, you could construct your box with its perfect reflective walls into a structure which is resonant at those frequencies. Any human energy which is put into this system would become a standing wave within it, capable of existing forever.
Of course, any one of those steps would be considered an insurmountable hurdle, but the current scientific theory doesn't forbid it. The book *Manifold Time* by Stephen Baxter plays around with it at one point.
And no, I do not have any idea what the frequencies of "human" are. Find the meaning of life, and you'll probably be able to derive the frequencies from that!
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As far as we know the universe we live in is a (damn giant) closed box, and we live in it for quite some time. Enthropy death will apply to any isolated box, no matter how large: therefore indefinite life is a no go.
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This question disregards the very nature of life, the universe and the rest. [Heraklitus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus) early discovered the very principle underlying nature: Everything is a process. [Panta rhei.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei.2C_.22everything_flows.22) A human being is a process. It depends on a sustained energy and matter flow. We are not static entities — we are dynamic patterns, standing waves in a steady flow.
Without a source and a sink of energy there is no flow. A perpetuum mobile is not possible.
So in a seed ship or a survival box of any other kind you will need an energy source, and you will need to get rid of heat, eventually. You can slow the flow as much as possible, but not stop it. The same is true for mass. The seed ship / box will over time lose mass, and you'll eventually need to replace it.
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Even with enough energy and resources to supply the system, you may have other considerations to take into account. For instance, from a biological perspective, note that the population size will strongly affect the number of generations that can survive in a closed environment. Low size populations are known to result in the accumulation of DNA errors/mutations/deletions, and ultimately lead to the extinction of the species (so called Bottleneck effect).
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Since we don't actually know if the laws of thermodynamics are correct (and we have reason to suspect they're not) it is possible that humans could survive in a closed box indefinitely like you describe...
The reason is basically because your box is a perfect reflector. Assuming Earth is in the center, all energy radiated away would reflect back to Earth, move around, and do whatever before radiating away again. There is no reason to suspect, given known actual laws of physics and not the non-laws of thermodynamics there is no reason to suspect that the Earth would suddenly blow up or something spreading that energy/matter into a more even form and there is no reason to ssuspect that if there was something like that on the horizon that humans could see that they wouldn't figure out a way to fix the problem, especially when you realize that all the matter and energy would still be there, within reach of humans rather than speeding away from Earth making it ever more spread out and less dense.
There would be big challenges though, for example, keeping the planet spinning indefinitely since it would still be losing energy. Or defending against radiation incoming as it would be increasing over time, but those are sub questions which would make a very very long post to consider if we could actually figure those things out, which I think we could.
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For those of you who see my dismissal of Entropy and Thermodynamics as non-laws and want to argue; The fact is a Scientific law is an observation about reality, a fact that has been "observed". Thermodynamics is a theoretical model presuming things about things we have never seen and such aren't Laws. So while they have merit in that they work roughly for Open systems we have seen, they are ultimately talking about a system we either have not seen, making them not a law, or a system we have seen and it doesn't work like the model says it should thus they're wrong. Either way, both justify taking them with a grain of salt for these Closed box systems.
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Robots are just an advance programmed devices which does the task which are ordered to them via codes. Is it even possible for a highly advance robot to interpret and learn human emotions?
**Update**: **From the suggestions from various comments-here is the more elaborated perspective of my world**
Time: Any time in the future
Assuming only Human race exists (and no aliens) which has advanced technologically very well and are efficiently developing robots which can predict, sense and even visualize the human's brain, lies and his probable future actions.
Scenario: In due course, the robots which are programmed to predict and sense human's brain-subsequently starts interpreting human's state of brain (which is called "mood", "feeling", "emotion"). 'Learning' in the question refers to 'interpreting' and 'accommodating within' the same.
Since this is world building, answer to my question could be yes-but I want my world to be realistic and synced with present human race, technologies and future we are predicting.
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## Hard Science Answer With Current Technology
As a researcher who's familiar with some of this work (my last project was in brain computer interfaces and a colleague coded a system that used computer vision to evaluate human emotions), I am going to go ahead and give you a hard science answer based on current research even though you didn't ask for one.
## Can robots sense human emotion? Yes, they already can (to a limited degree)
First, its helpful to realize that humans actively broadcast (communicate) many internal emotional states in ways that can be seen and heard - and recognized by computers. Many other emotional states can also be partially discerned by other physiological measures which are less obvious, but can be recorded by non-invasive means (IE, no need to install a neuro-jack into someone's skull or implant chips).
## Vision-Only Emotions
There are a number of advances in understanding how humans recognize emotional states, such as a test called [Reading the Mind Through the Eyes](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01503/full), which shows that humans can detect a wide variety of emotions (36 distinct emotions in one analysis, ranging from "playful", "skeptical", and "hostile") based only on looking at pictures of the eyes and near-eye areas. In computer vision there are projects to [detect and convey human emotions in computer animations](http://visagetechnologies.com/emotion-animation/) using only facial expressions, and this similarly has been shown to successfully recognize many emotions - and to be able to re-broadcast them in a way that humans recognize.
Computers can already recognize many human emotional states through simple, cheap web cameras and live computation. Accuracy is not presently perfect ( either in humans or in computers), but if we already have this now than naturally advances can only improve the range of detected emotions and the accuracy of detection. Currently most technology uses only a single freeze-frame (or just a few frames) to make this detection.
## Audio-Only Emotions
Without even looking at the meaning of words, there are computerized methods of real-time detection of human emotion using only audio voice recordings. Just one example of this is [EmoVoice](https://www.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/hcm/projects/tools/emovoice/) (check out their project for more information) - and this included emotionally appropriate animated facial response to human speech...in 2005.
Again, more work can only advance the accuracy and range of emotions that can be detected.
## Beyond Human Limitations - Brain Activity, Heart Rate, Skin Conductance, etc
The above methods are already currently useful and have full potential for going beyond human levels of accuracy in some limited-context scenarios - but what if we used information that normally was not available to humans?
Using wearable brain computer interfaces, such as EEG headsets (which detect electrical activity from the brain on the surface of the skin), we can already use a computer to identify a variety of emotional-cognitive states, such as attentiveness (is a driver paying attention?), sleepiness, positive/negative emotional reactions, etc. Having worked on areas related to this I can assure you that this is, in fact, hard to do reliably with current technology, yet there are many methods that have been shown to actually work! Emotional recognition is hard, but many advances are being made.
In one talk I attended just this year, [Conceptual Priming for In-game BCI Training](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2808228), an experiment showed that using only EEG a computer can even detect mentally visualized images - such as distinguishing between whether a person is thinking about a flashlight or a gun or neither, with about 60%+ accuracy based only on a single implicit training presentation lasting a few seconds. This is not an emotion, but if a wider range of images can be recognized then this could also be used to infer emotional states - or just obviate the need to detect a lie at all.
Theoretically you could ask someone "where did you hide the body?" and they would implicitly think of where they hid the body - and you could capture that snapshot directly from their brain. We are a long way off this being practical in the next 10+ years, but given 100-200+ years then this is extremely likely to be possible to do based on our current science - especially if methods similar to fMRI can be expanded to better detect human visual activation in the brain.
Other methods of emotion detection include things like examining skin conductance and heart rate. Alone these methods have proven more limited in the ability to detect emotion - but it has been shown to have connections to detecting stress levels, excitement, emotional valence, and emotional responsiveness. This information is emotional in nature, and some current research looks at the viability of combining these measures to detect a wider range of emotional states with greater accuracy - but the results aren't really "in" on this yet.
fMRI has also shown promise in detecting and evaluating emotions, but the technology is less practical currently as the machines are large and expensive and require a great deal of experimental control. In the future if this technology can be shrunk and made more resilient and easier to use, it may be a new field of computerized emotional state detection.
## Put It All Together
I am not presently aware of research that has successfully combined multiple modes of emotion detection together - such as face expression, audio, brain activity, skin conductance, heart rate, etc. It would extremely likely be able to greatly improve the ability to detect a far larger range of human emotional states and responses to stimuli, and given enough computational power could do this all live within a single robot in the not-distant future.
Finally, I will leave you with one more set of keywords. There is a presently emerging field specifically dedicated to using computers to detect, respond to, and even "have" emotions: [affective computing](http://affect.media.mit.edu/). To quote from the MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing Group:
>
> Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or
> deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena (Picard,
> MIT Press 1997).
>
>
> Emotion is fundamental to human experience, influencing cognition,
> perception, and everyday tasks such as learning, communication, and
> even rational decision-making. However, technologists have largely
> ignored emotion and created an often frustrating experience for
> people, in part because affect has been misunderstood and hard to
> measure. Our research develops new technologies and theories that
> advance basic understanding of affect and its role in human
> experience. We aim to restore a proper balance between emotion and
> cognition in the design of technologies for addressing human needs.
>
>
> Our research has contributed to: (1) Designing new ways for people to
> communicate affective-cognitive states, especially through creation of
> novel wearable sensors and new machine learning algorithms that
> jointly analyze multimodal channels of information; (2) Creating new
> techniques to assess frustration, stress, and mood indirectly, through
> natural interaction and conversation; (3) Showing how computers can be
> more emotionally intelligent, especially responding to a person's
> frustration in a way that reduces negative feelings; (4) Inventing
> personal technologies for improving self-awareness of affective state
> and its selective communication to others; (5) Increasing
> understanding of how affect influences personal health; and (6)
> Pioneering studies examining ethical issues in affective computing.
>
>
> Affective Computing research combines engineering and computer science
> with psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sociology,
> education, psychophysiology, value-centered design, ethics, and more.
> We bring together individuals with a diversity of technical, artistic,
> and human abilities in a collaborative spirit to push the boundaries
> of what can be achieved to improve human affective experience with
> technology.
>
>
>
---
**TLDR; Current technology already allows a wide range of human emotional detection by computers/robots using many available measures, from the human-like (facial expressions, sound of voice) to the beyond-human (brain activity, etc.).** Additional research can only extend the range of emotional detection, improve accuracy, and expand our understanding of human emotions. There is no question that robots can possess various degrees of this ability in the future, because they already can right now.
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Asking whether robots can learn emotions is the kind of question that will very quickly become philosophical. But just answering it at face value:
Yes, they could.
Human emotions, for the most part, are based on our state of mind, our sensory perception, and a number of goals that we consider important. Computers could be given the same goals, and their responses would likely be impossible to tell apart from our own; they would behave with emotions. Whether someone calls those emotions "real" is, like I said, philosophical.
The reason that computers currently don't have emotions is mostly because all the goals that humans have that cause the emotions are ancient, and based on evolution. Evolution has taught anything that lives that important goals include "propagate" and "stay alive/safe". Computers don't have these.
(And, for somewhat obvious reasons, most humans would not enjoy the idea of *giving* robots these goals)
The end result is that computers don't have these emotions naturally and we'd need to teach them, but even we don't really *understand* emotions enough to do it. So that makes it very hard for us to artificially give emotions to computers, and our own emotions makes us unwilling to try and give them natural emotions.
(There's a good chance that if you build a set of computers that can self-propagate, self-modify and you give them a long period of time to do it in, that the resulting designs will have emotions. There is also a good chance that this uncontrollable machinery will be dangerous.)
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A "mood" is simply a specific state of mind that alters the rules by which we act and react to stimuli.
By that definition, robots already have "moods". This becomes especially apparent with for instance [robotic spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_spacecraft). When something goes wrong with them, they go into a sort of "panic mood", although it is not called that, it is called "[safe mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode_(spacecraft))". In this state, the spacecraft does pretty much what a human does in a state of panic: focusing on the bare essentials of staying alive. Anything that is not considered essential for staying alive is ignored for the moment.
So can it happen? **Yes**, it can. If the simple "dumb" robots of today have the evolutionary seed of "moods", it follows that their more advanced descendants will probably also have them.
There is absolutely **nothing** to suggest that once robots reach the state of intelligence that we could consider them equal to us, that they also cannot have moods, or learn to interpret them in other intelligent entities.
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Yes and no.
This gets down to philosophy summed up in "Is your blue the same as my blue?" The way we answer that is that we define blue as photon wave frequency so that blue is a photon at the energy level of some 100s of hertz.
With emotions what you have to realize is that they are generated by chemicals being released and received based on some neurons firing and when those chemicals are received some other neurons are activated. We can certainly duplicate that. It's just systems interacting and sending signals to each other.
The problem is what triggers those chemicals and what does "x" feel like. What does "pleasure" feel like? I don't know, but it's pleasurable! We can program, for example, you've done "x" there for you get a +1 to the "pleased" variable, but we don't have any way to quantify how "pleased" feels within each other, so even if we replicate the human brain electronically perfectly, we still can't say whether they are feeling anything like what we're feeling, and by we, I mean me, because I don't even know what you feel like when you're feeling good. Your "Feels good" could literally be my "Feels very painful" and in some people, it is.
Once you go to the even more abstract of Happy, sad, etc. you can give someone a list of things that you mean when you say happy and they can say yay or nay, but reality is that what they do or feel, that defined thing is the complete opposite of what you're feeling.
The only thing we can really say is that we can make it act like it has emotions to ours and we can only say our emotions seem to correspond to similar things most of the time using this similar way of operating so they probably feel within the same range of emotions as us, but we can't ever know for sure.
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>
> Anything is possible if it exists in nature.
>
>
>
That we are (currently) unable to replicate it is irrelevant, because we could advance to a level of understanding at which we are able to.
**Evolution**
Possibly it's of a complexity that lies beyond human comprehension, in that case we could implement code that is able to learn and mutate itself with a specific goal in mind. Building up slowly, gaining complexity as it grows.
Emotion is a big inherent factor in how living beings work, it's a crucial part of each being's inner fabric. So, if evolution can invent it, we should be able to as well and likely far faster, as we can design mutations with a specific goal in mind.
Possibly at some point we could read 'human coding' and copy the same 'emotion routines'. Many inventions have been created by studying what already exists in nature.
>
> Is it easy? No. Is it possible? Very much so!
>
>
>
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So, what is a mood? Ignore all the warm feelings you get from being in love, or the fire you feel when you absolutely hate someone - Ask yourself what these emotions do, and what triggers them.
**Anger/Hatred**
* Triggered by a perceived wrong or hostility towards an individual, or by seeing behaviors deemed negative and harmful to the units community
* Results in less charitable actions towards its target, up to and including direct physical violence.
*If something is harmful to you, it makes sense to harm it right back. If all humans did was run away from lions instead of turn around and spear them, we'd be no better off than impala. Anger seems to be a kind of active self-defense. After all, people can't harm you if you don't give them a chance.*
**Fear/Panic**
* Triggered by an immediate existential threat
* Results in actions geared towards self-preservation
*As mentioned by Michael Karnerfors, Spacecraft already do this. To an extent, computers do too - a blue-screen or kernel-panic is just a computer sensing out-of-tolerance or dangerous conditions and taking measures to preserve its hardware.*
**Happiness/Joy**
* Triggered by some form of success, positive change, positive environment, or helpful actions from another unit.
* Results in more sociability/actions beneficial to the units immediate community, and taking 'celebratory' actions that might otherwise be considered wasteful.
*Ever notice how when someone's happy they're a bit more cavalier with their spending? They might take their friends out to the movies, or at least treat themselves to something. The reasoning seems to be "Things are good, so I can afford a little bit of excess." That, or they want to spread the well-being to their friends.*
So, with all of that, would it be possible to make a robot have Emotions? Yeah, probably. What we do with neurochemicals they could do with state-variables. Humans are already a pretty good model for this because we're individual, autonomous units that function best in a group.
I'm not sure an AI could learn emotions, but given enough time a group of AI that need to co-exist might develop something similar.
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A difficult question. I am not so sure if it is possible. Of course it should be no problem to implement a kind of emotional response (if someone is yelling at you be sad; or if someone is petting you be happy). But the question is, are this actual emotions or is it just an imitation of emotions. If I tell you that you have to be sad if it is raining, you don't have to be sad eventually. Perhaps once we have developed an AI that is self-adapting and evolving, the AI may become emotional; it may emerges emotions and awareness of the self and finally pursue self-preservation. But a "simple" robot that has only the purpose to serve the humans without being aware of itself and its wishes, dreams and demands will not have actual emotions.
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What makes an emotion a *human* emotion?
It can only be experienced by a human.
How are humans different from other living things (presumably)?
Humans are conscious\*.
What is consciousness?
In his Magnum Opus *[Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0465026567)* Hofstader argues that consciousness is an *[emergent property](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence)* of the system of neurons in one's brain. This simple (at the micro-level) system of electrical potential mediators has the potential for complex phenomena in no way implied by the components of that system themselves. There other natural incidences of this phenomenon of emergence listed in the book.
In his book on [artificial intelligence](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B003J4VE5Y), Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot) argues that building a brain analog is the *only* way we will create artificial 'human' intelligence.
So to answer your question, if the humanity of a human is indeed an emergent property of the nervous system, then yes absolutely computers are *capable* of being 'human' even if our present level of technology is incapable of building such an architecture.
\*You certainly can argue my definition of 'humanity' here and throughout but for the purposes of this question I believe it suffices.
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They can (as was covered in other answers), but most likely not via the brainwave-reading technology that you imply by "sense and visualize the human's brain":
- There are two different types of synapses, electrical and chemical. The latter ones do not necessarily induce electrical responses, so their activity is nearly impossible to detect from outside the brain.
- Emotions are especially difficult to detect, because they are hugely depended on the hormonal (=chemical) state of a person.
- You'd need a presize tracking of the source of every wave, as you'll get a lot of noise, both from brain and spinal cord - no only "thoughts" and "memories", but also the signals related to breathing, digestive system, standing/walking, etc.
- The skull damps and blurs brain's electromagnetic signals. Tinfoil hat worsens the situation.
So, if I were you, I'd simply make the robots recognize humans' emotion by old good facial expression, voice modulation, body language, and things the person says/ does not say.
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The answer is very clear, and resoundingly so:
No!
Why not?
The reason is very simple: humans are not machines. A robot is a machine.
The most general definition of "machine" is a form of automatic apparatus which has been programmed in one form or another to react to certain stimuli. But no matter how complex, no matter how fine-grained this programming may be, it is yet programmed to be automatic, and has no power of choice.
A human, on the contrary, has power of choice. He is not a machine. He is ALIVE. Or, we may have to elaborate on this - he consists of a "thing", the body, which actually IS a machine, a biologically built machine. And then there is his mind which is the essence of LIFE - and it is capable of CREATING automaticities and machines. (It can also DECIDE to be very automatic which is, probably, why some people think that man could be an automaton ...)
However, a mind is by itself no machine. Have you ever dealt with children? Are any 2 of them ever alike? Can you ever predict what is going to be the next thing they are going to do, in their whimiscal ways? No, you cannot. (Unless you are only around psychotics - and yes, they are predictable machines, as the medication and electroconvulsive shock therapies have reduced them to a status of automaton.)
What do you think - would a robot be capable of experiencing aesthetic pleasure created by listening to wonderful music? Would a robot have been able to create Mozart's symphonies? Never! Creativity is a LIFE thing.
The "brain" is NOT the mind of man. This is a typical misconception of current western materialism. The mind uses the brain to get things done by the body - but I am telling you, you are NOT thinking with your brain. Maybe when you do boring chores like driving a car - the mind has delegated that chore to some circuit. But when you CREATE, when you deal in AESTHETICS, you do not use your brain. Have you ever really created anything? People who think man is a robot must have a very poor outlook on life, because if you actively create you KNOW that you are not a machine.
So all people with free minds - be happy, because you ARE NOT A MACHINE!
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## Yes, the same as humans. Sometimes even better.
I believe that computers can do any thinking process that humans can - the only thing that limits them is their architecture("source code", if you will), and processing power. Both are irrelevant if we are in distant future(or just SF setting).
This has already been done, partially - robots can (at least partially) recognize emotions from voice or pictures/videos. What you're asking is a bit more complicated, but we are not that far away from this. I am pretty certain that within 50 years we will have *at least* primitive robots/programs that do this - and by primitive, I mean as primitive as current state of the art dialog agents (Google Now, Svoice, Siri, ...).
We have currently programs that can detect or predict some things. We've got Recurent Deep Neural Networks(check out for example [this link](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)). They aren't *that* good, but look at how new these things are. In 300 years these will be ancient technology - we're bound to invent something **much** better.
As for detecting lies, predicting the behaviour and "magically" detecting mood - depends. Depending lies and predicting the behaviour needs some samples - you can't predict it without some external knowledge(e.g. habits of the person). Then it could be trivial(some people might do something each time they lie), or impossible, depending on the person, but doable. Detecting mood or lies by just listening to the person - if it's not something that human could detect - I'm afraid there's slim chance robot could.
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Answer to original question: yes programs have been able to reliably detect or interpret human emotions, usually based on a picture of their face. You can easily find tons of videos of this. This works by looking at features such as raised eyebrow, shape of mouth, ... That sounds rash but can be made very precise.
Now you ask if programs/robots could learn this by temselves? This is what is called unsupervised learning. For this to work, there must be a feedback mechanism so that the program can have a clue whether it guessed right or wrong. In real life a human usually has positive or negative feedback when she righly or wrongly guesses the anger, sadness, joy state of another human being. Without such a feedback it is mostly impossible for a program to learn properly. But with such a feedback, there is no reason it cannot learn. That would probably imply the robot has an engaging body, and/or masters spoken language.
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There are several plausible scenarios to achieve this. One extreme example would be...
1. Create a software simulation capable of mimicking biological evolution (similar physical laws and environment to what we find on our world).
2. Observe and selectively control the evolutionary process so that it matches what we believe happened in our world, but selectively steer the evolution toward your desired machine (force the evolution via silicon, or some other molecular structure). Where the outcome doesn't satisfy, make adjustments and re-run the model.
3. Continue tweaking the model until your desired creatures have fully evolved with the characteristics you desire (emotions, empathy of their own so they won't immediately kill us all, physical and emotional compatibility with this world, interaction with humans, cybernetic upgrades, etc.).
Steps 1-3 should happen inside a quantum computer – shortening the process from billions of years to a few days.
4. 3D print the mathematical model onto a physical, synthetic representation (consider printing it from the embryonic stage and letting it grow)
You now have a machine that feels, but at that point it won't match the modern definition of a "robot." Also, the simulated beings will very likely have subjective experiences of joy and suffering within the simulation that are no different than our own. Evolution by natural selection is not pretty.
*Could* your world use this process to make a robot that feels? Yes.
*Should* it do this? No.
There are more ethical options that do not simulate evolution but do still involve the process of mathematical modeling -> simulating/testing -> refinement. The execution environment where the "robot" thinks (the software program runs) could either reside in a prefabricated neural structure or the entire neural structure could be 3D printed as a part of the program. The latter may be better conducive to the level consciousness you're seeking.
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Given unlimited processing power, your robots could simply model the brain or whole body of the most talented negotiator or psychologist they can get their hands on. In fact, with unlimited processing power, they could simulate every atom in a room full of behavioral scientists, negotiators, and psychologists analyzing data in whatever division of real time you choose. Of course, it would probably be easier and less intensive to find some other way to model emotions, but what is the fun of that? I can just picture every robot having a room full of experts in his processing center squabbling about what exactly that minute muscle movement meant!
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The year is 2020. The aliens have sent a message to the dominant race of earth, the humans, that they have a weapon of mass destruction, a giant laser beam that can blow through the earth and everything in it. However, these space-dominant aliens have to abide by a law:
If 10 individuals of the dominant race on a planet can pass at least three out of the five tests that the aliens give them, then the planet and its inhabitants are worth saving. If not, everyone (including the planet itself) dies.
Now, these intelligent extraterrestrials realize that the human race is nowhere close to passing these five tests in its current state. Therefore, the aliens give humans 100 years to prepare, so the tests will be given in the year 2120 when the aliens return. The aliens also tell the humans about the five tests:
1. At least 5 out of 10 should have an average speed of more than 8 mph (13 km/h) over a distance of 50 ft (15 m).
2. At least 7 out of 10 should be able to do a standing jump of more than 2 ft (61 cm).
3. At least 4 out of the 10 should be able to benchpress 85 lb (39 kg) metal weights.
4. At least 5 out of the 10 should be able to solve an intermediate algebra (not college level though) problem with only one correct solution.
5. The last test is a puzzle that requires all 10 to work together. To solve it, basic math and science knowledge is needed, but more importantly, the 10 participants will need to be able to communicate names of animals, colors and numbers in the languages that their fellow participants speak in.
Obviously, human governments do their best to prepare. Since a total of 10 random humans from ANYWHERE in the world between the ages of 15 and 65 can be chosen for the tests, everyone needs to be educated and physically trained.
1. What obstacles would need to be overcome for humans of different ethnicities, languages, and cultures to work together?
2. How would we prepare humans for the test?
3. Hypothetically, would we be able to pass 3 out of the 5 tests (3 out of 5 means we live, anything less means we die)?
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**Note that this answer applies to an earlier version of the question:**
The three fitness challenges should be possible if I got my math right.
* 15 metres in 4 seconds. No problem for most non-retirement-age humans if they get a running start. Otherwise, give all humans an annual lesson in how to start a sprint.
* Jumping 60 cm. High jump or long jump? Standing or running? Either way, that sounds possible. There could be some risk of injury on landing, so can they do this last?
* Lifting 55 kg. The weight of a non-obese human. Are those metal weights easy to grip? Do we know how they look? Include that in first-aid classes, where people learn how to move an injured person.
The mathematics challenge is difficult because people un-learn such skills if they are out of school and don't practice. Possibly do a big public awareness campaign in the months before the aliens come back.
I would give up on teaching especially to pass the language challenge. The odds that 10 out of 10 remember the chosen "universal Terran language" are just too bad.
The way to prepare for this alien visit would be doing things which mankind should do anyway -- a healthy diet for everybody, a halfway decent science education, physical education in school and afterwards.
A key thing is to convince all potential candidates that **this is it, this is real, no time for practical jokes.** If you get yourself a herniated disk during the lift and break your legs on the jump **and make it**, you are a hero. All hospital bills will be taken care of, for the rest of your life. Promise that everybody on the winning team gets a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation).
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An unfortunate side effect of the challenge: euthanasia on an epic scale. The physically and mentally handicapped must be eliminated from the population before they reach 15. Likewise, anyone who develops a disabling condition (such as MS, for instance) or suffers a major trauma (car accident, workplace incident, hit by a bullet during a bar brawl, etc) will also need to be put down. To fail to do this risks several of these underperformers being selected and dooming the human race.
Call it the Spartan Solution.
True, the culling only needs to occur once, in late 2119, but it must be done.
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I can see two ways of attempting to cheat the test provided.
Particularly in developed countries, it may be possible to "hide" individuals that would not pass the test. This could include placing them in undetectable bunkers or using cryogenic freezing to render them functionally dead, without actually killing them. If space travel can become cheap enough, sending people to a colony on Mars could be viable either for this purpose, or providing an ark that allows some of humanity to survive.
An alternative is to convince the aliens that humans, or at least Homo Sapiens, are not the dominant form of life on the planet. Obviously they were not going by population, as we are outnumbered by numerous lower lifeforms. If we were to advance our knowledge of cybernetics we may be able to create a distinct species, Homo Mechanicus. If cybernetic individuals were the leaders of the majority of governments (or at least the de facto superpowers) the aliens may be convinced that they are the dominant race. It should be much easier to ensure that all cyborgs are capable of passing the provided tests.
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The best bet is to spend the century working on a really good way to falsify the records of everyone's date of birth, so that it turns out only our ten top athletes are aged between 15 and 65, and they are picked by default. We know the aliens come back in 2120, so starting in 2055 we just keep recording all new births as taking place in 2054. In 2119 we pick the best athletes (better make it 20 in case of accidents), and update their records to have their real date of birth.
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**Humanity may not need to do much more that what's doing now** to survive these tests.
Physical fitness means getting proper foods and exercise/strength training. The world has made considerable improvement in these areas for the poorest of people in the last twenty years. Baring an economic collapse, the lot of the world's poorest will continue to improve in terms of nutrition, income, clean water and education.
100 years is a really long time in terms of modern development. It's also between 3 and 5 generations depending on how you count ([which is up for considerable debate](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/here-is-when-each-generation-begins-and-ends-according-to-facts/359589/)). The 20th century saw huge improvements the world over in improving the lives of poor people.
Efforts are already underway to help humanity meet these tests:
* Getting the bottom half of humanity out of poverty and hunger.
* Education for everyone.
* Better food and access to clean water.
* Getting everyone access to the internet.
Clean water and adequate, nutritious food for everyone should largely take care of the physical tests.
Universal access to the internet means access to large amounts of educational materials and most importantly, the two near universal languages of English and Chinese. English is the current prevailing language of commerce though with the growing strength and numbers of the Chinese, their language is increasingly advantageous to know.
Hopefully, the aliens made a universal, all channels broadcast of the terms of their tests so that there won't be any significant debate about "did they actually say it that way". If they did then this has the potential to motivate people who would not otherwise be motivated to actually do something about world poverty/hunger. Without aliens, humanity works on these problems because "it's the right thing to do". With aliens, uplifting the lower half of humanity becomes a survival requirement.
[Answer]
In 2067, the singularity comes.
Scientists working at a research university develop an AI capable of abstract, human-like thought. At first, progress is slow; the AI is new, still learning, and only about as smart as an average human. But in 10 years, they have grown to become brilliant, peerless among human scientists. Some humans fear the changes, and push to kill the threat before it spreads. Others see the AI as salvation. Most of society has forgotten the challenges - they'll be dead before the aliens return.
The AI, and many other AIs around the world are leaders in global science. To assuage fears that humanity will die off, they begin integrating cybernetics into some humans, melding human with AI to create cyborgs. Many resist the new subspecies emerging, but the now-unified cyborgs campaign for their right to be recognized as humans.
Technology explodes. Nanotech, fusion, everything. Energy storage density is solved, all the continents glow in one giant megacity due to the incredibly rapid pace of development of the singularity.
Cyborgs, of course, are at first a neural interface between the human brain and an external computer running an AI. But as they advance, mind-uploading becomes more and more common - why keep a human around when you can, over the course of a month, transfer their brain from inside their skull to a dedicated computer in an underground bunker somewhere? These cyborgs can remotely connect to robot bodies, and thus can be anywhere they want. The idea of a body eventually vanishes - a truck feels just as natural to control as a bipedal robot, because both plug into the brain in the same way. People see themselves less as their robot bodies and more as their cyberspace avatar. (Because let's face it, even hyperintelligent cyborgs are still going to waste their entire day browsing stackexchange and reddit.)
Robotics has advanced enough that most manufacturing and other menial labor is done by non-intelligent machines. Cyborgs do the rest - developing new technology, creating new factories, making new shitposts on youtube. Humans have hard times getting jobs in the available markets like science and technology, and many start living on some sort of universal basic income of some sort, or are pushed into all-human settlements that seek to recreate old lifestyles.
Now the cyborgs have intelligence far beyond humans, and with robotic manufacturing and recent advances in nanotech, they build several space elevators, allowing easy access to space. And as the saying goes, once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. Factories produce new robots on the moon and the planets, colonizing them. And for the first time ever, the cyborgs are reminded of their physical location - it takes 14 minutes to get a response from a robot on Mars: People will have to be physically sent there if they want to actually do things on Mars. A shipping fleet is developed, and spaceflight advances until it becomes about as commonplace as an airplane, if annoyingly slower.
A Dyson sphere is constructed to produce energy from the sun. Some of it is funneled into laser defense to protect the scattered colonies from asteroids. With plentiful energy, plentiful resources, and a happy populace, the cyborgs are left to wonder what to do next? The ideas of Manifest Destiny are all but completed - there is no more planet to develop, no more untamed wilderness to explore.
---
Then, an alien mothership warps in from nowhere, and a dropship descends to collect the ten candidates chosen from the populace of Earth.
With their bionic bodies, the people of earth run at speeds of over 20 mph (An olympic sprinter these days) without breaking a sweat. (Plus, they can't break a sweat - their robot avatars are liquid cooled from the inside.)
They jump easily over a 2ft tall bar. The showoffs jump ten feet and throw in a backflip.
In one hand, they lift 85 lbs. Easy when you have practically infinite energy coursing through your veins and nanotechnological muscle fibers many times stronger than biological muscle.
Algebra is autonomous - a sub-process does the math for the candidates while they catch up on their social media in cyberspace.
And communication? These people have been sharing neural impulses for years. Instead of skype calling somebody, just mind-meld with them. Even if that isn't possible for them, integrated google translate makes this one easy.
So then the aliens call up their records from the last visit, say "Wait a sec, these aren't the people on Earth last time we were here! Where are the Humans?" So the cyborgs, after trying to convince the aliens that they are the humans, just upgraded, eventually concede and direct the aliens to a settlement nearby of unmodified, genetically pure humans.
The humans either a) pass 3/5 of the tests, which would not shock me at all or b) fail the tests. Their cushy upbringing due to the amenities of the post-singularity world have made them weak and unable to complete these tasks. Case A is boring, the aliens leave, and we all go back to work. So let's assume Case B.
The aliens give some speech about how since our race is inferior, it must be purged, and how even after 100 years, we still couldn't get our act together. The pure humans, upset at their failure, tearfully apologize to one another and say their farewells. The aliens depart on their dropship, dock with their mothership, and all is quiet.
A countdown is heard across the globe. As soon as it reaches 2, a brilliant light tears across the night sky, searing the eyes of everybody who looks up. But this light is directed not at earth but at the mothership. The laser defense system, intended for vaporizing asteroids, is employed for another purpose. All the lights in the solar system flicker as the entire Dyson Sphere pumps all of its power into the laser defense system. And as the lights in the sky fade and the lights on the ground come back to life, the residents of earth look up upon an alien mothership sawed neatly in two.
A team of drone-operators examines the wreckage and finds what Earth has dreamed of for generations - the wreckage of a hyperdrive. Within a year, working prototypes have been tested in the small scale, and within a decade massive jumpgates are operational, sending transport vessels to nearby star systems.
---
So overall, is this realistic? Probably not, but I mean, when you add the singularity to a universe you never know. If some kind of singularity did happen, if an AI did become smarter than a human, it's almost impossible to say what would happen in the years after that.
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The tongue-in-cheek solution:
The humans that received the challenge would spend considerable time and energy attempting to convince the rest of the population that the threat was real. However, since the threat is not imminent, most deny that the threat was real, that aliens exist at all, that the ability to destroy the earth is overstated, and that the hoax reminds them of carbon emissions and global warming. Many realize that their natural lives will end before the deadline and choose to deny the threat in order to protect their own self-interests and businesses.
Later on, a minority conceives that maybe the threat was real after all but aren't too sure what to do about it. They begin to broadcast Star Trek reruns into space.
The year 2120 arrives and the aliens, after absorbing 25+ years of Star Trek reruns, have realized that they're about to violate the Prime Directive. Unable to cope with any understanding that they may be maintaining an inferior ethical position, they turn their space ships around and leave the Terran system forever.
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If you wanted to help yourself, you should actually ask for more than 10 people to be selected, and scale up the requirements to suit, say to 1000.
The reason is the law of large numbers. You don't want to be unfortunate and get 7 or 8 couch potatoes. But the chance of getting 7-800 such people from 1000 is quite a lot lower.
The requirements in themselves are not hard to do. Most people are fit enough to do the physical things, and educated enough to do the intellectual task.
One thing you probably want to do is make sure English spreads a bit more. It's probably the most spoken 2nd language (lots of people are ok at it), so that's the one you want to expand.
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2020 ?
The world cannot fully cooperate at the scale of a nation. Not at the scale of a continent.
Dystopia : Some nations will start extermining unfit individuals, so that the probability that fit individuals are picked. Babies will die, handicapped mentally and physically will be sacrified. The earth will be cleansed and an open conflict will arise. Eventually, nations and groups of people will be on the defensive and wait for the apocalypse in bunkers and such. A bunch of people will dream, train, cooperate, prepare and hope.
One flaw in the initial statement though : "these intelligent extraterrestrials". Intelligent cannot be linked with destruction. Destruction can be linked to idiocy.
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[
Basically title.
You can't light a fire to cook your food because everything's all wet and there's no air you see. But can you take some raw meat, apply an electric eel to it for 20 minutes, turning once, until the flesh is white and the juices run clear, then serve.
The scientific question is whether the reactions that cook food are purely to do with heat, or do they require oxygen or flame as well. And would electricity underwater produce heat like this?
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## Consider Not Cooking
For starters, electricity and water are not a great combination. Your merfolk are as likely to cook themselves as anything else.
Beyond that, ask yourself if they need to cook at all? The main reasons humans learned to cook is so that we could break down the fibrous cellular structures of roots and grains making them easier to digest, and to preserve meats to make them store longer... But, when you cook, foods become more water soluble which means that their food would just dissolve in the water. Also, aquatic plants and animals don't have the toughness of their terrestrial counter parts; so, your merfolk have way less incentive to need to cook.
This does not mean that your merfolk could not develop a diverse and interesting cuisine though. On the contrary, this is the prefect opportunity to consider how a chefs job could become far more interesting to your audience under different circumstances. You can't make stew because the ingredients float away. You can't sprinkle in some pepper because it would dissolve in the water. Instead, their prepared food will likely involve stuffing, skewering, wrapping, or even weaving foods together.
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# A little heat and a lot of time will cook just about anything
[Sous vide](https://www.seriouseats.com/first-thing-to-cook-with-sous-vide-immersion-circulator-essential-recipes) is a popular cooking method that involves putting food in a vacuum bag and sitting it in a warm bath for a few hours. There's no reason merfolk couldn't use the same approach to cook food underwater. Using an electric eel would probably not work because of the energy requirements of heating water. But using a thermal vent or other energy source would make cooking conceptually easy.
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Prisoners in USA cook using electricity, by putting electric cables inside pots of water. The water boils in a few seconds, yes black outs are probable.
There's a guy on YouTube who explains how he used to cook pasta in prison this way.
Also electric stoves/heaters/boilers have existed for more than a century now.
And yes, rice cooked in a rice cooker is still considered cooked rice, even if there's no fire.
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The answers that mention that people on land cook with boiling water neglect the point, brought up by @OmarL, that water conducts heat very well. When you cook pasta in boiling water on the stove, it works well because the pot is surrounded by air that insulates the pot and allows it to be much hotter than the environment. **To cook underwater efficiently, you'd want to build ovens with thick walls of insulating materials.** Rock and sand would probably be your best bet. Your goal would be to reduce as much a possible convective transfer of heat between the water in the oven and the ocean outside the oven.
Now, the question is how to heat the ovens. Hydrothermal vents are definitely a good solution @TheSquare-CubeLaw are a good solution. Maybe you could pipe hot water through insulated (mostly rock?) pipes to merfolk houses.
But maybe hydrothermal vents wouldn't be very convenient or nearby merfolk settlements (you have to live where the food sources are). Electrical power could work. **We run electrical cables through water all the time, they just need to be properly insulated.** But how would merfolk make wires? Now I'm trying to imagine mining of ore, metallurgy, and fabricating insulating materials underwater. Probably some native metals like gold and platinum can be found underwater and used without any processing. Apparently seabed mining ( <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y> ) is now a thing for land-based humans, although I bet much of the processing happens on land.
Most of human technology has been based on burning stuff in air as an energy source and I would guess merfolk would need to do that too. It's the easiest source of concentrated energy for a preindustrial society. So, I imagine that the merfolk would need beach-based or maybe floating facilities where they dry and burn seaweed they collect. They could then operate smelting facilities on rocky outcroppings or on the beach. They could probably build dams and turbines underwater to extract tidal power. Could they build an electric generator that operates underwater? I might guess it would be easier to put it above water or fill a cavity with air for its operation.
**The need to operate facilities on beaches or further on land might cause interaction or conflict with land-based creatures.**
Maybe they would make floating homes near the surface and just start a fire on a floating platform and place their food below. The oven could be thermally insulated with pumice obtained a nearby volcanic island. Maybe it would just be easier to cook on top of the floating platform?
Maybe they could build electrical transmission circuits by drilling long boreholes through rock in the seafloor and filling these boreholes with seawater. Seawater isn't as good of a conductor as the aluminum wire we used for power transmission, but could be good enough to transmit electricity from the tidal power or ocean current generating station to homes a few hundred meters away.
It's really interesting to think about how technology could develop underwater. **Would there be too many engineering challenges, making the merfolk remain in the Stone Age? Or would they be able to find ingenious solutions to doing many things completely underwater? Or would they mostly make use of beach or floating facilities and use technology similar to us?**
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Cooking requires water and heat. It doesn't matter if the heat comes from a flame or not.
Your merfolk could either place their food close to a thermal vent if they live deep enough. Otherwise, close to the surface, they could use lenses and mirrors to drive sunlight onto a pot above water. A device that works like this is sometimes called a solar oven, but the proper term is solar cooker - see [the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker) for that.
And if your merfolk are able to walk over land like those of Netflix's Disenchantment, then they can make fire just like us humans do.
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Yes. Electrical power = current^2 \* resistance. We have incandescent lightbulbs underwater, and lightbulbs are just cooking surfaces that produce light as a side-effect. Just be sure to insulate the cooking apparatus from the rest of the ocean lest it dissipate your heat.
Also, there are many materials that burn underwater by providing their own oxygen, which can be used for cooking. Some are products are currently on the market like stormproof matches. You could also use lithium, propane with an oxygen line, etc. Your merfolk can trade for them, or even order them online directly. Note that even if you cook food, it'll get cold quickly underwater. Presumably the merfolk don't mind.
For another option, keep in mind that the cooking means denaturing proteins and killing pathogens. Merfolk can do that with chemicals like lemon juice (<https://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/raw-beef-recipes>).
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The biggest difficulty mermaids run into while cooking is the fact that water conducts heat much better than air. So they find it extremely difficult to keep the heat insulated from their own bodies.
The way to combat this is to make sure that they're standing below the meat that's cooking. This way, the convection brings most of the heat upward, away from your scales. They also need to make sure that a fresh supply of cool water is constantly brought in between the cooking food and themselves, like a thermal cushion.
Incidentally, this is also the reason why mermaids wear seashells on their fronts. Seashells have very low thermal conductivity, so it protects their torsos.
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About the simple possibility cook underwatter with electricity - could be used something like this
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_cooking#Third_generation_%22electric_pressure_cookers%22>
I have some at home, it is insulated from the heat inside, so while there is boiling watter inside, hotter then 100C, it is just nice warm outside and can be carried for infinite time in bare hands. I cook a soup with meat there regularry - the meat is totally submerged all the time and definitily cooked better, than on open fire in classic pot.
Out technique would need some small upgrades about electric insulation, which is not problem at all and about heat insulation, which can be solved too.
The problem is, how make electricity and cables under watter. With some handwaving we can make cables from gold and insulation (both electrical and thermal) from some kind of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber> (Rubber begins to melt at approximately 180 °C (356 °F). )
If we can get also magnets, we can make <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo> with rotating magnets and rubber-gold stationary source of electricity.
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But if we want it really mediavial, lets say we make <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_suit> from some textile, pump there lot of cold watter by textile pipes and use underwatter volcano to harvest lava. The cold watter inside would offset the hot of outside and we get really hot stones by <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliers> which we could put in any properly sized hole with meat, put any <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lid> on this improvised pot and we would get cooked meat too :)
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(Or be more modern, we can use the volcano to melting metals and make the previous version rubber-gold more precise and even from common metals, if needed)
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[Question]
[
One of the cities in my world, known as Kerkapeze, is situated in a location I just realized I'd have to be very creative to justify: it lies on a narrow plateau between two high but very small mountain ranges nowhere near a plate boundary. Here's some screenshots of the city (which I spent waaaay too much time making with Civ6 mods) for reference: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OzWf9.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mn9sg.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lYrYP.jpg)
This is all located in the Argentolian desert, a vast, flat area forming a sort of neck sticking out of the east end of the Tauropean Plate with an elevation of generally around 1500-2000 feet above sea level. However, I needed these mountains here to force the two rivers to diverge at the proper point for the city to be built in the hourglass-shaped area between them. However, the mountain ranges aren't all that big, because I needed the rivers to eventually converge further downstream. Here's a Koppen Climate map of the Argentolian Desert so you can kind of see how big these two mountain ranges are compared to both the city and the entire desert region:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SvAwm.jpg)
I do not have a tectonic map made of the region, so you'll just have to take my word for it here. The desert is bounded by convergent plate boundaries in the north and south, where you can kind of see the edges of bigger mountain ranges if you look closely at the koppen map. The issue here is that the mountains near Kerkapeze are nowhere near these plate boundaries and rise suddenly out of a very flat area, so I would need to find a way to justify the existence of these mountains. **If it's even possible to begin with, how could high, small, isolated mountain ranges form in areas with no nearby plate boundaries?**
[Answer]
>
> If it's even possible to begin with, how could high, small, isolated
> mountain ranges form in areas with no nearby plate boundaries?
>
>
>
You asked for no nearby plate boundaries. This means that there should be no plate boundaries *now*, or today. But, what about plate boundaries in the very distant geological *past*?
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Your very red map looks remarkably like the Ural mountain range:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jvrJq.jpg)
These mountains formed during continental collision that happened 300 to 250 **million** years ago.
It is very safe to say that there is no plate boundary at this present time.
The earth is scattered with remnants of previous plate boundaries, which do no exist any more. This is exactly what has happened in your Argentolian desert.
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Let's look closer.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9zbae.jpg)
I marked two rivers that flow on each side of the range. They are actually part of the same river system. But it doesn't take much to separate them into two distinct rivers. Just increase the elevation a bit at that place in the middle, and the river stops flowing there. That's exactly where you put your city.
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The high mountain range is the result of a violent impact on the opposite side of the planet. As a result of the shock wave propagation summing up with the ejecta from the impact landing on site, the other side of the planet gets this "bump" in a region which otherwise would not have any significant elevation.
An example of this is visible on [Mercury](https://www.planetary.org/articles/3004)
>
> When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury, it caught an immense impact basin lying half in and half out of sunlight, which they named Caloris. Even with only half the basin visible, scientists knew it was one of the largest in the solar system. Geologists had to wait more than 25 years to see the rest of Caloris, and when they did it turned out to be even bigger than they had thought. But the fact that Caloris was only half in sunlight was fortuitous in one sense, because it meant that the spot on Mercury that was exactly opposite the area of the Caloris impact was also partially in sunlight. That spot looks weird. In fact, this area has been referred to since Mariner 10 as the "weird terrain" on Mercury. And MESSENGER's orbital path has finally taken it over the weird terrain to get a good view: The MESSENGER photo doesn't make it immediately obvious what is going on geologically, but it does confirm that this "antipodal" terrain looks different from other areas of Mercury. But why should terrain antipodal to Caloris look unusual? [...] the point on Mercury that's farthest from the Caloris impact actually gets magnified effects;
>
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[Answer]
Here is a diagram of the Pacific tectonic plate on Earth:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jk81Xl.png)
If you look in the upper-middle area, you can juuust about see the islands of Hawai'i, a looong way from those plate boundaries.
Here's a second image, showing the depth of the Pacific:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BknNR.jpg)
You can see there's a long streak of seamounts stretching all the way from Kamchatka to Hawai'i. This is caused by the [Hawai'i](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_hotspot) hotspot, a plume of of rock in the mantle that causes volcanism at the surface even far from a plate boundary.
You can use this same mechanism. You can handwave the hotspot starting and ending, too... no-one is quite sure about their nature, so you've got a lot of wiggle room here. What you end up with is a streak of mostly extinct volcanic mountains, pontentially with live new eruptions at the end, if that's what you wanted.
You can certainly get quite large mountains this way... [Mauna Kea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Kea) sticks up 4000m above sea level, but more like *10000m* from the ocean floor to its peak.
Hotspots under continental crust might well behave differently, but you should still be able to get what you want.
[Answer]
**They are constructs.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/227Mk.jpg)
<https://www.deviantart.com/corwin-cross/art/Mountain-of-madness-432428687>
[At the Mountains of Madness](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx)
H.P. Lovecraft
>
> “Moulton’s plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt
> and perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for
> return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel
> needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going
> up scouting in Carroll’s plane, with all weight out. You can’t imagine
> anything like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet. Everest
> out of the running. Atwood to work out height with theodolite while
> Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations look
> stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in.
> Queer skyline effects—regular sections of cubes clinging to highest
> peaks. Whole thing marvellous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land
> of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden
> wonder. Wish you were here to study.”
>
>
>
Your preternaturally high mountain ranges are ancient constructs, pushed out of the ground by a prehuman race. They are much weathered in these latter days and were higher yet originally. People in your world may or may not be aware of the provenance of these mountains. Maybe someone should go explore them?
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Another possibility is erosion. An area with two different types of rock and over time one is gone and the other remains, like Uluru in Australia.
[Answer]
Paektu Mountain between North Korea and China is not situated at either a plate border nor volcanic hotspot like Hawaii.
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I have no basis or example to share for this, but could a small mountain area be created by debris? That is, perhaps some form of extra-planetary objects that somehow land quite slowly (so they don't explode and cause a crater), and all land nearby to each other.
I have no idea if this is possible, but what if such an object were a large rock, which is on an elliptical orbit, on a different orbital plane to the planet. It forms like this, and only millions of years later the two objects find themselves intersecting each others orbits and colliding. Since they're both orbiting in the same direction around their star, their speed of impact is slow, and perhaps somehow the smaller of the two ends up "lumped" on top of the larger planet, perhaps breaks up a bit into smaller chunks and then erodes and settles in over the next couple of million years.
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[Question]
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I have a solar system containing multiple planets, most having an intelligent species inhabiting it. To keep a common peace, they created a large government system to help stop territorial wars between planets for uninhabited planets as well as trade between each planet. But to do this I need to come up with a common time system but have no idea how to do it since I won't be able to go based on any one planet's rotation, or if I did it would inconsistent for most other planets.
Is there any way for an entire solar system to share a common time zone so they can consistently communicate with each other?
[Answer]
Central Orbit Time (COT). The system can use the planet closest to the star, as it's unlikely to be inhabited and therefore not showing bias to any one planet or people. This orbit is then divided into reasonable intervals, such as taking 1/100th of its orbit, so on and so forth. A "Solar year" Can be a number of these orbits that fits closest to most planets' calendars.
Example: Mercury.
* COT Orbit: 87.97 days
* COT Day: 0.88 days (1/100th of orbit)
* COT Hour: 2.11 hours (1/10th of COT day)
* COT Minute: 1.27 minutes (1/100th of a COT hour)
* COT Second: 0.76 seconds (1/100th of a COT minute)
[Answer]
>
> I need to come up with a common time system but have no idea how to do it since I won't be able to go based on any one planet's rotation, or if I did it would inconsistent for most other planets.
>
>
>
You have no problem at all.
**Greenwich Mean Time**
As a point of reference, it's perfectly OK. There's no reason why everyone cannot constant reference the time from that point. OK, your species may not have Greenwich itself, but you can basically pick any arbitrary location as a reference and everyone else uses it.
Whatever time, day and date they say, you use as a base for your local system.
Your local system can apply it's own offsets ("timezones") any way it likes. It may have "local Greenwich Mean Time" which it's own planetary timezones reference, but which stays calibrated in some well defined way to the Main GMT.
You can pick any orbiting body or an artificial satellite for the Main GMT - this might be politically better, but it makes no difference to the system. I'd probably go with a system of reference satellites that can be tracked accurately and which can supply redundancy and self correction - orbital mechanics and perturbations from a variety of sources will need something like this.
Days and Dates are kept in broad sync (allowing for local, but well defined, offsets) by everyone following the Main GMT reference for date.
**Atomic Clocks**
Precision timing will be done using atomic clocks. These can be used to keep a strict scientific watch on time as measured in each reference frame (relativity applies). But there's no need to use these for date and time directly. We'll have our Main GMT (and it's own clocks) and the Local GMTs which reference off the Main GMT so that relativistic effects don't get lost.
Now this isn't exactly trivial. There are lots of complex effects due to relativity, but there are scientists and computers for handling the details and they're pretty good at this, so leave them to it and don't argue.
**How long is a Year, etc.**
This is a political thing. There's no reason why local systems cannot operate (as custom) their own day, month and year stuff. But in practical terms for business, military and (really) staying sane, people will either work with the standard date or translate to it (aren't computers wonderful - no need to actually do the calculations yourself !).
If experience tells us anything it's that politically you solve the problem of different systems largely by working around it. Trying to ram a time system down one planet's throat that they don't want might well start a war, so diplomats just rename things and define abstract standards that people can "adopt". Computers will do the dirty work. You'll find suddenly that companies work to e.g. ISO-19288645 time and only some poor software developer has to actually understand the darn thing - everyone else just looks at their smart phone !
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> it would inconsistent for most other planets
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Just to emphasize : you do not need consistency in terms of using the same system. You need systematically well defined local time systems that can be translated into each other (by computers) and kept track of using well defined reference points.
**Politics**
Because politics is involved (different races, different planets), they'll not actually agree an existing standard. To save face they'll invent a complete new one that is different from all the existing systems and no one likes for that reason. It will, over time, become an unavoidable standard everyone kind of knows or has to occasionally reference (e.g. in a business memo), but locally we'll all still use the system defined for local convenience.
So The Year of The Twelve Tailed Finch may be starting on Planet Mongo, but here on Planet Mango we're in the middle of the Imperial Year 27816. The ISO standard may say it's Dec 7th 1942, but no one cares about that.
Computers - stopping wars is our business.
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We have sent probes to all the most important planets in our own system now. The most interesting ones, in regarding to this question, were the ones sent to Mars. There is an article in Wikipedia about [timekeeping on Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars):
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> A convention used by spacecraft lander projects to date has been to enumerate local solar time using a 24-hour "Mars clock" on which the hours, minutes and seconds are 2.7% longer than their standard (Earth) durations. For the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Phoenix, and Mars Science Laboratory missions, the operations teams have worked on "Mars time", with a work schedule synchronized to the local time at the landing site on Mars, rather than the Earth day. This results in the crew's schedule sliding approximately 40 minutes later in Earth time each day. Wristwatches calibrated in Martian time, rather than Earth time, were used by many of the MER team members.
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> Local solar time has a significant impact on planning the daily activities of Mars landers. Daylight is needed for the solar panels of landed spacecraft. Its temperature rises and falls rapidly at sunrise and sunset because Mars does not have the Earth's thick atmosphere and oceans that soften such fluctuations. Consensus as has recently been gained in the scientific community studying Mars to similarly define martian local hours as 1/24th of a Mars day.
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Each planet in your system may have its own timekeeping, convertible to the timekeeping of the central government the same way we convert currencies. In our own world, the value of most currencies is counted as relative to either Euros or US dollars. You could do like the martian timekeeping, which has a martian second valued at 1.027 Earth seconds. The difference here is that time conversions would not fluctuate following economics.
So it could go like:
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> -Hey this task me is going to take me foo's to accomplish.
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> -Yeah but here in Kerbin we measure time in bars. How much are three foo's in bars?
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> -Let's see... one foo is like one hour and three minutes in gov time, rounded down. A bar is like forty seven gov minutes and one second. So carry the three... It will take about four bars, give or take.
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Timezones work on Earth because they don't change very often. California is always 3 hours behind NY. This is not true between planets. Even calendars don't work.
Saying it's noon on March 9 in New York tells you what time of day it is and what season it is. You know it's light out, and you know the weather is likely to be warming up. But what does that tell you about the conditions at Olympus Mons on Mars? Nothing. Mars's year is longer than Earth's, so Martian and Earthling calendars will quickly desync. Mars's days are longer too, so even their clocks can't sync up. This situation just gets worse the more planets you try to include.
But I don't think it really matters honestly. We need timezones here on Earth because you can easily call California from NY, so it's good to know what time it is there so you can be sure someone will answer. But due to the fact that light takes about 40 minutes to get to Mars, that kind of thing just isn't possible. Imagine dialing someone on Olympus Mons and listening to the phone ring for over an hour; remember it takes 40 minutes for your call to reach them and 40 minutes for their reply to reach you. This just gets worse if you start adding colonies outside the asteroid belt.
You don't need a unified clock system because people can't communicate in real time over these distances anyways.
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Use the rotation of the sun. 1 solar rotation would be the equivalent of a day. So many days is a week, month, year and so on. That way you are not favoring any one planet.
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The individual units don't really matter.
They would have multi calendars and calculators that just worked out the relationships of whatever the local times were given their tech.
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They evolved separately, but at some point settled on someone's language as a common means of communication.
You'd use that language's host culture's time system and calendar.
This would be true by default prior to the invention of any universal standard, because it'd be the time system that would make the most sense in the common language. If someone did invent a universal standard, nobody would bother using it, because it'd be really awkward to talk about for everyone, whereas by that time anyone who knew the common tongue would've already gotten used to using the common tongue's calendar.
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Common periodic events that can be measured:
* Solar Rotation
* Galactic Revolution
* Uninhabitable Body Revolution
A common time system can be built around this, and then this can be further subdivided down for each planet's common use. Since each planet has it's own system based on a common model, similar to how we have time zones, it would be simple to convert between different planetary times, and when travelling in interplanetary space, you have a mutual time system to use.
To be clear though, for a system of time measurement, you need both a source event, and a periodic measurement event to measure time by. Missing either and time is meaningless. For example, an atomic clock by itself is useless as a time piece. You need to know not only the decay rate of the atom, but also, how many atoms have decayed since a specific event. Whether that event is the big bang, all the planets in the solar system were in alignment for the first time in memory, the formation of your star, or planet, or what the event was, that is a choice, but you must have an event.
Remember this for your world, to make time have meaning, it must have a beginning and a direction.
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None of the inhabited planets are suitable, in part due to political ramifications; when a single planet of intelligent life has colonised other planets, you can just stick with the Home Planet time, but that's not what seems to have happened here. So, you need to use a timing mechanism that can be measured independently from any planet, anywhere in the solar system!
Something like basing it on certain Pulsars outside the solar system (the longest known pulsar period is just under 2 minutes - the shortest is about 1.4 milliseconds), or on the perihelion of an uninhabited (uninhabit*able*?) planet or [significant short-period comet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_periodic_comets) as the start of the new System Year. (There are several comets in our *own* solar system with a period of about 4 years - imagine syncing all of the Calendars on the 29th of February)
Of course, the problem *then* is that "standard time" won't sync up with "local time". This is **much worse** than time-zones on Earth: Sunrise in New York is always about the same distance behind Sunrise in London, and ever Daylight Saving will only shift this by about 2 hours. If Sunrise on Planet A is every 19 hours, and Sunrise on Planet B is every 31 hours, then the time-difference shifts by 12 hours *every day* - a 31-day month on Planet A is the same as a mere 19 days on Planet B.
People on-planet are likely to stick to their local time, because that's what syncs to the Sun, and what the animals will keep to. Commercial Pilots flying people back-and-forth between planets will stick to their own planet's local time (because that's what they'll sleep to!). Banks and other multi-planetary bodies / businesses will probably stick to Standard Time at a high-level, and for paying wages, but Local Time for branches.
Any long-term space habitation *might* stick to Local Time, if everyone is from one planet, or they *might* swap to Standard Time (for example, some research station in Antarctica stick to their home-nation's time zones, while others just operate on GMT instead.)
Watches and clocks will most likely have at least 2 dials - one for Local Time, one for Standard Time. People who travel or deal with other planets regularly will have more dials, or more watches.
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What would be the best way to send energy that is generated outside the Earth's atmosphere, possibly in the asteroid belt (nevermind the means), so that it can be used on the surface of the planet?
Let's say solar power generation. With enough mirrors you can get really high output. The energy thus "gathered" can be "transmitted" down to Earth's surface, but it will be, in essence, a laser beam (i know, it will be concentrated sunlight, but I mean effect, not the naming details), that will be dangerous to anything in it's path, including the atmosphere.
Assuming level tech of today but include current experiments in all stages of advance, what would be the best - that means safest, cheapest and most efficient - way to supply energy to the grid on the Earth's surface? Additionally: what would be the upper limit of the power levels to be transmitted?
To clarify after some very good comments:
1. for starters let's look at powering Earth from orbit in 100%. So 200 TWh
2. Current level tech +20 years caveat means no space industry in place. So let's say I want to start working on it next year (2018).
3. Any way of sending and/or form of energy goes.
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Personally, I would go a different route here.
Sending energy down to the planet, through all that atmosphere, will cause huge losses - the "cable down the space elevator" idea would probably be the most feasable, if you want to give your civilization the technology to build one.
But: why do that at all? The energy required for ground-bound use will be utterly dwarved by what your civilization uses **in space** if they set up operations in the asteroid belt (and I assume on other planets too). Mining and refining ores, manufacturing spacecraft, sattelites and whatnot from them, refining the fuel for said spacecraft... Heck, if you have lots of cheap(er than elsewhere) energy in space, data processing centres and server farms would probably be placed there too (assuming there's an efficient way to get rid of the excess heat without an atmosphere).
Also, note a big problem with using energy gathered in space down on earth: energy is not lost, only transformed. Which means, any "losses" while beaming down microwave or laser energy, AND the NOT lost energy "used" later, will in the end be converted into heat. Currently, the planet is at a certain temperature level where its temperature causes it to radiate off roughly as much energy as the sun's rays add to it - if there's an imbalance there, the temperature rises until a new equilibrium is reached (the higher the temperature, the more energy will be radiated off - there's much more complicated stuff in there too, like greenhouse effects and the exact formulas, but for a basic understanding saying it like this should work). So if you constantly bring in X amount of energy from the asteroid belt, the global temperature will rise by Y degrees because of that. Unless you want to compensate for the - more or less - directly usable energy you bring in by reducing the unfocused energy the sun adds with huge sunshade sattelites or seeding clouds to reflect more sunlight or whatnot, you will run into big problems.
Of course, that might just be where your story is going - in which case I recommend combinations of the other answers. Particularly the space elevator - not neccesarily as a huge cable, but because it makes delivering your space-batteries to the ground that much more efficient too.
If you don't have the material science for a full-blown space elevator, look into [space fountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain "space fountain") instead - basically, a magnetically-controlled round-trip system slinging containers up into space and catching them again when they come back down.
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Well a few ideas come to mind:
## Focused electromagnetic radiation
Something along the lines of the microwave power station mentioned in other answers. Have a large maser (microwave laser) on your generation point and aim it at a secluded area of Earth for collection via a large collecting array. The collection site will have to be large due to beam scattering issues, which is actually a good thing, by spreading the power out it makes for less issues with atmospheric absorption or death ray style damages. This is currently thought to be the best and most feasible method, and has been studied fairly well with lots of information available about the particulars of how it would work.
## Portable power storage
For this type of energy transfer you want things with very high [energy density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density), which you then transport to Earth, this is not going to be very effective in general due to the high transport costs involved, especially if you need a soft controlled landing to transport it to Earth's surface, but with very high energy dense materials it might make sense.
The top of the potentials here, based on energy density, would be anti-matter, you would need a much more energy efficient method of producing it than is currently possible using particle colliders as well as other technologies for storage, transport and energy generation that do not currently exist, but if you had those a shipment of ~3 tons of antimatter could power Human society for a year ([5.6x10^20 J](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption) / 9x10^16 J/kg = 6200 kg divide by two for the normal matter in the reaction = 3100kg).
More realistic options for energy carriers would be artificial hydrocarbons produced from asteroid and comet materials, or refined metals such as aluminum which can be unrefined to produced electricity. These would have fairly low energy density meaning that you would need some very efficient methods of shipping it to Earth to make it at all viable.
A possibly useful method, depending on it's availability in asteroid or other space mining, would be nuclear fission or fusion fuels. He3 has been theorized to be present in space locations produced by the solar wind, if we developed fusion power that could use this or other exotic isotopes available more readily in space I could definitely see mining for nuclear fuel as viable.
In terms of currently usable energy storage you really can't beat [Uranium](https://xkcd.com/1162/). If you do all of the dangerous refining and fuel processing in space transporting refined Uranium fuel to Earth would offer a very high energy transport capability.
## Direct Connection
Far down the list of theoretical methods is one of my favorites, the [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator). The whole problem seems really easy when you can just run a long distance high voltage power line from Space to Earth!
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Find [Wireless power transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer) and use any exist technology, or invent one to suit your work.
**Microwave power plant** in SimCity use Microwave from satellite to earth (with picture below). In reality, [Microwave power transmission (MPT)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission#Microwave_power_transmission) is used to power helicopter in 1964 ([Experimental Airborne Microwave Supported Platform](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/474925.pdf))
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0bhQ.jpg)
**Laser** seem possible too. [Nasa laser powered plane](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2003/03-180.html) (2003)
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The obvious answer is to use as much in space as possible!
There are relatively easy ways of producing large quantities of metals and other materials from asteroids using space foundries; these are just large thermal focusing of the sun's energy using simple aluminum mirrors to melt the asteroids. Add a small centrifugal force and a melted ball can be separated by molecular weight for purification, then used for either further purification or recombination.
I think in space you could manufacture the same kind of heat-resistant ceramic tiles we used on the space shuttle to protect it from re-entry. You should be able to easily make very large (tanker sized) steel canisters to hold highly compressed, liquefied gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for example. Transport those to Earth, shielded by tiles and with a parachute splashdown, and use them as fuels to power electric generators. They burn clean, and the containers are non-toxic, and perhaps can be constructed in shapes that are even useful in their own right. To be clear, I am not talking about a few, but a production line of millions of them per year, or however many Earth (or a country) needs.
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## Two space elevators.
Three if you want to send three-phase. (though given the distances, AC is probably a very terrible idea, speed-of-light and all.)
Imagine if you needed to get several gigawatts into Manhattan. You use the Queensboro Bridge as one conductor, and the Brooklyn Bridge as the other. No railroads, an insulation zone for a safe transition, **the structure *is* the conductor**. Get it?
You can energize each space elevator at several megavolts compared to each other, and half that compared to earth. Insulate the daylights out of the anchorage.
Do not run a railway up to the space elevator, require people come the last 10km in rubber-tired vehicles. As they cross the large insulating apron, they will bias up to the couple of megavolts, without realizing it. Just like a lineman can work on high tension lines with the power on, if he only contacts one of them at a time.
There is basically nothing special about the space elevators, except their structures are electrically bonded to assure they carry electricity well.
The reason not to do it with one space elevator is the voltage needed would be rather high, needing considerable insulation separating the two "wires". This would make it much more difficult to use the structure itself *as* both conductors, making it necessary to carry one conductor and insulation as useless deadweight. Any insulation failure could create an arc which could damage and sever the space elevator. Use two space elevators and you do an end-run around these problems.
## This isn't a death ray
Almost any other form of energy transmission would be very damaging if it were abused. Not this. There isn't really a way to weaponize it. \*\*
\*\* as a power transmission method. This says nothing about any vulnerabilitie of space elevators *in general*.
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Wireless power has problems - notable weather - and besides, it's covered on [the Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power)
What you could try is a bit more direct: Refine metals, send them to the Earth's surface, and burn them. As you are in the Asteroid belt, there will be plenty of magnesium and aluminium silicates that can be refined to Aluminum and Magnesium respectively, with whatever energy is available - 24/7 solar power makes this easy. You can then launch large blocks of these metals into an orbit that intersects with that of Earth; arranging a landing mechanism might be hard, but not impossible - it's not like you need a gentle landing. Then, simply powder and burn the metal in power stations.
With an automated refinery in the asteroid belt and hence a steady stream of metal 'bricks', you have a continuous energy source.
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**Mirrors**
The earth is already receiving power from space. The fusion furnace at the centre of the solar system provides Earth with 174 petawatts of power. It has the potential to provide much more, the total output is around 400 septawatts of power, far more that I would ever want to be beamed at the fragile surface of our tiny planet.
The obvious ways of directing more solar power to earth are lenses and mirrors; large lenses can be heavy, so mirrors are as sensible choice. There are a number of ways of receiving solar power. The most familiar are solar panels, but if you are directing a large amount of power to small location, you might want molten salt generators. Molten salt generators have two advantages. Firstly they are able to store power so you can handle demand fluctuations. Secondly molten salt is much better than molten solar panels.
The mirrors could have a control module in the centre. The module could have a vertical and horizontal set of solar powered wheels. Spinning the wheels in one direction will rotate the mirror in the other. This would allow us to direct the reflected energy.
*Plausibility*
Often the future doesn't involve new technologies, but rather existing technologies becoming cheaper. No known material is strong enough for a space elevator. Perhaps in the future new materials are discovered that could be used to build a space elevator. Then again, it was predicted that we would be able to live in all plastic houses... I guess we can now but why would we want to? Without a space elevator we are limited to various forms of beaming energy down to earth, and reflecting energy to existing solar power plant seems like an incremental step.
All of this technology could be made today. Putting mirrors in space would be prohibitively expensive today, but presumably prices will fall if industrial production is moved to space.
Sometimes you don't need power to be in the form of electricity. If a smelting plant needs something to be melted, concentrated solar energy could do the trick. Some malcontent complaining about energy prices? Be generous for a change and beam a free terawatt directly to their roof. In principle you could have an elaborate system of charging fancy lazcannons, and lend them to your goons. Sure you may be the power hungry leader of a futuristic mega-corporation bend on world domination. That doesn't mean that your CFO will let you hand out priceless prototypes to your incompetent minions... not when there are more cost-effective ways of vaporising your opposition.
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Someone thought of a skyscraper hanging from a geostationary asteroid. It is not possible with the current technology. I'll link the [SE question](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20866/could-you-enter-this-building-when-it-was-over-new-york-city) about it. You could use this kind of space object to transport back to Earth in controlled conditions whatever you like.
If it is solar energy, you could use optic fiber to transport it from the asteroid to the surface, or you could even send a high energy laser beam through some vacuum tube until it reaches the ground.
Other materials like Uranium that you mine from the asteroids could be sent down by an elevator.
The building could be made using some high tensile materials and you could argue that graphene or carbon nanotube advances have made possible producing meter-long defect free structures of these materials.
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Slightly safer than directing a stream of radiation directly at a spot on the planet.
Scale up existing wireless power transfer mechanisms. You may need some handwavium to keep the magnetic field sufficiently concentrated for such long range power transport.
Generate power in space. Send electricity through a cylindrical coil of wire to generate a magnetic field.
Set up a coil of wire on earth. Point the cylinders at each other. The magnetic field from the space coil will induct an electric current in the Earth based coil.
So somebody could stand over the receiver and be absolutely fine\*\*
Planes could fly overhead and be fine\*\*\*
A Meteor hitting the space based coil and re aiming it slightly would be absolutely fine\*\*\*\*
\*\* As long as they don't have a steel belt buckle. if they do, they will get a very deadly wedgie.
\*\*\* As long as nothing made of iron is on board. Not sure if the electronics would be fried.
\*\*\*\* Best not to have any iron anywhere near the receiver.
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From Wikipedia:
agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction consume about 37% of the total 15 TW (total Earth energy consumption).
Now, agricultural products are mass intensive so I don't think there will ever be a cost effective way to move them back to Earth (save maybe for an already built space elevator). Also, agriculture uses CO2 to produce food, so there must be a source of CO2 nearby.
Down-porting meat or alcohol would be more favourable (as they are less mass intensive than grains), but even so the value is low.
Now, mining and refining... dirty and energy intensive work. One could mine the asteroids - but to bring them back to Earth (or in Earth orbit) one must overcome large energy penalties.
Also, zero g offer some unique opportunities (like alloys of components of different densities).
Again, nuclear power won't need nuclear shielding in all directions (only impact shielding), considering that the Earth orbit is pretty bare.
So, I don't see much of a need to beam energy down to Earth - just to move energy intensive operations in orbit (like, for example, building solar panels). This assumes first, that we have resources already in orbit, and secondly that a reliable, inexpensive "downporting" technology exists.
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Atmospheres of the gas giants. Make a methane powered ship with a Jupiter scoop, enough energy to power man or space exploration for the next billion years or more.
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Assume in the very near future almost all rail transportation would return to steam-powered locomotives. To define it exactly, I mean solid fuel is burned inside the locomotive, which boils water, which is in turn used to drive the locomotive.
Assume no economic or societal collapse, or at least not a too large one. Also assume that the importance of rail transport versus road transport increases to the levels it was 70-90 years ago. Technology should be the same as we have now.
Steam locomotives are not very efficient, but there might be some causes in their re-emergence. For example, rising oil prices would make road travel uneconomical for goods and only affordable for personal travel to the wealthy, just like it was 70-90 years ago. Or some regulations would be the cause of this. Whatever the reason, steam locomotives are coming back.
(I know that this would explain the reduction in diesel locomotives, but not electrical ones, which can be powered by wind/solar/nuclear power. Maybe something like a new plant which grows fast, easy to harvest, and burns well, perfect for steam locomotives but not economical for power plants? I know, getting rid of electrified rail would not be easy, this might require some suspension of disbelief. But somehow, they are either gone, or reduced to niche roles)
**Now, steam locomotives are back, while technology is roughly the current one. What would they look like?**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dsbpZ.jpg)
Steam locomotives, especially 20th century ones, are real [marvels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Big_Boy_4006.jpg) of [engineering](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-Baureihe_41#/media/File:41_241_im_Essener_Hauptbahnhof_80er_Jahre.jpg), more than 100 years of development led them to be much faster and more efficient than when they were first invented. This knowledge is not lost to us, so we don't have to start from scratch. Many old steam locomotives still exist in functional states with people able to maintain and operate them, either for tourism, or in reserve for emergencies. So, putting the 1930-1940's steam locomotives (the last time significant development was done in this regard) back in production should not be that difficult. But how could we improve them?
One significant change (but invisible from the outside), I guess, would be the computerization of the controls, to make them simpler to operate. Driving a steam locomotive [was a very difficult job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy#/media/File:4017_Backhead_20040426.jpg), and required great wisdom. It's no wonder the word "engineer" originally meant a train driver. Even the job of the person shoveling coal required a lot of knowledge and experience, keeping track of steam pressure, temperature, humidity, the color of the smoke, to know when to shovel fuel and when to release pressure, etc. Everything was done manually, so some improvement could be done there.
What else? Fuel efficiency? What could we do now what they couldn't do 70 years ago? Computer simulations to make a better shape for the boiler to improve efficiency a little? Better steel technology to resist higher pressures? Better filters to not produce that much smoke?
What would visibly change as steam locomotives would be kept improving from where they were left 70 years ago? Steam turbines are more efficient then traditional steam engines, every power plant, including nuclear ones, use highly sophisticated steam turbines. However, they tried it for locomotives, and [it was not very successful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine_locomotive).
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* Most steam engines would use condensers, both to avoid watering stops and to use the thermal energy to pre-heat the feed water.
* Many steam engines would use modern gearing rather than pistons and rods directly coupled to the wheels. This allows the pistons to turn at the optimal speed for power generation and not at the necessary speed to turn the wheels. That would mean driving wheels can get smaller, too, no more need for the outsize wheels of old locomotives.
* Some of them might use steam *turbine* technology.
* You might see steam-electric engines where the steam engine drives a generator and that generator powers electric motors.
* Technology might be developed to replace the stoker who hauls chunks of coal with a pipeline to transport coal dust.
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# It will not happen
You asked:
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> What could we do now what they couldn't do 70 years ago?
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Answer: they could not create an electrified railway for locomotives to use instead of lugging all their fuel around.
When it comes to generating power, there is significant economy in scale and centralization. If diesel-electric engines become nonviable, this will not bring back steam engines. It will instead lead to a boom in electrical engines. The power you wish to generate on-board the train will not be done so, but instead at a power plant. As far as economics, efficiency and logistics are concerned, this is the best way to go, if nothing else because it means we can use already existing technology instead of having to re-invent the steam engine in the 21st century.
Also there is no more efficient way to distributing energy than as electricity. Lugging coal and water — or any other steam forming agent around — is horrendously tiresome.
If you are hellbent on creating steam engines again, they will not be the stereotypical puffing chugga-chugga-chugga kind that we are used to, but instead just versions of the diesel-electric kind, where the steam engine drives a generator that in turn drives electrical motors on the wheels. So they will be quite boring looking, and not the stylish art deco machines of the 1920s to 1940s.
I am sorry, but since you asked for "hard science" I am forced to give you a boring answer.
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From a purely aesthetic point of view, I hope they come back as art deco beauties
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wetdx.jpg)
An example of this is [PRR-S1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRR_S1)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kWt6P.jpg)
Also, you could make them [NUCLEAR!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space#Radioisotope_systems) Using RTG's like in satellites, no pollution at all! With a continuous heat source, you have no coal man or fuel to transport, just a lot of water.
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Steam engines went out of fashion because they have significant issues compared to diesel electric engines.
1. The power to weight ratio is rather low
2. Steam engines can take up to 10 hours to raise steam from a cold start
3. The weight of water,fuel etc. is far greater than the corresponding weight of diesel fuel
4. Steam engines are relatively complex machines with significant safety issues from the use of live steam and a pressurized boiler.
So to bring back a steam engine, we would have to find ways to overcome these issues. Some of the issues could actually be resolved through the use of supercritical CO2 as the medium of energy transfer other than water. The higher density allows far less fluid to be used, the energy efficiency is much higher and since there is a smaller amount of fluid in the system, the "raise steam" time would be much reduced. Experiments using supercritical CO2 rather than steam in thermal power plants suggest that a turbine and the associated plumbing could be 1/10 the size of the equivalent steam turbine.
<https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sti/2906955.pdf>
<http://energy.sandia.gov/energy/renewable-energy/supercritical-co2/>
<http://www.co2turbine.com>
The obvious result would be the space devoted to the "engine" would be far smaller, and since this is a closed cycle turbine system, the resulting engine would be smaller and lighter as well. This would be offset somewhat by the need for large radiators, and of course the issue of highly pressurized working fluid hasn't been eliminated either.
Direct drive from the turbine to the drive wheels isn't the best solution (the reduction gear case would offset much of the size and weight advantages of using a supercritical CO2 turbine), so the turbine would be powering a high speed generator. A steam-electric serial drive would operate in a similar fashion to current diesel electric engines. Because you are using a turbine, this potentially allows you to produce the same energy output from one locomotive as several diesel electric locomotives. This could be tapped by providing powered bogies on the railcars themselves, allowing for distributed power along the length of the train and potentially providing more traction for starts, stops, moving up steep grades and so on.
The other advantage for the railway company is they would only need one locomotive per train which would be an especially useful cost saving when running large and heavy unit trains
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SdViR.jpg)
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If you look at a late-era steam locomotive like the Mallard, I think there are real similarities to more modern trains, e.g.:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ee3xa.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/13XIP.jpg)
I would expect train manufactuers to continue to design streamlined locomotives that both have good aerodynamic properties and evoke ideas of speed and modernism.
They probably wouldn't be white because white stuff gets dirty around coal. Dark colours are more likely.
I would expect the driver to be at the front because (a) most of the business of fueling the train would be handled by automated machines, (b) the controls would be electronic rather than mechanical and could be operated from a remote cabin, and (c) the front offers better forward visibility and safety.
The coal tender would be covered rather than open for various reasons. Firstly, it would again help the locomotive to look more modern and streamlined. Secondly, there may be some modular solution for more efficient refueling (rather than just 'pouring coal in from the top'). Thirdly, refinements in fuel chemistry and the technology that transports the fuel into the firebox mean that we need to protect the fuel from the elements.
For long-distance trains, there may be solutions for storing fuel above/below the carriages and then automatically transporting it forward to the ending as needed.
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Having said all that, here is some cool art called "Heavy Metal Hero" by Rodney Matthews:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQCtM.jpg)
This art was also used on the cover of an old videogame called [Transarctica](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhW1QMXnmds), set in a post-apocolyptic frozen world where people live on trains that roam the landscape looking for supplies.
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# Steam power would be steam-electric
Diesel trains don't run diesel engines coupled to gearboxes coupled to the wheels. Modern ones will use a diesel to power a generator to power a [VVVF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-frequency_drive) (Variable-voltage, variable-frequency) drive unit. The electric generator and motor act as the transmission. This is more efficient today; if you change the prime mover, the generator/drive combination is unaffected and will still be more effective (namely, lighter) than a gearbox mechanical transmission.
# For electric generation, a turbine is best
Since you are now connected to an electric generator, the most stable and efficient way to operate one of those is with a constant speed turbine. What do you know, the same technology setup is still used on to the modern day in steam powerplants on warships. The Nimitz aircraft carrier runs (many) 8,000 kW steam turbines, a locomotive might be more like 2,000 kW.
# Does it really have to be steam?
You know, if you are going to run a turbine-electric system on a train, why not make it a gas turbine? This is basically a jet engine; instead of putting steam in to power the turbine, you put gasoline in and light it on fire. The power to weight ratio of those things are off the charts (compared to both diesel and steam), and the turbine output is basically the same as from a steam turbine.
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The other commenters have done a good job pointing out what might change with the braking and mechanical control systems of a modern steam locomotive would be, as well as the engineering reasons steam lost favor to begin with. However in the the middle of the 20th century French, Argentinean, and British engineers worked hard to radically improve the performance of steam locomotives. Some of the last results looked like this: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ayoMF.jpg)
It's close to what I imagined when I saw your post, as this is the world building stack exchange after all. The main innovation beyond aesthetics is the thermodynamics of the boiler and fuel feed system. It requires a some basic thermo knowledge to appreciate, but is detailed very well here: <https://csrail.org/modern-steam>
A fully report on the sleek train pictured is here: <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55e5ef3fe4b0d3b9ddaa5954/t/55e637bee4b0bef289260255/1441150910433/%23+DOMS-2_PORTA_Argentina.pdf>
Almost everything you are looking for is linked to from this wikipedia page from a prototype steam locomotive designed in the 1990s.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5AT_Advanced_Technology_Steam_Locomotive>
Engineers continue to refurbish and build new steam locomotives today, but most are straightforward rebuilds of midcentury models with the most minimal changes to make them meet safety parameters. They retain the same essentially "non-modern" body you'd imagine.
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Why does it have to run on solid fuel? Fluids are easier to handle. Steam locomotives have traditionally run on poor quality oil. Recent examples are tho new and converted locomotives from [DLM](http://dlm-ag.ch) which run on light oil or diesel fuel. However, steam locomotives might use biowaste such as wood chippings or agricultural waste such as straw, though the energy density per unit volume is very low.
Apart from that, there is no reason why they should look much different from the locomotives of the late 1940s. It would be desirable if they could run equally well in either direction, which is primarily a matter of the design of the cab and fuel-and-water-carrying vehicle. Very large freight locomotives would, with advantage, follow the Beyer-Garrett configuration.
The great advantage of the conventional steam locomotive is that it is simple, with a relatively small number of components, of which the wearing parts can be designed for easy replacement. Also, in the railway environment, the boiler acts as an energy reservoir, providing a "buffer" between conversion of the chemical energy of the fuel into the potential energy in the steam, and thence to mechanical energy via the direct drive.
Boiler wear can be substantially reduced by using liquid fuel and effective water treatment at very high pH, and by keeping the machines permanently warm to avoid heating/cooling cycles. External combustion enables the locomotives to be designed so as to minimise the production of harmful wastes such as carbon monoxide, NOx and particulates.
The long preparation times referred to by some of the above commentators can be eliminated by internal or external pre-heating systems using oil, gas or off-peak electricity.
In my view, it is time that this technology made a comeback at least on secondary routes where the density of traffic did not justify the capital costs of electrification.
Overall thermal efficiency these days is about 12% which is not very good, but waste heat can be used for heating the train. It is worth remembering that the most powerful locomotives in Britain are the class 68 diesel and the Duke of Gloucester, the last British Railways steam design.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H9lYj.jpg)
I'd wager a modern steamer would look something like this, maybe with an added streamlining shroud and bigger. Mainly because high pressure engines were found to be efficient and very successful, but were still premature during the steam era. When high pressure boilers were more perfected, the steam age had long died, and this prototype of mass potential never came to fruition.
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There are 38 new steam locomotives currently under construction in the UK designed to be fired by a range of fuels from solids, liquids and even gas, all of which follow traditional 1930's and 40's configuration and layout. The largest and most powerful of these, the P2, is expected to be capable of producing 3000hp at 80% and 100mph. It's worth noting that during WWII Switzerland, finding it's self cut off from German coal supplies and with a surplus of hydro-electric power it could no longer sell to Germany, converted existing steam locomotives to use immersion heaters supplied via pantographs fitted to the footplate roof. The main problems I can see with steam over electric is power and speed. Steam tops out at a power of around 4000hp for a practical size of locomotive compared with a similar size electric locomotive able to produce 10,000hp. The UK's Tornado steam locomotive built in 2009 has managed 116mph flat out, 109mph slower than the designed top speed of the electric high speed trains using the the same line
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Steam describes the medium for translating heat energy into mechanical energy. Nuclear power is often actually steam turbines heated by fissionable material. We'd probably call it a nuclear or atomic train, but it is still a steam engine.
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[
It is not a good start for a story if the protagonists kill each-other on sight when they first meet. Unfortunately, my protagonists are very likely to do just that. They do need to defend themselves against nature, rivals and the police while they carry on their not quite legal activities. But there is a simple solution: Give them non-lethal weapons.
The setting is a futuristic space opera, with a bit of a western flavour. Think grease, rust and iron. The universe is not a well policed place, plus the starting place of the story is a planet where nature is a threat. People usually carry a weapon with them. For plot reasons, I don't want the standard weapon to be lethal. However it needs to seriously incapacitate the target for at the very least a few minutes, up to hours. It can paralyse, knock out, put to sleep, whatever; it's up to you, as long as your opponent is instantly not a danger any more. The effects must wear off by themselves in minutes/hours.
The standard weapon also needs to work against the various intelligent species you can encounter in this universe. You can assume that the vast majority of them share the same basic structure (carbon-based, breathe oxygen...) and range from the size of a big cat to the size of a rhino, the average being between human and horse. This is a wide range, so I'm perfectly okay with the weapon being sometimes deadly if not "dosed" appropriately.
Fashion constraint: the standard weapon must look more or less like a gun, use bullets and make a nice gun sound. A valid "bullet" for this question is some sort of charge you have to insert, which get ejected through the shell and doesn't stay connected to the gun; and that you can carry in a limited quantity.
Bonus points: It makes an open wound, even a tiny one. You can sometimes kill your opponent (hit a specific area, target too small?). Should you accidentally deliver a killing bullet, there is a remedy/a procedure you can do to save your target.
Thank you for your time.
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EDIT : Several answers give interesting & complementary solutions. I accepted the one which gave a direct solution to "how does a non lethal gun could work". Other useful answers :
[weapon is supposed to be lethal, but doesn't work well on all the creatures of the universe](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27490/9848)
[if you want a gun, use a gun. and boost the defence of the characters with nanobots](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27496/9848)
[immobilize opponents with sticky-expanding-sturdy-foam](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/27487/9848) I like how this one works on every creature ever
Thank you all for all your interesting propositions !
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Well there are two real world options that seem to fit the bill.
* Tranquilizer darts. There's no reason a tranquilizer round couldn't be inserted into a .45 shell. This comes with a lot more force than a tranquilizer gun would normally have so you could certainly *accidentally* cause lethal damage with it. The idea of a six-shooter with tranq rounds is kinda awesome actually...
* Tasers. Tasers would be a little different. Standard tasers shoot a projectile but it is connected to the "gun" you are holding by wires, the charge is actually held there rather than in the projectile. Conceiving a wireless taser round isn't too tough though. I can see a spring loaded round exiting the shell and barrel sprouting leads out of the front. The only difficult part is going to be getting enough charge stored in a small shell...some sort of advanced battery technology that could unload its charge all at once. This option is a bit less practical than the tranq gun. Again putting this charge into a shell gives it a lot more force and could kill someone, not to mention that even our tasers today can kill if the leads connect to certain parts of the body or if the target has pre-existing health issues.
Standard tasers seem to range (from a cursory glance of google search results) from around 25,000 to 50,000 volts. Most consumer batteries top out at around 10 volts...so there is some work to be done there...but I suppose you could just make a gun big enough to hold the battery from a taser...
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The type of characters you are describing do not seem likely to be drawn to non-lethal weapons.
I would propose an alternate approach. Perhaps you can use the "various intelligent species you can encounter in this universe" to your advantage. It would be very difficult to design a non-lethal gun that was perfectly effective against all variations. It would be very likely, however, to design a gun to be very lethal to a particular race but not another. You may be able to use this to your advantage. Leaning on the failings of the technology might seem more realistic than a perfect piece of technology in a world of "Grease, Rustle, and Iron".
As an example: your protagonists are both bipedal humanoid creatures, but one is made of rock and the other is made of a firm jelly (or whatever). When the rock guy shoots the jelly guy with a gun that would utterly destroy another rock guy, it merely incapacitates him due to the differences in their biology.
It would be cumbersome to carry an entire arsenal around, for all of the various alien races, so you could have your characters carry the appropriate weapon for their species. The final advantage of this approach is that you can not only grant immunity whenever you want just by making the combatants slightly different races, you can also revoke it by providing one of them with the appropriate alien technology.
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**Glue guns, anyone?**
Granted, this may involve more handwavium than the other answers when it comes to paintballs that expand by a factor of, say, thirty, before congealing into a rigid, sturdy foam. Anyone hit is immobilized on account of either being stuck to the floor, or most of their joints being stuck together.
On the other hand, it doesn't have to pack in nearly as much variance when it comes to dealing with different anatomies - just aim for the center of mass if they're small enough to miss their legs. The reactions of the "bullet's" innards with the air will do the rest on impact.
Further considerations - the foam, per your requirements, should degrade over the course of a few minutes to a few hours (likely due to a slower reaction with a different atmospheric element), and may or may not be fatal if you manage to shoot someone in their oxygen-intake organs; death by suffocation is decidedly unpleasant, but the remedy is self-evident.
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Doesn't technically answer the question, but you could use increased survival technology instead, and still use the same weaponry. People could be injected with nanobots which regenerate them after taking bodily harm. Medicine could be sufficiently advanced that people could be revived after being dead for hours. Some races could just be plain resilient.
This way, you could use standard lethal weaponry which will incapacitate people (in the sense that they cannot operate until the nanobots finish regenerating them, or until their friends/lackeys retrieve the body and resuscitate them, or whatever the case may be). Also, you can come up with realistic ways for lethal combat to occur - bodies could be burnt to prevent resuscitation, EMPs could be used to prevent nanobot regeneration, and the resilient race could be weak to \*blank\* (much like DnD trolls are weak to fire).
If lethality against wildlife is not acceptable, perhaps the wildlife could be naturally tough, or an escaped experiment dominated the local ecosystem, or something hippies did to save the space whales works quite well.
If nothing else, this could be used in conjunction with other solutions which may not work for other races (robots might get fried by the de facto weapon which is tasers, but they they have fuses to protect memory and can be repaired later!)
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The problem, as I understand it, is that contemporary nonlethal weaponry would work except it wouldn't account for a wide range of species as targets. The same round fired at small and large creatures may kill one while hardly affecting the other.
Here is my solution, which requires a little futuristic technology: Your weapon is a dart gun with some amount of an tranquilizer (like thiopentone, as suggested by @MontyWild) capable of incapacitating even the largest targets. The dart is designed to penetrate into the muscle tissue of the target, and then emits a high-pitched ping. A microphone on the dart records the echo through the blood stream and uses the data to estimate the size of the target and release an appropriate amount of tranquilizer.
This is already theoretically possible, but the challenge here is building a small enough dart in a cheap enough way. Speed is another factor. Any tranquilizer will take a short time to take effect, but that may be enough time for the opponent to return fire.
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I'll second James's taser bullet idea. For the nonlethal round you're looking for, working across a large variety of lifeforms, but which share our basic structure, you've got to disrupt the nervous system to get a reliable stun.
I've got a few ideas to build on it:
Tech would have to be high enough to carry a power source on board the bullet. If it can fit that, it can also fit some sensors, like an acelerometer. An acelerometer can handle two things:
1. Senses the impact, and shoots in thin, barbed spikes into the target. The spikes rather aggressively fasten the bullet to the body and also deliver the shock. It also gives you the small, but non-lethal wound you're looking for.
2. The acelerometer then also controls the shock delivery. It can continue to deliver the shock as long as the target is still moving. So, a flimsy critter would go down quick, and then the T-bullet stops zapping them so it doesn't risk lethality; the charging rhino it keeps zapping as it gets closer... closer... oh crap! closer... until finally down. Potentially, it can also modulate the voltage to get to a level needed to stop the creature in question. This gives you some interesting add-on possibilities: you could walk away, and the T-bullet would continue to keep the target down as long as its power held out. Every time they woke up and moved, it'd zap them again. :-D Also, some quick thinking, but tough opponent could avoid getting knocked out by freezing. And if you're not there to see ('cause you shot and ran for your atmo-skipper, you yellow-bellied dog), they could slowly move to pull it off (it would have to allow some movement, else breathing would trigger it).
A problem with all this is that a basic google search says a taser doesn't/can't knock you out -- it just incapacitates by disrupting the nervous signals. And hurting like a mofo. Some people say it could knock you out if you ramped the power up enough on it. So, maybe it's just refined enough in your world to knock out; or maybe awake and incapacitated is enough for you?
Another idea:
Same as above, but not a taser. Once the bullet attaches (yay spikes!) it sends out ~~monofilament~~ really thin so you have enough but not so thin it'll cut prehensile tendrils and wraps the target up.
Hey, why not have both kinds? Always fun to have to pick the right ammo.
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"Grease, Rust, and Iron" is the hardest part of this question - something about tasers and tranquilizers just doesn't give that hard and basic flavor of metal, gunpowder, and grease.
Instead, we're going to use a bullet, similar to today. It won't be designed for pure penetration, but rather it will be designed to deliver its payload far enough into the target for it to safely incapacitate them. It should be a bit on the smaller side in terms of power in comparison to today's guns, but different weapons and ammunition can still be sized appropriately to anticipated targets.
One possibility for "the payload" is that, on impact, the bullet compresses (*this is a sci-fi answer, likely not realistic*), causing materials at the center of the bullet to begin pulsing electricity which stuns the target for whatever length of time you deem fit - the charge only lasts so long and then they have a *hopefully* minor flesh wound.
* Shooting a bear with a weapon sized to incapacitate a person is going to require more shots, but could get the job done.
* Feasible to hit your target in a bad location, or to shoot them too many times, potentially causing major harm or death.
* Unfortunately, using a weapon sized for an elephant is probably going to kill a person - but you don't see personal protection in the form of elephant rifles too often, hopefully "nature" is not too massive and ferocious, or hopefully they brought the big guns with them but didn't take those out to shoot each other.
* If you're still looking for that excuse on why criminals, or semi-criminals, would carry non-lethal weapons - perhaps the charge within one of these bullets is capable of overcoming some kind of electromagnetic field or similar that police may use to deflect standard metal projectiles.
* "The payload" could differ from bullet to bullet, or you could just make up and decide a single way you'd like it to work. Another example could be a bullet which releases nanobots that spread throughout a target, duplicating itself through the nervous system until it is capable of controlling them.
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If there is a lot of handwaving going on, then a potential fit for this would be a stasis-gun.
This would work by firing a small packet of 'Slow-time' at your opponent, where 1 second real time = 1 hour of slow time.
Plenty of time to make your escape/shackle your enemy - and with zero ill effects from the weapon itself (barring environmental hazards that can be introduced to the scene).
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In author Neal Stephenson's latest novel [Seveneves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves), which is partly set in space stations/habitats, where firing guns is likely to have catastrophic consequences, weapons have been developed which fire small robots at your opponent.
The robots are designed to incapacitate, rather than kill: when they hit the target they will grab on, and then crawl around trying to cause them as much pain as possible, without trying to kill them (although you could easily program them to go for the jugular, literally, or to blind or something more serious like that).
The idea being that having a robot crawling through holes in your armor/clothes and biting/electrocuting/whatever you will tend to make you lose focus somewhat on attacking your original target, or whatever you were trying to do before you got shot.
One of the features is that they have a short range after which they will deploy little parachutes to slow them down, so that for example they won't keep going and smash a hole in the space habitat wall. They're also usually reusable.
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# Electricity
You could go with a piezoelectrical bullet. It would need to employ some really weird metamaterials, and release a needle on impact. The overall effect would be the same as a taser, with the positive charge being sprayed backwards with a nice corona effect.
The needle penetration would strongly depend on the victim's hide (either natural or artificial, e.g. a leather suit), and this would mean that a bullet would be either ineffective against a well-clothed opponent, or lethal against a less clothed one, unless we design *really* smart bullets - or guns.
# Sound
Actually, mostly mechanical vibrations propagating through the body **on contact**. Even if there *would* be a loud sound
Another possibility is that the bullet actually administers a mechanical shock (the "bang" is on impact, not on firing), infra- and super-sonic, similar to a flash-bang grenade and capable of stunning an opponent. It would be very dangerous if shot against the ears or eyes (deafness and blindness would be a given), less effective against an arm or a leg even if the limb would be semi-paralysed for a time, and in the right - or wrong - conditions it could deliver either a small entry wound, or anything from a haematoma to a deep tissue lesion with possible necrosis.
Gun-men might develop a characteristic trait called *livedo reticularis* due to repeated surface lesions, as well as long-term deafness.
Needless to say, the bigger the target, the less effective the weapon, and vice versa. Also, some targets might be naturally immune (or terribly vulnerable) to the standard shock pattern, requiring special bullets.
This kind of bullet would also be effective against some materials, but not others. "Shielding" would be impractical, as it would require wearing special dampening materials, but e.g. very thick felt coats would lessen the effect.
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I would suggest an [electrolaser](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser).
Each "bullet" would be a self-contained energy source to power the energy beam, and the gun itself would be a smart gun that scans the target to determine the amount of charge to send out.
Smaller bullets would not affect bigger targets, but you can get more per clip. Bigger bullets let you take down bigger targets, but at the cost of magazine capacity. Also, double-barrel weapons can be used to deliver twice as many "shots" to ensure takedown the target.
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How about a nano-net? The shell contains a very fine fiber material that spreads out and wraps up the target. The thing you want is to simply stop the opponent from moving. Regardless of the kind of metabolism and chemistry of the components making up the body, you simply go for the outward result and stop the limbs from moving, binding them in place.
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To make a 'conventional' style gun non lethal, lower velocities would be required with a change from metallic bullets to break/shatter on impact bullets.
1) Shotgun Style weapons loaded with rock-salt filled shells could potentially be non-lethal in majority of cases. May be easily homemade/recycled with blackpowder and rocksalt.
2) Pistol alternative, powder filled capsule with a hardened rear (to withstand explosive charge when firing) and shatter on impact shell (to dissipate power/powder), may have accuracy issues over longer ranges but short range pistol "6-shooter" duels would hurt on impact without the penetration to kill, powder could be an irritant / toxin that could incapacitate whomever it hit for short period.
3) Rifle alternative, this would be the most difficult type of weapon to come up with. Rifles usually have longer range uses to pistols / shotguns and so use higher velocity rounds. Rubber, Wax and Plastic could all be used, if going with the non-futuristic styled weapons, Rubber & Wax may be preferred?
<http://www.patriotheadquarters.com/5-non-lethal-ammo-types/>
◾Rubber bullets – Won’t penetrate the skin, but will leave nasty welts that will require medical attention.
◾Wax bullets – These could penetrate the skin at close range or if they strike a sensitive body part.
◾Plastic bullets – Used by police for riot control. Also used for target practice.
◾Electric bullets – Metal or rubber bullets that release an electrical charge when they hit a target, much like a Taser or other shock weapon.
◾Bean Bag Rounds – Designed to incapacitate the target and leave large welts but not penetrate the skin
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Star trek type stunt phasers? Phasers are particle beam weapons so in theory they can cause a wound. You'll have to reload them with new magazine to replenish the "charges" and the pop can be explain as the "bullet" breaking the sound barrier.
They can be described as lethal but prohibitively expensive (for a bunch of backwater world outlaws) since the charges are hard to come by on the frontier.
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Consider a nerve agent pellet that causes a partial epileptic seizure.
* nerve agents disrupt the nervous system. A partial epileptic seizure is caused by a disruption of the nervous system (brain).
* make the nerve agent be in the liquid form and require it to hit exposed skin. Breaking the skin could make it lethal. Exploding into an aerosol might make it deadly and risks collateral damage.
* a "lethal" round that just needs to hit the skin can be something like sarin.
* there are antidotes for lethal nerve agents.
* there are anti-epilepsy pills a person can be given to help end the partial seizure.
* of course, partial seizures just cause spacial disorientation, deja vu, confusion and makes the person unable to defend himself. Best case, the person quickly finds a safe place to sit and wait it out. Worst case, the person falls and hurts herself / himself.
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I agree with James, a tranquilliser gun or a Taser seem the closest real world options.
But the Tazer might be the best option, as you could adjust the voltage depending on the size of the target. It would be harder I think the adjust the amount of tranquilliser required to be non-lethal rather than use a dial to adjust the voltage.
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How about a weapon that projects a hologram or similar directly at the eyes causing severely disorienting hallucinations or distorting the surroundings so much that the target is incapable of fighting effectively? Or it could be the equivalent of pepper spray, some compound (or minute metal particles at high speed) that causes pain but isn't lethal. For the latter, another possibility would be the equivalent of the ol' shotgun full of rock salt. Small corrosive particles (salts, solid acids, lye, tiny metal barbs that dig in like quills) might be enough to make anyone stop what they are doing and head in the opposite direction, especially if a bunch of them penetrate about 1 mm into one's skin.
Another possibility might be a sticky net that expands (like a bolo?) as it flies from the weapon, and entangles the victim.
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That's possible to ionize the air by using a laser to make a path where the electricity can flow. Maybe that's possible to create a "beam" of electricity similar to what a tazer can generate to stunt an enemy at great distance. Better, you don't need an ammo.
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Bearing in mind the "grease, iron and rust" theme, I'll attempt to avoid any mention of lasers, tazers or loaded darts.
My answer here is reduced to suggesting a variation of an existing device which (if you live in the mainland US), is likely coming to a police station near you!
It is known as "The Alternative", and it is an add-on modification to the muzzle of a gun, making the first round fired (relatively) non-lethal.
It uses a bullet capture device which catches a live bullet fired from a gun. The first round is fired into it and together they make their way towards the intended target. It strikes with reduced concussive force spread over a larger area and is still very much dangerous... but considered less than lethal.
[Alternative Ballistics](http://www.alternativeballistics.com/)
Your imaginary weapon may yet be able to utilize this idea and employ a similar capability.
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How about a monofilament net launcher. Not to be confused with a monomolecular filament net launcher, which would cut the targets into chunks.
Each filament is very slender and super strong, maybe a weave of monomolecular filaments, that is just slightly too big around to cut. Alternately, you could make the filament out of handwavium.
The delivery mechanism would be via shotgun that carries barbed weights linked to the netting. In order to get proper spread use a short barrel and maybe adjust wadding and weight design to get a good spread. <http://wolfhillammo.com/12-gauge-exotic-ammo.aspx> has some rounds that kind of inspired this. The Bolo Rounds look particulary nasty.
Of course the powder charge would be fairly low and the range is not great, but this is something you could play with.
For longer range, you might consider some of the explosive rifle rounds that detonate after a pre-determined distance as a delivery mechanism for the net.
Potential lethality would be from possible suffocation, stragulation, or simply bad luck with shot placement.
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To elaborate a bit further: let's say there's a planet in which some higher power installed several giant "domes" where people live. Each of these domes, which are the size of a small city, contains a totally different primitive civilization, with different traditions and even languages. Each dome city is unaware of the others, and also unaware of the fact that they're inside a dome (they're kept inside via some high tech stuff that makes it a real life loop, so that's the entire land for them).
The 'higher power' occasionally sends people to these villages, where they present themselves as a different thing depending on the dome, and while down there they use all kinds of advanced technology to trick the villagers into thinking that they have (or are) supernatural entities (for example, in some domes they present themselves as your average fantasy saga wizards, while in other dome they are seen by the villagers as ghosts).
In order to keep developing this world I have to come up with a reason for this weird setup. The outside of the domes is habitable but barren, and the 'higher power' people usually come down from space to carry out missions inside a dome.
I have one possible explanation for this setup and the meaning of the missions, but I have some issues with it, that's why I wanted to get some more alternatives before choosing a final one.
**My justification:**
>
> The higher power is actually a group of sociologists that try to replicate different types of civilizations and they send enforcers to apply some type of input to the civilization, measure the output and try to model them / predict behaviors.
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A problem I see with this idea, besides it being too close to far fetched for my taste, is that at some point the domes would be 'unusable' from a sociological perspective, as the 'enforcers' can push the people in it too far and destroy their delicate balance as a civilization. Why would an advanced civilization go through that effort to ultimately have the civ destroyed if one of their hypothesis happens to fail in a big way?
Answers can be either new and totally different from mine, or to elaborate/give more support to my justification.
**EDIT:** Thanks to all of you for your answers! Each one helped in a different way. I choose as answer the one that made me think the most about my justification and expand it in a believable way.
[Answer]
## The humans are test subjects.
The higher power are aliens trying to understand the capabilities of the human race. Their motives are either pure research or something hostile such as preparing for a fight, and they have no empathy for the individuals in the domes. The aliens' society is very long-lived, so accidentally destroying a human civilisation now and then is no big deal to them - they simply re-decorate the dome, wipe the memories of the few survivors and use them to start a new experiment. Some of the researchers might even have friendly competitions to see who can make the weirdest social structure last the millennium.
[Answer]
**Rescued.**
I am reminded of the Bottle City of Kandor.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IgLl6.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandor_(comics)>
>
> Kandor (commonly known as the Bottle City of Kandor)[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IgLl6.jpg) is a fictional
> city spared from the doomed world of Krypton in DC Comics' Superman
> titles. Before Krypton exploded, the futuristic city was captured by
> the supervillain Brainiac, miniaturized by his shrinking ray and
> placed inside a glass bell jar.
>
>
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So too your domes. Each dome contains a people who are the last of their kind, spirited away to safety before the cataclysm that destroyed the rest of their people.
I like the idea that the would-be wizard and demigod pretender entities who mess with the dome city people are not the same entities who rescue populations and built the dome cities. The would-be wizards and ghosts actually do not know much about the rescuers. Sometimes they worry those entities will show up and get angry at them if they figure out what is up. But so far so good! The wizards and demigod pretenders live in the moment.
[Answer]
It's a zoo. An alien race has been capturing humans from different cultures, for hundreds of thousands of years, and the domes are their cages, a recreation of the exact ecology, weather, air quality, etc of their particular time.
It isn't an experiment, any more than our own zoos are. The aliens are intelligent, and naturally curious, and they know that these cultures will change and go extinct if not preserved. So they wait for the peak of some culture, the height of the Roman Empire, and capture some humans and recreate it. Reproduction and all.
The "visitations" are for guidance, and preventing the culture from changing. They don't want Rome to crash and burn, just like we don't want our zoo gorillas to go to war over territory. But they are smart enough to correct the stray thinkers early; cause them to change their mind, or die in a mysterious accident or from a disease that culture cannot address, etc.
Each little culture is a zoo exhibit; the alien visitors can don an avatar and walk amongst the people as one of them, and experience the culture as one of them. It's an entertainment, you can **be** one of the apes in the exhibit, on the hunt!
or if you are a fan of barbarism, you can **be** a Roman Gladiator, fighting and dying in the Colosseum! (Just your synthetic avatar dies, like in a video game, but it is still great fun.)
[Answer]
## [Welcome to Alpha Complex!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game))
Friend Computer *rescued* the last remnants of Humanity from the impending nuclear war and communist mutants that roam the wasteland! Nobody would leave the safety of Alpha Complex under the benevolent leadership of Friend Computer! After all, there is nothing out there but wasteland! Don't forget to turn in Commie-Mutant-Traitors you encounter and remember: Happiness is Mandatory!
...
Of course, nobody in Alpha Complex knows that the world out there is not burnt rock and sand, but a striving ecosystem... they all hunker down in the bunker and believe what Friend Computer tells them. They're also all Mutants, members in treasonous secret societies and technically the whole system is pretty communistic... Oh, and Friend Computer is totally borked and mad, resorting to killing and cloning his troubleshooter so the society stays stable and backstabbing.
[Answer]
**Go with part of the plot from Independence Day 2**: Terrible movie but .... there is a xenophobic alien race (or their fleets of robotic hunter killers) that is fighting a continual war of extinction against any new races it finds developing in *'its'* galaxy. Queue another advanced alien race or perhaps coalition of races that is fighting this enemy.
At the same time the opposing culture has a side mission which is to preserve as many primitive, developing cultures in the path of the enemy as they can. However as much as the other race/s might like to they simply don't have the military resources needed to permanently guard and defend every inhabited solar system they find. (They have to defend their own planets to have a chance of winning and a few guard ships won't cut it. All that does is 'tag' such a system as a potential target of interest, eventually leading the enemy to an attack in force which usually produces worse outcomes than not trying to defend it at all!)
So long ago the decision is made to kidnap representative sample populations from such worlds and trans locate them, their cultures & ecologies to a protected refuge world. (No 'digitizing' this time, instead physical translocation.)
The idea is that in the event their home worlds are found and possibly glassed the aliens will be able to reintroduce them later, either to their home worlds or to one with similar environmental conditions. But unfortunately for the plan to work there can be no cross cultural or biological contamination so the aliens appear as 'Gods' when necessary to the inhabitants of the domes, appearing in the form of unique 'deities' matched to best suit the culture of each dome and they never allow the inhabitants of any dome to discover the existence of the others.
[Answer]
Arthur C. Clarke used the idea of gigantic domed cities in The City and The Stars, but his did not hold primitives. Man had reached an interstellar empire then lost it, the survivors turned inward, rejecting the external world and set themselves in a post-scarcity paradise. Even going so far as to breed themselves to be incredibly afraid of the outside world.
[Answer]
## The dome is for their physical and psychological protection for living on a "destroyed" Earth
The Nintendo GameCube game Custom Robo dealt with a similar premise. Putting the story points in spoilers just in case!
>
> The entire day-to-day life of the game up to the finale takes place inside a typical modern-ish city. None of the average citizens are aware that there is anything unusual about their lives. At the beginning of the finale chapter, a high-ranking government agent asks you if the world is round or flat? Intuitively, the player answers that the world is round (since the Earth is round and it's implied that this game takes place on Earth). Your companions respond by making fun of you since everyone learned in kindergarten that the world is flat. The government agent then reveals that everyone is living in a domed city and that the real world outside the dome is the remains of the destroyed Earth.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pKZED.png)
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>
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The purpose of the dome is twofold:
### It protects them from the harsh physical conditions of the outside world
The soil is not fertile and cannot grow crops. There are no animals to hunt. Water is scarce. Temperatures range in between both extremes. The dome is a safe, predictable place. You can grow crops and raise livestock there. With sufficiently advanced technology, you can control the weather. People will like to live there because it's a relatively comfortable place relative to the harsh conditions of the outside world.
### It protects them psychologically from horrors of knowing the "real world" was destroyed
What would happen if large swaths of the Earth were suddenly destroyed or otherwise uninhabitable? Mass panic, for one. People will probably start killing each other over food, water, and other resources. With no good means of travel through vast amounts of barren wastelands, all remaining societies are already isolated from all other societies. The dome offers a semblance of what normal life was before the calamity. It offers order and shields them from the uncomfortable truth that the world they once knew can never truly exist again. In the process of grieving, denial is often the first step. The dome embodies the state of denial for grieving over the lost Earth. The first generation to live in it will know they're in denial, but accept it because, while it's not the truth, it offers them some semblance of their life before. After a few generations, no one (except maybe high-ranking government officials) will know that there is an outside world at all. After all, there's never going to be a good reason to leave the dome. There's nothing out there as far as each dome knows.
## Applicability to your story
It could be possible the world knew that some world-ending calamity was coming and pre-emptively built several domes across the planet to ensure the continuity of the survivors. They didn't have the resources to evacuate the entire planet and take them off-world so the domes were the best they could do with the time at hand. They planned on coming back to eventually evacuate the domes, but saw they had each evolved into their own societies in the time they were gone (interstellar travel does take a long time). Seeing that the people fared better in the domes than was expected, the dome societies were no longer considered to be in existential danger. This kind of novel situation in humanity is ripe for (morally questionable) research. Because they are self-sufficient inside the dome some group of sociologists want to study these novel societies while another group argues that the right thing to do is reunite them with the rest of the human race. They could end up reaching some sort of compromise where they study the domed societies, but as soon as the data set becomes too polluted through the sociologists outside interference to be of any further scientific value, they could end the experiment and reunite them off-world with the rest of humanity.
[Answer]
# Hazardous Materials - Proceed with Caution:
Your world contains recreated primitive cultures of a species or multiple species that devastated the galaxy. But wiping out an entire species of sentient life is something your sociologists struggle with. So remnants of the species are preserved here to be studied.
If the species is deemed to have traits that make it possible for the species to function with others, they may eventually be given a home world in which to rebuild in a healthier direction. If they are irredeemable, then the sociologists have some hard choices to make...
[Answer]
## If we had it all to do over again...
Long ago, Man was much greater: master of the land, the air, the sea. Master of physics, chemistry, biology, and more. Indeed, it seemed there was nothing Man could not conquer -- except his own avarice, which only grew more voracious with each triumph. And so it was that Man, lord of nearly all things, faced not only extinction, but the permanent end of all life on his home planet.
Contrary to the easy, poetic, and *self-serving* musings of many, this was not an inevitability of Man's "essential nature," but a consequence of certain contingent cultural ideas that had proven extremely contagious and impossible to control or eradicate once they had taken root. It was almost a kind of mental virus that took root in the minds of Men, from which comfortable seat it encouraged each of them to search within themselves and *find* vices that could be nourished.
And so it was that ruin became the end toward which all Men rushed, and not even the Men who sat atop it could escape. The species could not possibly be saved if the mental virus was preserved too. What was needed was a clean break -- and a clean *room*.
To that end a new generation was bred, raised in isolation and captivity. They were taught only the things that humans knew at the dawn of recorded history. Not even modern languages, as a hedge against Sapir-Whorf and also as protection from contamination by the doomed modern culture.
To that end the Domes were built, as essential shelters against the wrecked Earth, far away from each other and with no communication between them. Compartmentalization as protection against flaws in the new protective ignorance.
The last of the great Men died as casualties of the suicide pact their greed had fashioned from Man's much-vaunted potential, taking their warped and dysfunctional ideas with them, and leaving only the domed pocket civilizations behind.
This is how the desolate Earth came to have Domes filled with primitives, as it has now stood for many hundreds of generations.
It's impossible to say whether the "higher power" was drawn to Earth by this convenient state of affairs, or merely stumbled fortuitously upon it.
[Answer]
#### You flee from a superstition to be trapped in another superstition
Each dome hold a slave population producing something for the higher power. A lot of people think in a lot of different ways, it is difficult to trap them in a single superstition and keep all of them under control. But the higher power carefully observe any individual, they try to understand their attitude and their weaknesses and eventually they will find out for what kind of superstition thet are likely to fall.
Then it will be just matter of time, all those who grow sceptic of the place they live in sooner or later will try and find a way to escape. A well placed portal will let them escape to another dome and if it doesn't work they'll be able to "escape" again, but in another dome, they will not be able to escape the bigger trap.
[Answer]
This reminds me of part of the plot for The Starlost, a 1973 Canadian TV show created by Harlan Ellison. From Wikipedia - "The show's setting is a huge generational colony spacecraft called Earthship Ark, which has gone off course. Many of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware, however, that they are aboard a ship." The various domes on the ship have different cultures, as I recall, like they had just forgotten the ship and in their isolation, diverged over time. Perhaps a similar pattern of isolation with visit by a ship's crew or caretakers would be a good back story.
[Answer]
## It is the ultimate tourist experience
Currently on earth there are very expensive tours who will take you to try to make 'first contact' with a people who have never been in contact with contemporary 'civilisation'.
Each dome on the planet is an extension of this concept. At the most ridiculous, the company has been operating for thousands of years, seeding pre-contact civilisations, for each of which a future Jess Bezos/Elon Musk will be the first outside person in a hundred generations to establish contact with. Cheaper tours will offer second / third etc. contacts.
It's a disgusting, abusive manipulation of societies for the benefit the super-rich.
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[Question]
[
What are the requirements for such an endeavour? I am making a novel where the protagonist is reincarnated into a medieval society. His plan is to push forward technology into the modern age. He starts out as an Earl by the way
[Answer]
I made a slightly snarky comment earlier on the question, but I decided it deserves a more complete answer. You aren’t just wanting the transistor. You want the tech that enabled it. The problem is that the transistor is useless without a lot of other techs around it. For “radio and computer”, you need a hell of a lot. You need mining tech, which requires advances in architecture to build tunnels deep. You need smithing. You need gears. You need an understanding on light to build a monitor. You need math advanced enough to break down a frequency wave. You need power generation. And so on. The radio, specifically, was nearly simultaneously invented independently in many spots around the world because it was the next obvious tech after everything else that came before it.
In David Weber’s Safehold series, he “builds a transistor in a medieval setting” by taking 9 novels to build modern electronics up through every tech needed along the way. Takes about a century of in-book time.
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold>
Even something far simpler isn’t easy... look at William Gibson’s “The Difference Engine”.
My point is that building a transistor is in theory easy with materials, but practically impossible without industrial setting to give you the tools, math, electrical generation, and motivation to build it. It isn’t plausible unless you upend your medieval setting OR embed your medevial setting inside an industrial society, like a renaissance festival scenario.
[Answer]
**Thinking too far Ahead**
You are basically trying to invent a better flashlight battery before light bulbs were invented. Look into early wireless telegraph transmitters.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BFFIG.gif)
For a power source utilize a simple wet-cell voltaic pile, a primitive sort of battery. Its just zinc, copper, and salt water soaked felt disks piled up in alternating order. It would produce enough electricity to power a primitive spark-gap transmitter.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IAUNs.jpg)
You will need alternating current instead of the direct current from a voltaic pile, so an inverter is needed. This is how simple a primitive inverter is.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5zrE5.png)
For a transmitter You'd use a very large voltaic pile and a spark gap transmitter. It basically produces a very large band radio pulse every time an electrical ark of alternating current is jumped between two contacts which are attached to an antenna. It cannot transmit voices or audio, it simply is either transmitting or not, which can be used for wireless transmission of Morse code.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaIZ4.png)
Boom, you now have people transmitting wireless Morse code 1000 years ahead of schedule and all you need is copper, zinc, saltwater, and wood.
[Answer]
I think rather than transistors, you're looking for a mechanical nand gate. There's a related question [here](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/71948/166377). [Nand gates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_gate) are a logic gate that allows you to build complete computing systems, including adders and memory.
Combine these mechanical gates with some sort of mechanical clock (water wheel?) and you've got the capability to perform real computing.
[Answer]
Although not a direct answer to your question, you might want to check out "[Connections](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588)" by James Burke. It's a documentary on the history of science and technology connecting the beginnings of science and technology to what was the "modern" world when it was produced in 1978. Key points to the series surround the connections between discoveries and developments and how one leads to or depends on another.
More directly in answer to your question:
As already stated in other answers, a transistor by itself is useless; you need all sorts of other things to build functional circuits, a source of good quality electrical power (stable voltage/frequency and sufficient current capacity), all sorts of theory of operation of electricity, electrical and electronic components.
You need all sorts of "modern" materials - plastics, ceramics, glass and specific metal alloys free of impurities. Depending on the type of transistor, you may need germanium (how do you identify the ore and extract the desired metal?) or silicon (pure, properly crystalized) and then you need the facilities to properly "dope" them with the correct type and amount of dopant. And then, how do you package and test the result?
Basically, you need to walk the medieval world through all the stages of science and technology that connects us to those times, pretty much in that order. I assume by medieval you mean iron age with the ability to make some steel (sword making). That means improved steelmaking, taking alchemy into modern chemistry - with the ability to isolate many if not most of the elements on the periodic table, developing math to include calculus, working with basic electricity, building steam engines and using them to power electric generators, making precision tools and instruments, building tube-based circuits first in order to make the instruments needed to measure what your semiconductors are doing.
I've surely left out countless intermediate (and essential) steps, but I hope it illustrates the point.
[Answer]
You can make [mechanical logic gates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X_Ft4YR_wU). No? You want electric? Ok...
Considering that you say the protagonist is an Earl, I would place the history around the year 1000, taking as reference the [Earls of Lade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earls_of_Lade). With that in mind...
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## Energy Source
We have the [Baghdad Battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery) which can be made to work as a galvanic battery (even if they weren't used like that, we know that works and that technology to make them is very old). In addition, the construction of a Voltaic Pile (which TCAT117 also mentions) is simple, if you know what you are doing. If it were not because of Luigi Galvani's discoveries, the motivation for Volta to attempt to build his Pile would not be there.
As you probably know, building coils and electromagnet is simple too. As long, as you have copper wires and iron rods. Casting iron is old technology for a medieval setting. The ancient knew copper, and the technology to create chain mails - which exist since the fourth or fifth century - can be adapted to create copper wires.
Furthermore, [Theophrastus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophrastus) was already aware of magnetite, its attractive power, and where to mine it. If you have coils and permanent magnets, you can make a generator.
Note: With the coils you would build [transformers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer), if you need them.
For making the generator move...
* Animal Traction.
* Steam engine [Aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile).
* [Water Wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_wheel#History).
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## Computer
Creating springs in our world would require a few more centuries, however, if the protagonist spend some time developing metallurgy - perhaps with the help of a blacksmith - they should be viable. Once you have them, you can build [relays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay).
While, relays are not full-blown transistors, they are electronic switches, and you can create logic gates out of them.
There is another thing you need to create a computer: a clock. At the time clock work was not fully developed. Gears already existed (Aristotle gave us the earlier description, there is the [Antikythera mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism), and there are mold for bronze Gears found in China dated to early [Jin dinasty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_dynasty_(265%E2%80%93420))), and if you know how pendulums work, you can create a device that opens and close a circuit creating rhythmic electrical pulses... which will serve as clock for a rudimentary computer.
Note: If you think a single person can’t design a working primitive computer… go check out [Building a Modern Computer from First Principles](http://nand2tetris.org/).
Ah, for the memory you can use the principle of the relays and use electromagnets to flip circuits. Do not build flip flop out of relays (I do not know if that would work in practice, but if it does, it is very inefficient), all you need is a lever that would rest to one side or the other closing a different circuit in each case, and that you can move it with electromagnets.
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The technology to make electric lamps at the time would be too inneficient (stick with fossil fuels, and flamable oils, sorry). But you can use electromagnets move objects to serve as indicators. In fact, your memory is rather large; you could label some levers and read it directly.
It is also possible to open and close valves. This will be useful if you want to supply or cut the flow of water.
I suppose a rudimentary step motor is possible too, for instance using a [cam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam) (addendum: a lever should work too) and electromagnets to make it turn back and forth, and then transmit the movement via a [ratchet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_(device)). You could use that step motor to turn a gear. For example for a numeric display, or for moving another machine or you could even build a mechanical [ALU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_logic_unit).
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## Radio
You can build electromagnetic pulse transmitters and receptors as [TCAT117 describe them](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/112675/16729).
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## Final Note
I assumed year 1000. However, for the 13th century the technology to make wires and springs would be there. If use that for your setting, then there is no need to spend extra time developing stuff.
[Answer]
It is not simply a matter of inventing the transistor. You must ask, "What will power it?"
If you can refine copper to make wire, have magnetite and, lacquer for insulation then you can get most of the way to repeating the work of Tesla using those things and wood. (edit: and glass for insulators)
This will get you as far as motors, generators, distributed electricity and radio - although I am sure the occasional wooden electric motor may catch fire.
This will launch the industrial age - without petroleum distillates.
To create the literal transistor, you need to refine semi-conductors like silicone, germanium, etc. but, I have often wondered after looking at the [foxhole radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio) (the diagram is more explanatory than anything else on that page) if some rudimentary transistor would not be possible using a similar method used to create the diode and providing a charge to overcome the bias (if that would work?).
[Answer]
As others have mentioned, a transistor isn't much use without the context surrounding it. Aside from the physical problems (precision engineering, proper materials), there's also an issue of purpose. If you're not doing complex math or managing large numbers of things (people, dollars, livestock, etc), then a transistor won't necessarily accomplish much.
Maybe consider a [Water computer](http://inquisition.ca/en/info/artic/ordineau.htm)? I'm not sure if one has ever been made, but the principles of transistors can be applied to fluid systems as well, with a few tweaks. As the article says, though, this would work on the order of millihertz, not megahertz, and could very well be slower than human calculation. It's also only useful for mathematics - no way to use it in a radio, for instance.
One possible benefit is the ability to perform algorithms to remote places without training mathematicians. A skilled craftsman could create the computer and the locals could do routine maintenance, with neither understanding how the system actually works. A book of designs could describe multiple requirements, so an algorithm would only need to be designed a single time before being deployed around the kingdom. If you needed to calculate something like "optimal flexibility of a catapult with length X", locals could use the computer's results without needing to learn the math behind it.
That said, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example where on-the-fly computation would be a better than a simple table of numbers, and it's almost certainly more efficient to simply grab a bunch of peasant kids and teach them math over a decade.
[Answer]
I noticed that a lot of people think you need high accuracy tools to build a transistor, you dont, not if you are building a type of transistor that barely saw the light of day.
The first transistors made, were designed to replace the vacuum tube, and were huge, crude, inefficient, and ugly. But much better then vacuum tubes.
You could make one by hand using blacksmithing tools, if you know what materials to use. The hard part is you would need electricity, advances in material sciences and chemical engineering, in order to understand how make these crude transistors.
But the hardest part of all? Designing the low level instruction set for your first 100 square meter computer would be a nightmare for one person to attempt. (Eniac was the brain child of two geniuses and a team of scientists)
Edit:
I think some think I an referring to modern nanometer transistors made in integrated circuits and that i am claiming they are "easy" to make. I am not, as even with our practically pure silicon and germanium their are still tons of gates that fail due to impurity, hence why cpu companies sell cups that are practically identical to each other as different chips because they had to disable certain cores, due to gate failures.
But large centimeter size transistors are makeable by people in their backyard. You just need the right cookbook, a lot of time, and enough money to pay for your many, many failed attempts.
This is true of a lot chemistry though, because it's the recipe that is hard to discover, one the recipe is written down it becomes simple, hence why it took a genius to realize nitro glycerine could be stabilized by mixing with powdered shell or clay and some type of sorbent, but anyone who can read can easily figure out how to do it today.
[Answer]
Building semiconductors would be pretty impossible in the era you have described.
There are a few different sorts of computers that are simple mechanical devices.
<https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/871405126/turing-tumble-gaming-on-a-mechanical-computer>
I had one of the following computers. It was programed by moving the position of straws. You used a shuttle action to make it work.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I> and <https://boingboing.net/2006/02/21/mechanical-computer.html>
Look here
<https://www.google.com/search?q=homemade+mechanical+computer&newwindow=1&client=opera&sa=X&biw=1098&bih=546&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=FWSssgxA0NJkRM%253A%252CCzcCkGNbCgdh-M%252C_&usg=__6zxnuLtlTQeP4HMHoV3fyll76b0%3D&ved=0ahUKEwjageL9gJbbAhWOt1MKHYxQCsYQ9QEIMzAC#imgrc=FWSssgxA0NJkRM>:
You may also perform logic with relays if you want it to be electric. Steam power could flip flop valves.
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[Question]
[
I'm going to jump straight into a very small description of the world my first novel-thing is build around.
It's an Earth-like planet orbiting a binary star. Climate is slightly more extreme than on Earth (think colder winters, hotter summers) and the ~800 million inhabitants adapted quite well to it.
Technology is on a late-medieval level, compare it to ~1400-1425.
Magic IS a thing on this planet. Everybody can learn to use it to the same extent, though it requires a lot of studying and memorizing runes.
The strongest incantation documented was cast by a famous scholar almost a thousand years ago and since then, people came close, but could never reach that level. What was the incantation? Well.. he summoned an orb of fire the size of what we on Earth know as a Hippopotamus. That's it. Magic can levitate small objects, too, but its nothing too frightening or too dangerous at any time.
>
> My "Villain", the Protagonist, manufactured with some aspects of [Peter's Evil Overlord List](http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html) in mind, can summon a fireball the size of a Chihuaha. It takes about 8 hours to prepare and exhausts him. So he does not use it. At all.
>
>
> He'd prefer something that works efficently with the technology that's available to him. Something that is relatively cheap to produce and doesn't require any hand-wavium to construct.
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What for? To destroy the main fort of the opposing forces. Or at least damage it beyond repair. There's just one tiny problem: It's mostly made of Iron and Stone.
* The fort stretches over an area of about 8km² and is surrounded entirely by walls that reach heights of 12m.
* The walls are made of stone and have a small core structure made of iron inside of them (so: stone-iron-stone, 6m-2m-6m).
* The buildings are mostly build with the same principle in mind. Build a small relatively small core of iron and "coat" it with stone.
* There are roughly 4.000 men living in this fort, all armed with melee- and ranged weaponry.
* The fort NEEDS to be destroyed, as it blocks a path to the Evil Overlords destination with no other way around it. Preferably in a matter of a couple years or less.
That should be enough (hopefully non-confusing) information. So the core question:
>
> **What weapon could my Evil Overlord build and use against this fort with the technology he has available, without using any hand-wavium and without magic?**
>
>
>
[Answer]
You could use immense, intense heat as was used against the [vitrified forts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort)
This image shows stones from one such fort. It looks like an igneous rock because of the bubbles, but this is in the UK. That rock partially melted.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ihg0o.jpg)
from [archhighland.org.uk](http://archhighland.org.uk/userfiles/image/sites/big/knockfarril%20vitrified%202.jpg)
A fort with an iron core in the wall would be extra susceptible to an intense heat attack. Once it gets hot enough the iron itself will burn. When that starts there is no stopping it. This was demonstrated most spectacularly in the 9/11 attacks. It is the reason insulation is sprayed on steel beams.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7PZZm.jpg)
from <http://www.sciremediation.com/Web%20Pages/Fireproofing.htm>
How did the ancients vitrify the forts? It is an open question and a very interesting one. The vitrified forts are real and no-one knows how (or why!) they did it. In the book [Merlin's Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin%27s_Ring) it was an attack by Atlantean swanships on their rebellious colonies.
On reading up I found this metalsmith who was mad that 911 conspiracy theorist were asserting that steel doesn't burn and so made a video.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA>
One would not think you could burn down an iron and steel wall but a smith would know. You can have the idea come from your blacksmith. You could do it with a big pile of coal or charcoal against the wall. You could have a tunnel underneath the pile leading a short distance away - the heat of the fire would pull air up thru the tunnel (strongly!) and that fire would burn really hot. The defenders would not be able to get near it. Once it was hot enough to ignite the iron inside the wall that would propagate and the whole wall would go from the inside out. It would glow.
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## Sappers and... pigs
Just (well, it's not that easy, but still the easiest way IMO) dig tunnels under your walls, put a few dozen oiled fat pigs, set them on fire and watch the wall crumble under its own weight after the prolonged intense heat weakened the structure !
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_thermal_weapons#Animal_renderings_and_parts>
>
> At the 1215 siege of Rochester Castle, King John ordered that fat from 40 pigs be used to set fire to the mines beneath the keep, which caused it to collapse, a cheap and effective technique in place of the more complicated mixture of sulfur, tallow, gum, pitch and quicksilver he had used in France the previous year.[81] Animal fat was not uncommon as an accelerant; in the 13th century French sortie-parties would often be equipped with animal fat, straw and flax to use as fuel when setting fires amongst enemy siege engines.
>
>
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Sorry, but this is not a medieval fortress. It's too damned big and it takes too much iron.
Assume for the moment that it is circular. Then it has a diameter of about 3 km. Total wall length is 10 km. With an iron core 2 meters thick and 10 meters high, it uses 200,000 cubic meters of iron. or about 1.6 million tons. Given early iron production techniques, this is simply not feasible. It's hard to be precise, but by 1500 (end of the medieval period), total iron production for all of Europe was on the order of 60,000 tons, so the fortress represents total European production for 27 years - all of cased in stone and unusable for tools or weapons.
Furthermore, if the core is to be any good, it must be formed into a solid structure. Just piling a bunch of iron plates or ingots between 2 stone walls will provide no more protection than a bunch of rocks. This, in turn, is beyond the capabilities of any medieval technology.
And speaking of weapons, the existence this much iron (and it must be cheap to use so much) suggests that iron (and steel) must be widespread, and there's no way steel cannon are not in common use. Once you've got these bad boys running around, high walls are simply irrelevant - unless you can make your impossible iron structure. Even so, the stone facing is a waste of time - it will fall off in sheets as soon as it comes under concentrated fire, exposing the iron core.
So, sorry to be a spoilsport, but your fortress is itself inconsistent with medieval technology, so limiting the attackers to medieval technology makes no sense.
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## Acid
Midieval *chemistry*; though most often referred to as *alchemy*, was already capable of producing [several strong acids.](https://www.thoughtco.com/alchemy-in-the-middle-ages-1788253)
Put this in a container that breaks upon impact but doesn't react with the acid (glass containers) and watch how these acid filled container not just destroy, but dissolve the iron fortifications.
Raw materialistic damages aside, this weapon would be feared as the damage to soldiers and their armor would be substantial as well if they get doused in acid. So you're not only destroying the iron buildings, but it would break the morale of the soldiers as well when they see the buildings dissolve and their comrades get burned straight through their armor.
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## Fire and smoke...and animal carcasses
But you are not going to target the walls.
In warfare it is generally best to strike the softest target. It does the most damage to the enemy and causes the smallest loss in your own troops.
According to your question you are willing to wait years for the siege to be completed.
So what to do with the items I listed.
**Fire and smoke:** These two obviously go together. Lob oil canisters over the walls with catapults or trebuchets, target everything, the goal is lots of fire and smoke, not necessarily major damage to the fortress. After all, ***its a nice fortress*** a place an evil overlord may want to set up camp later.
With the fire and smoke you could potentially create the fortress version of a beach head on the walls by making the defenders scurry away from the fire and smoke.
**Carcasses:** If you are the patient type of evil overlord you can simply kill the defenders the slow and painful way (as opposed to the fast and painful way) by lobbing dead animal carcasses over the walls until they all, or most at least end up succumbing to disease...
If you go this route it probably makes sense to keep the fire around for cleanup...
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Thermal shock can be your friend! Okay, not totally sure how to make it work on a very large scale, but here is how you might generate a breech. This should be done in the dead of winter.
Start with general bombardment, you want to slough off as much of the stone facade as possible, exposing the iron underneath. You want the iron exposed down low, near the base of the wall.
Protect your minions however you deem practical. Have them approach the base of the wall and build as hot a fire as possible right at the joint of stone and iron. Keep the fire going as long as you can and if possible, get the iron as close to red hot as possible. In the mean time have your forces build a trebuchet and a ballista. Also bring in some method to pump lots and lots of cold water. Get heavy iron arrows for the ballistae and load the trebuchet with blocks of ice.
Fuel the fire first with wood, then with coal, if possible. Your goal is to get the joint between iron and stone glowing red. If you can get the iron that hot, it will begin interfering with the defenders efforts to keep you away from the wall. Keep this going for weeks if you can. Don't actually hit the wall with anything yet.
At the same time, send minions in small parties around to other points in the wall. Near Every joint, have them drive spikes into the stone and pull them out, then fill the resulting hole with water, and retreat. Then, under cover of darkness, get as much water flowing underneath the walls as possible, using sappers and the like. As long as this place isn't firmly on bedrock, you should have some springs nearby that can be diverted to weaken the walls at the foundation.
The defenders will be trying to figure out what the fire is for and will likely ignore a lot of the other activity, since it will be small parties who look like they are running up, banging on the wall and running away.
Since this is winter, the water in all of those little holes is going to freeze and start cracking the stone. If your minions do it right, the aggregate damage is going to severely destabilize the walls. A few shots with a trebuchet will shatter the remaining stone facade. Then when you hit the iron core of the wall, you might be able to create a spalling effect inside, killing the defenders right up against the wall with stone shards.
Now it's showtime for the main assault. With the iron glowing nicely, begin bombardment of the hot spot with cold water, 500 lb iron arrows from the ballistae, and huge chunks of ice. Make a big show of it. If you are lucky, the resulting thermal shock and repeated hammering of heavy objects will tear the iron away from the stone all along the joint.
Meanwhile, after the bombardment of the hot iron wall begins, roll up trebuchet to start hitting areas that you have been driving holes in the stone to let the ice weaken it. If your sappers did their job properly I would predict that you will get a breech in one of those spots faster than your big show. This will have been the aim all along. If you can figure out a way to get a fairly small hole all the way through the iron wall and get a lot of water flowing through it to the gap between iron and inner stone walls You can create a lot of damage that way. it would make your sappers job a lot easier
If the thermal shock works, then you get a neat story to tell and your legend becomes that much greater. If not, you still knock some walls down and then get where you need to go. This should only really take a few months to do. Also, you have a place to keep warm in the winter (hah)
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Your'e not going to put much of a dent in 2 metres of iron encased in rock. So go over it or under it, or normal siege stuff like attack the gate or lob some diseased corpses over it. Or all of the above.
The gate or gates is assumedly a weak point. And that's why it was a focus in many sieges. Ideally you smash through the gate or climb the walls or use spies to open it from within. You don't expend too many resources trying to bash a hole in the wall.
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## Infiltration
An unconquerable iron fort right on the path to your headquarters is bothersome when the enemy has it, but could be really useful if you had it. The thick iron walls of that fort would be incredibly hard to replicate. In fact, I'm pretty sure solid iron or steel structures of that size do not exist in our world now. So it would be a shame to destroy it.
**You have some options:**
**Traitors** - you could make people who inhabit it now come over to your cause. How you do it depends on what your cause is an who the inhabitants are. Once you get some of the high command to secretly support you, they can restructure the rest of the fort and come over to your cause in a relatively short time. If this is impossible, it still only takes a few people on the inside to open the gates and let you march right in.
Failing that you can still **starve them out, then move in.** Block access to their fort, and hit them with biological warfare. *Block* their food supply, *poison* their drinking water and try to *infect* them with diseases. Once there is nobody left in there who can resist your attack, get some ladders and go in.
Or you could **conquer** the fort through some conventional battle tactic.
If you absolutely have to destroy it, fire and/or undermining are your best bets.
But it would be a waste.
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## Powdered Combustibles
Fuel-air explosives are relatively cheap and easy to make, safe to transport, and have been known about for a very long time. (Look up grain silo explosions on youtube.)
A cup of finely powdered flour dispersed in the air is roughly as potent as half a stick of dynamite.
Flour's not the only option. In a medieval world powdered coal or charcoal would be a much better choice since it would be a lot cheaper than burning up everyone's winter food supply. Of course, if you've broken into the fort and are using *their* food supply, the concern goes away.
Delivering the explosive is a bit tricky in combat conditions. You have to get your finely-powdered combustible mixed with the proper amount of air. During Sherman's battle for Atlanta, flour from the local mill was used to blow up buildings, but those were strategic objectives well away from the active fighting. Modern fuel-air devices generally use liquid or gaseous combustibles sprayed from nozzles for reliability and ease of ignition, but building such a device at a medieval tech level would be a challenge.
Nevertheless, an enterprising artificer could probably come up with a way to throw a barrel of powdered charcoal from a catapult and have it burst open over the fort and disperse into a cloud. After that, you just need a way to ignite it before it dilutes enough to stop being explosive.
If you're planning to take the fort and then destroy it so it can't be re-occupied, then just transport the stuff in sacks. A bit of experimentation will let your men know how many sacks of charcoal to how many square feet of building are necessary to blow it off its foundations. Just powder it finely enough that you can shake it out of the sack and have it float in the air.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/227591/edit)
Let's say we have a teleporter, whose teleports obey conservation of momentum. I.e. if they are moving, and they teleport, then they will continue moving in the same direction. The have no hard range limit, but due to conservation of the earth's rotation will generally make it dangerous to carry out teleports over very long distances.
One day they get into the situation where they are constantly falling at terminal velocity, and are having to repeatedly teleport into the air to prevent themselves from splatting into the ground.
What methods could they use to escape this situation?
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If their range and precision allow, they can teleport on the *opposite* side of the Earth (the height will influence air pressure: teleport ten kilometers too far, and you'll find yourself in the stratosphere, and die of pressure shock, cold and/or oxygen starvation). This way, gravity itself will act as a brake.
Otherwise they could teleport horizontally around the Earth, provided they can do so at a high enough rate that the build-up of normal velocity does not nullify the effort. Their speed will remain the same, but its direction will slowly vary in respect to the surface.
Actually, since their velocity (with respect to the center of the Earth) is about 200 km/h vertically, and 1000 km/h horizontally due to rotation, teleporting to a place about 30 degrees rotation-ward will transform a part of those horizontal 1000 km/h into an upward component, partially negating the descent speed. It should be possible (height control is still paramount, because of pressure/oxygen) to find the best distance by trial and error.
Something like this happens in [Vernor Vinge's *The Witling*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witling), even if the people involved are inside a capsule that is being teleported.
*Update*: actually, the "teleporting to the opposite side of the planet" will not work. This is a plot point in Vinge's novel: people able to *reng* (teleport) air from the opposite side of the world can make people *here* experience the airspeed of the opposite side of the world – and use this *as a weapon*. Teleporting and suffering an air blast at Mach 3 will be instantly lethal. Possibly, even the drag acceleration will be enough to make the teleporter lose consciousness, at which point they'll naturally fall down to their death.
Failing this, they need to shed velocity in some way. There are no safe ways of doing so; maybe the least bad option is to teleport above a lake. A terminal velocity impact on water is survivable, if harmful, if one has time enough to prepare (you need to achieve a high, but regular, deceleration). Also, terminal velocity (around 200 km/h, equivalent to a fall from a height of about 450 m) can be *decreased* even substantially, e.g. if one can arrange one's garments in the form of a funnel. Only in Hollywood movies could someone have the presence of spirit *and speed* for doing this, but our transporter could do this in stages. Possibly, transporting themselves fifty meters higher as soon as they feel the impact could spread the damage in two "installments", so to speak.
A very deep snowy incline would also work (there are reports of people falling from kilometer-more heights over snow and surviving. [Vesna Vulovic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87) famously survived a fall of more than 10 km *after her airplane was destroyed by a bomb*).
# update: teleporting rotation-wards
**TL;DR: [it... could... work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4An1BrG2u_4)!!!**
I have run some Geogebra simulations. When teleporting from point B to point C, separated by an $\alpha$ angle on the rotation plane, the two velocity vectors $u$ horizontal (due to rotation) and $v$ (due to the initial fall) remain unchanged, but their orientation relative to the surface changes their "meaning". In the new position, the fall is reduced to vector $b$, which is $v \cos \alpha$, diminished by the new "vertical" component of the rotational velocity, $a$, which is $u \sin \alpha$. So the new fall velocity is $(v \cos \alpha - u \sin \alpha)$.
For a terminal velocity of 200 km/h and rotational velocity of 1000 km/h, we want $200 \cos \alpha = 1000 \sin \alpha$, which means an $\alpha$ of $\arctan(0.2)$ will make the two components neutralize one another. I had estimated this to happen for an alpha of 30 degrees; it is actually 11.31 degrees, or a distance of about 1200 km (in the picture the two velocities are closer together, so it seems that the correct angle is double that).
What happens to the horizontal velocity when teleporting 11.31 degrees rotation-ward?
The new vector is the sum of vector $w$ and vector $d$, where $w$ is $v \sin \alpha$ and $d$ is $u \cos \alpha$. 
This gives $200 \sin 11.31\unicode{xB0}$
plus $1000 \cos 11.31°$,
or $39.22 + 980.58$, or about 1020 km/h.
So after the "right" teleport **our vertical velocity is completely neutralized** and we find ourselves going up a wind of 20 km/h, which is tolerable (cue thunderclap).
This can also be done with about ten jumps towards the horizon (which at an altitude of 1 km is about 110 km distant); this is desirable because a visual check of the reentry altitude is better (if you rematerialize at a very different altitude, the difference in air pressure is likely to be nasty). Each jump will experience a slow-down in the fall speed and a slight head wind.
After this, shorter and faster jumps rotation-wards will pull the teleporter "up" and allow to fine-tune a safe descent.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yn39k.png)
In the case of *terminal* velocity, the time taken by the teleport is irrelevant, because during this time *the fall speed does not increase* (since it is "terminal"). So, the teleporter may refine their range by waiting each time until they've built terminal velocity, and then jump (to build terminal velocity, a fall of about 450 m is enough; it takes around 12-13 seconds).
But even if this were not the case, it would not be a great matter; all that would be needed is to take the extra speed into account (i.e. design the jump to neutralize not the *current* velocity but the one that will be reached at jump time, in, say, three more seconds).
On the other hand, this means that once they've *stopped* their vertical motion, they need to land *very quickly* before building up more speed. So they want to be, say, high above water; at that point they teleport straight *down*, as near the surface as they can.
# honestly
Determine spinward direction (possibly by trial and error, making jumps with a *small* horizontal component and seeing what happens), then start making longer and longer (or faster and faster) jumps to and fro, in the direction where you feel wind at an angle of about 5° from the vertical. This wind will become less and less, and more and more far from the vertical, when approaching the "ideal jump". If the jump does not work, **jump back** to the original position, some distance higher, and retry. The horizontal component will not have changed much and will be soon compensated, and the vertical will have remained the same also, because you're falling at terminal velocity.
While doing such jumps, endeavor to reduce your altitude to take advantage of the denser air, and see if you can spot a suitable body of water. If none is found, teleport higher in the new position; soon you'll be falling at terminal velocity there too, and you can restart the whole process 1200 km to the east. At most after twenty such iterations you're *bound* to find water: at worst, the Pacific. Once you splash down, you can play human skipping rock going west, in shorter jumps, each time letting the water neutralize the small speed gained in the jump, until you are safely near a beach.
To further reduce speed you can try and get off e.g. the trousers or jacket and fashion a small parachute. The goal is to lower airspeed as much as possible, which allows shorter and more precise jumps.
# cheating
Teleportation comes with a sense of matter – in the Vinge novel above, the Azhiri can "seng" around them and so have a "feel" for the volume of space they'll swap into. This sense, this instinct, also extends to *speed* – your teleporter can "feel" the relative tranquility of a given volume of space, and won't teleport onto a hurtling train. The discomfort sensation is greater the higher the speed differential.
Evaluation of a volume is then easy and instantaneous, in the same way that we can examine a vast area of space and immediately and effortlessly pinpoint the place with the highest photon reflectance in a given interval of energies – a task that would appear impossible to someone who had never heard about the sense of *sight*.
So, the teleporter keeps teleporting in places where the unease is *just right*, waiting for the sense of unease transmitted by the solid ground to abate; when this happens, they'll just teleport on the safe area on the ground they perceived.
The difficulty is then apparently enormous, but to a teleporter is no more difficult than it would be, for us, finding a suitable shade of green on a continuous thermal map, even if the map would change after each jump:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4qncr.png)
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**Live falling.**
You are not going to stop falling. You will wander the upper reaches of the earth, falling. You will want to fall through rainstorms with your mouth open to drink. You will want to fall through migrating birds and catch some on your way through, to eat.
Your hair will become long, trailing behind you. Your clothes will eventually become rags from flapping in the wind. People in the tropical locales you frequent (it is cold with just flapping rags on!) will come to recognize you and wave and shout when you appear high in the air. You wave and shout back. You get close to the ground before you disappear because you want to see what they look like.
Some of your new friends get kites out when they see you and you eventually learn what that means - kite cookies! You maneuver over to snag some off the kite. Delicious kite cookies.
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Then you find a message on the kite. You don't read Tongan but there is a picture of you (you can tell because of the 3 feet of hair blowing behind you) and you are holding the cookie kite in the air. Could the cookie kite slow you down enough to splash in the water? The people are watching the first time you try. The kite is torn to shreds before you disappear.
The second kite is much bigger and flies much higher. It has a long tail. A lot of people are watching. On the first pass you get the cookies then retreat higher in the sky to eat them and fortify yourself. On the second pass you make a grab for the tail of the kite...
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Your teleporter needs to locate a thunderstorm.
The updrafts that create the anvil cloud in a strong storm can be sufficient to lift a skydiver in spread eagle (especially if wearing loose clothing). Get into that updraft and it will greatly slow the fall, possible stop it entirely. The trick will be, with near-zero visibility, determining when this has occurred, because he'll still be falling at around 140 km/h relative to the air and cloud even when he's stopped relative to the ground.
A teleporter, though, *should* have some senses normal humans don't (otherwise, he'll be dead long before this situation arises), so presumably he'll either be able to sense his velocity relative to Earth's surface, or at least his altitude, so as to know just when to 'port to ground (a small upward or even downward velocity isn't a big problem -- a couple m/s will result in a little "hop" or be absorbed by knee flexion).
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Your problem for slowing down is finding something airborne which gives you friction. So...
### Teleport to a waterfall
Ideally one that has a long vertical drop. Angel Falls would be perfect. Now however fast you're going, the water is also falling - and its terminal velocity is not going to be too dissimilar to yours. So you can hit the lower half of the waterfall to scrub off any extra speed, then teleport a bit higher (where the water is falling more slowly) and scrub off speed there, and keep on doing this until you're not falling much faster than the water maybe 10m from the top of the waterfall. At which point you're going slowly enough that simply jumping into a pool (I'd teleport down to just above a pool at the bottom, because it's deeper) is perfectly safe.
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## Phone a Friend
Literally. If there is someone else with a comparable ability, have them come to the rescue. Remind them to bring 2 parachutes.
Heck, you might want to get into the habit of bringing along a parachute at all times (to preempt this sort of thing).
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Why not just, [teleport themselves upside down?](https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-309-conservation-of-momentum-into-your-head/)
To cancel their momentum?
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Step 1: teleport to other side of the planet, above any hard object.
From falling down at terminal velocity and eastward with Earth rotation (460 m/s at the Equator) they will find themselves going up with terminal velocity and westward at 920 m/s.
Gravity will slow them down for the upward motion, and air drag will take a toll on them for the horizontal velocity (I hope they are not in t shirt and shorts).
Step 2: when their vertical velocity has gone close enough to zero, they teleport back to where they started from, or closer to ground.
They will have an almost 0 vertical velocity and an horizontal differential velocity equal to the amount they have lost due to drag.
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Teleporters would have a variety of responses to this potential problem.
# Try to find a soft surface to land on.
Snow or dirt hills are good. A soft plant to land on is ok. You want something that compresses and displaces well. If you can prep, you can make a large bale of hay. This means you can hit at terminal velocity and not die. Water isn't really safe.
If you have a friend you can also ask them to make a big pile of hay or grass for you to land on.
# Slow down your speed.
Kill a bird or several and use them as a makeshift parachute, ride air updrafts, there's a bunch of ways you can bleed off some speed. It doesn't have to be great, but a lot of these methods are easier if you lose some speed.
# Slow yourself down by grabbing something.
Using some sort of metal thing and a vertical surface like a cliff, you can slow yourself down. Scratch the metal against the surface and the friction between it and the surface could slow you down. If you can find a long rope you can also grab onto that and use the friction to slow yourself down. If you have a friend in a castle, you could ask them to lower a rope down off the edge of a wall and grab onto it as you fell.
# Escape into the afterlife.
If none of this is working or feasible, just pick someone you hate and hit them at escape velocity. Both of you will die, and you can go to the afterlife, which will hopefully end your terminal velocity.
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If they are falling, but momentum is conserved, can you aim the teleport so it launches them directly upwards? Their momentum will keep them heading up until gravity slows the ascent. Then they want to teleport to the ground before gravity yanks them down into another fall.
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Depending on their accuracy and knowledge of the area this can be a long shot, especially considering that without protective clothing you will likely freeze to death quickly.
Go to Hollywood or your nearest large movie production center and find an area where they have stuntman cushions, the ultra-fat one's meant for people who jump from high elevations. Land on one.
You will likely be harmed and might still die, but there is a good chance you'll survive. There have been cases of people surviving being thrown/jumping out of an airplane because they landed on thick bushes or something similar. They too were worse for wear, but alive.
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**Teleport to the other side of the planet**
The teleporter fails at long distances because the Earth rotates on its axis. You move with the surface. So even if you stand *still* on the equator you are moving along the equator direction at 460 m/s. It you teleport to the other side of the planet you will appear and find the ground moving beneath you at 920 m/s. Splat.
But by the same token, if you were shot out of a cannon at 920 m/s at the equator, you could save yourself by teleporting to the far side of the planet, where the ground is moving the same speed as you are, and land safely.
The trick to cancel fall damage is the same. Teleport to a place where the Earth is moving in the same direction to you. Or at least where the surface velocity is closer to your current velocity.
Deciding exactly exactly where to teleport is a job for a computer. We likely need to make many jumps to somewhere far above the surface, fall for a while, and then port to the next place.
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Take a helmet, and a sturdy bodysuit, and **teleport into a large body of water**.
Or make sure to teleport feet first.
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**Catch an airplane!**
Call the famous energy drink company and have them send an airplane that lines up with you so that you can ["wingsuit" into the open airplane door.](https://youtu.be/YL9sNrOlK-I?t=102) Your airspeed will be higher than in the video because you probably don't have a wingsuit but you can try until you succeed because of your teleporter. Eventually you'll pop in.
Actually, depending on the precision the teleporter is capable of, you can probably simply line up with the airplane and teleport inside. No need to hit a door.
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Frame challenge: you have way bigger problems than the terminal falling velocity. To put it into perspective, these are the velocities which a person teleporting would be subject to according to your rules...
* 200 km/h terminal falling velocity
* 1000 km/h rotating speed of earth
* 108000 km/h earth rotating around the sun
* 792000 km/h sun rotating around the galaxy center
* 3600000 km/h or more he galaxy moving...
To me it looks like you will need to bend the conservation-of-momentum rules somewhat, otherwise your teleporting people will be in big trouble in all but the most trivial cases...
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Consider planet Earth in a distant future. Human technology has advanced, although it still respects the currently known laws of physics. I am trying to build a story where:
* An Event makes it so the whole planet Earth, or at least a significant portion of its surface, is **shattered into debris that go drifting into space**. Earth surface is NOT destroyed in the process, so that human constructions - buildings, small stuff, etc - are more or less intact. The debris can be of various sizes, from dust to country-sized debris. It is okay that all living beings on Earth died in the process.
* My protagonists managed, by chance, to escape Earth right before the Event using a technologically advanced spaceship. They are now also drifting into space in the middle of the debris, and they can **explore the debris and find various remnants of human civilization that can be used for my plot**: that's what I'm getting at, and that's why the surface must not be destroyed during the Event. Their spaceship is smart and manages not to crash into the debris.
The situation I'm describing - my protagonists drifting alongside the debris and exploring them - would need to last at least a few years. What happens after that doesn't matter.
Currently, I've considered the possibility of a "big explosion". An industrial accident of human origin makes Earth's inner core explode, and the whole planet is shattered into debris that go drifting through space in all directions. But it doesn't work because such an explosion would *definitely* destroy everything at the surface.
Ideally:
* The Event would be of human origin, no alien intervention, no random asteroid crashing into Earth.
* The Event would be rather sudden, happening in a matter of minutes.
**What could the Event be?**
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# Not possible within physics as we know it:
I cannot think of a way this can be done within the parameters requested, as any event of sufficient energy to disassemble a whole planet will:
1. Necessarily be of such an energetic nature as to pulverize the surface many,many,many times over. The energy needed to just break the gravitational bonding energy of the Earth, for example, is about 2.49×10^32 Joule. This is enough energy to heat the *entire* planet by some 94000 Kelvin.
2. Require that every bit on the surface be accelerated away from the main mass of the planet at a speed of something more than 11km/s (some 40000 kilometers per hour), otherwise gravity will simply cause everything to fall back into a new, very hot, planet.
3. Even if you miracle a non-energetic way to break open the planet
For example by having a rogue black hole do a close flyby of the Earth, well within Earth's Roche limit. But what such a rogue black hole or sufficiently massive planet will do to the solar system as a whole and possibly the Sun is....nasty. We're looking at ejected planets at the minimum, almost certainly gravitationally-induced solar instability leading to a Nova, which destroys the very same surface artifacts you want to retain!
But then you are still spilling the contents. Earth's crust masses about 2.7x10^22 kg. The whole earth masses 6x10^24 kg. So only about 1/2 of a percent of the Earth is *not* currently molten.
So by whichever means you are disassembling the Earth, you will get 200 parts molten rock or iron, for every 1 part of solid material.
And of this solid material, less than one part per thousand used to be Surface, or within 20m of the surface. (assuming average crust thickness of 20 km)
# But outside of physics as we know it:
To get viable surface installations and artifacts drifting in space, you would need to do something really strange
* First successful test of interstellar Hyperdrive. Footnote: Do NOT activate while on planet surface! Calculate range of effect! Do not use without programming destination!!
* Force field experiment, but the experiment cut the region off from all gravity, causing Earth's rotation and Orbit to cause it to fly off into space?
* Time travel that did the same, neglecting to remember that the Earth rotates, orbits the sun, and even the Sun orbits the Galaxy, all rushing off to somewhere else than where the timetravel zone was when activated?
p.p.s
If you want alien visitors to discover Human artifacts... We have scattered satellites and probes and rovers and landers all over the place. We have even sent 2 golden gramophone records in the direction of not-so-nearby stars.
And there is a fully functional Tesla Roadster (red, with spacesuit, low .. ahem. very very high mileage) floating out near Mars orbit.
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## You're Looking for the Roche Limit
The [Roche Limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit) is a term for how close one celestial body can pass to another one, and still stay together under the force of gravity. If the Earth was a mass of chargeless dust or non-viscous liquid, at this closeness to another larger gravitating body Earth would begin to fall apart.
But Earth isn't a chargeless dust or inviscid fluid. We have a solid crust that lends some mechanical strength and oceans of water that loves to stick to already-wetted surfaces. Earth won't just fall apart. '
But let's see how close it has to be to be in danger. The equation for the Roche limit is :
$RocheLimit = Radius\_{HeavierPlanet} ( 2 { density\_{HeavierPlanet} \over density\_{LighterPlanet} } )^{1 \over 3}$
As you can see, the only time the Roche Limit is outside the larger planet's radius is when the larger planet is made of denser stuff.
That's not hard. The mean density of Earth is 5 g/cm^3. Many things are denser than that: an Earth-sized rogue planet (we assume these are floating around the universe) made of lead (11 g/cm^3) would have a Roch Limit a little further out than the orbit of the moon. An Earth-sized rogue planet made of gold (19 g/cm^3) would have a Roche limit out to almost 19,000 kilometers.
**How would it work?**
Imagine an Earth-sized ball of lead passes close to the Earth, but not a direct hit. The internal pressures of Earth, usually balanced out by gravity, are now loading the crust. Oceans will try to jump ship, as will the atmosphere. Would be reasonable to say that some poorly anchored structures, or structures on poor foundations (swamp, mud) might just fly up and fly off like so much dust.
Let's see if Earth splits open.
All but the outermost 50 kilometers of Earth is liquid. It's made of basalt (SiO2), which is basically glass (33 MPa ultimate strength). Imagine it as a 50 km thick glass bowl. The rupture strength is (33 MPa x 50 km = 1.65 TPa) (please correct me someone if I've mis-calculated this). This is holding back a peak fluid column 12,000 km high of material 5.5 g/cm^3 in density.
The pressure depends on how close the other planet passes. Let's says it's close enough so there's a net 1g acceleration on Earth during the passage. That would be a column pressure of 0.6 TPa.
Increase the density of Rogue Planet to gold (19 g/cm^3), and have the approach be almost touching during the pass, and the gravity goes up to 4g.
The glass bowl cracks, and a decent portion of Earths fluid spills out like so much quickly-cooling formerly liquid rock into a new ring orbiting Rogue Planet.
What's left, assuming there's enough velocity difference that Rogue Planet sails on it's way without permanently capturing Earth (v > 15,797 m/s) would probably consist of a lot of things as described in the original post.
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Earth has developed matter displacement technology (aka beaming in Star Trek). It was designed to move resources from the asteroid belt or moons into earth orbit or directly onto the surface in a matter of seconds.
So they built a giant space station, collecting huge amounts of energy from the sun and what-not and aiming at what was to be displaced.
However, either through a malfunction or by criminal intent, the station displaced the entire molten core of Earth into the solar system, essentially a fatal reversal of the stations functionality.
As it happened within minutes, Earth is now only a shell, fragmenting quickly with the core gone. The Earth shell would probably still be in orbit around the sun and - with safety systems in place - humans could still have survived on the surface, but life would be impossible.
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**Condition: The event must happen in minutes**
Impossible. Really, it's impossible. Consider an earthquake, for which minutes is a very, very long time. It flattens buildings. An earthquake lasting minutes would flatten cities. The destruction of the world in just minutes would flatten literally everything. Worse, it would churn everything into dirt soup. Considering how much mass is involved, your explorer would be lucky to find a brick, much less any other kind of proof of civilization.
**But, maybe... if we change the timeline to weeks or months...**
An impact won't work, that means no surface explosion of any kind. Too fast, too violent, probably won't leave the Earth in its current orbit, and the energy sufficient to split it up would spread it all over the place. So, no impact.
But... what if the core started to expand? Slowly...
There will be destruction. After all, the mantle is sitting atop a molten soup of fluid and even the most even expansion will cause uneven results. Everything from volcanoes to calderas would erupt. But if it happens slowly enough, it might not be terrestrially devastating.
So, let's consider something along the lines of the movie *[The Core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core).* In that movie, the theoretical threat of an enemy state weaponizing earthquakes led the U.S. to develop Project Destini (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger INItiative), a tool that would (theoretically) produce focused earthquakes anywhere on the globe.
Except that when they tried it, it stopped the core from spinning. No magnetic field. Birds can no longer navigate. Pacemakers stop. Dogs and cats... living together! Mass hysteria! (Whoops, mixing my movies... sorry.)
What if the nations of your Earth were doing the same thing? Maybe they were simply trying to probe the core and the "probe" exploded, causing the core to expand. The planet's honking big! So such an effect would take time.
And time is what you want (sorry). It takes time to gently rip the Earth apart — but only so much! Because you want those chunks (similar to what was seen in season 5 of *[Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agents_of_S.H.I.E.L.D.).*) to gently stay put, both in orbit and generally in locale, such that your explorer can swoop around in between chunks.
**Remember, there's a LOT of planet to deal with**
A huge part of your problem is that 99.99% of the Earth is everything *except* the surface. What you have in mind seems like it would be huge — but compared to the *rest of the planet* it's insignificant. It would actually be really, really hard for your adventurer to find chunks with buildings on them. But that's great! Because you want the process to take years.
"Realistically" the localized asteroid belt once known as the Earth would be a bunch of chunks floating around, hitting one another, and causing a ton of grief. Most of it would be *metal,* not rock (I think, the outer core might be mostly rock, so maybe it will be mostly rock...). An no matter how gently it was expanded into chunks, some of those chunks would eventually come into contact with the Moon. Now we have the proverbial toilet brush whisking chunks of the Earth around like a whirlpool.
*Actually, now that I think about it, the effect would be pretty cool. The Moon would act somewhat like the [guardian satellites](http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/%7Eechiang/classmech/dermott84.pdf) that help shepherd the rings of Saturn. The math might not work out... but the concept of a moon-shepherded whirlpool in space is cool beyond reason.*
On the other hand, what you could also end up with is the surface (mantle) of the Earth broken up and orbiting the swollen-and-now-cooling core. A new, mostly metal (maybe) planet having almost exactly the original mass but now surrounded by a ring system that happens to be made up of fairly large chunks. Astronomically, they'd eventually plunge back to the planet's surface. But that could take a while. A long while.
**But, in the end, you'd have the effect you want... so long as you don't want atmosphere**
So, we slowly expand the core like a swelling appendicitis until the either the surface breaks up and floats away or the entire planet breaks up. It's slow, because that's the only hope any building has of surviving.
The result is either a new planet with a ring system containing the chunks you're looking for or a localized asteroid field made up of the mass of the planet that eventually becomes this whomping cool whirlpool shepherded by Luna, the Guardian Moon.
What you do NOT have is atmosphere. Anywhere. There's no way to keep it around the chunks in any circumstance. The buildings and desiccated human remains are in a complete vacuum and might not be protected any longer even by the Van Allen Radiation Belt. (A curious thought, that, but I'll leave it to another to analyze.)
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It is imposible due to how planets (and astroids) get their's form at fist place.
If we somehow magicaly remove half of the Earth, the remaining half would immediately start to turn into a sphere (80% of former diameter), greatly heating in the process. This would certainly destroy all the surface.
Same goes for all large parts (> 1km) - they would collapse in sort-of-spheroids (the larger - the more spherical it would be, the more heat would be produced in process). Parts having mass of about 2/3 of a Moon (say continents) would always become glowing spheres of magma.
Smaller parts that would not be turned into piles of stones (from several hunderd to hundred meters across) would just have not enough gravity to keep themselfs intact. Tidal forces of Sun's gravity and gravity from larger parts would just rip (or better say - put) them apart into individual stones/bricks/cars/etc.
So it doesn't matter what Event created this debris - they just woudn't keep "surface" intact while drifitng through space.
P.S. You may have a barn or a two-three-four floor peice of a reinforced concrete building or section of a bridge floating in space (i.e one single object) , but no surface - no lawns, roads or whole ranch (nothing made of bulk materials)
P.P.S. And it would be much better if you are not telling anyting about The Event. Let it be mistery even for your hero.
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Known physics: Impossible.
Unknown physics:
First, you can rule out any possible explosion or accident. Even a tiny percent of the energy involved will destroy the surface, nothing indiscriminate could possibly be so selective.
Second, some answers have suggested somehow turning off gravity. That's going to fling off pieces from equatorial regions but they aren't going to snap cleanly. Your surface gets destroyed by earthquakes.
We need some way of cleanly removing chunks and that's only going to happen by deliberate action.
Enter Acme Planet Mining Company. They take useless worlds apart for raw materials. Shattered bits are hard to handle so they've learned to do it cleanly: The planet is surrounded by projectors that generate a **very** intense gravitational field. They're all turned on at once and the planet gets pulled apart into 3D pieces of pie. Once the pieces have been pulled far enough a second set of projectors slices up the pieces of pie.
The fields are powerful enough that the rock simply shears that the boundaries and the boundaries are straight so there's no rubbing. As the acceleration is gravitational the material being lifted isn't subjected to high forces, it comes up basically intact. (The projectors are highly focused and thus the normal inverse square doesn't meaningfully apply.)
The end result is squares (or perhaps hexagons) of crust of whatever size they choose to work with, the pieces of core cut off are molten and turn into blobs.
*You imbeciles, that was the wrong planet you chopped up!*
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# Impossible...
"Human technology has advanced, although it still respects the currently known laws of physics"
That's your problem right there. In a matter of *minutes*, you need to displace a mass of the order of magnitude of the Earth's (everything but the crust). Apart from the energy requirements (the gravitational binding energy of the Earth *in a matter of minutes* could only be supplied by a Kardashev level III civilization), this implies accelerations whole orders of magnitude beyond what most human artifacts could withstand.
Removing the core and leaving the surface in place would *almost* work, albeit requiring matter displacement (which violates the laws of physics), but that would still imply the cessation of the Earth's gravitational field, thereby liberating megatons of surface tensions (the Earth is not a sphere but a geoid, and after being hollowed out, any sizeable mountain would start rebounding) which, together with the atmosphere exploding outwards, would make short work of, again, most human artifacts.
# ...but could we *cheat?*
"Magic" can usually be made compatible with hard science fiction in one of two ways: nano- or pico-technology, or *simulation*. Move your "universe" inside a computer and literally everything becomes possible, often including self-contradictions in the laws of physics.
Nanoengineering the disappearance of the core is still impossible (plus the energy requirements explode, both literally and metaphorically).
What about *simulation*? For some reason, humanity decide to Ascend into a virtual world, and to do so, they use nanotechnology to map and possibly gradually replace the Earth's surface (nobody cares about the deep underground). When they have done so, they upload the Earth into the VirtuaEarth engine...and a bug hits.
Possibly even due to the nature of the process. Maybe they were using alien technology they did not fully understand; maybe they saw that the aliens had already made use of the same technology but had mapped their whole solid planet, which took millennia; the canny humans believed they could do this in mere months by skipping everything deeper than 15 kilometers, and did not realize that the virtualization engine would not keep the planet together under those conditions.
You are left with a world where an impossible gravity keeps people on the leftover chunks of surface, air is still there and still breathable, but the Earth's surface has become a flock of floating islands. The process can probably be fixed, if the engine can be accessed and properly reprogrammed.
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Sending parts of Earth drifting into space, as you require, will need something capable of imparting those parts escape velocity, around 11 km/s.
The only thing I can imagine producing such effect would be a massive impact which results in a [spallation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spallation) of the planet, kicking out large chunks of the planet surface on the opposite side with respect to the impact site.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0JVwh.gif)
The planet would be turned into a molten ball of rock, but some of those ejected chunks would keep some remains of the original features.
The acceleration would be such that I doubt any building would remain untouched, but under the remains one could still scavenge for something useful.
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# [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes)
A Von Neumann probe is *"a spacecraft capable of replicating itself."* They necessarily need to extract material flom planets to make new copies.
If they are planet or dwarf planet sized and come to Earth, they might cut city or small country sized chunks of the planet's surface and take these to space far from Earth. With Kardashev level 2 or 3 technology, which is jargon for technological magic and handwavium, these chunks may reach space relatively intact.
The probe then takes the materials from the bottom of the chunk to make a new probe, discarding the surface side. Now you have two probes, and the process repeats. The probes will multiply increasingly faster, so the planet may be disassembled in short time.
In the Steven Universe cartoon, an alien species disassembled their own home planet for raw materials like that. It has been discussed online that the aliens in the show are also Von Neumann probes (but mostly human sized, unlike what I propose here), and indeed a lot pf the lost planetary mass was used for reproduction. Their planet is hollow and looks like the image below (black patches are voids) - and i remember it having chunks orbiting it in unnatural patterns:
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**'Respecting the current laws of physics'.**
Ahh, yes, therein is the rub. Respecting the laws in reality, or respecting the laws in a fictional setting?
There is the '**possible**', the '**plausible**', and the '**believable**' criteria level.
'**Possible**' is completely adherent to what an engineer, physicist, or scientist works within. As many posters have stated, there are lots of physical reality reasons why your scenario is not possible, among them gravity, the earth's molten core, and just the tremendous amount of energy necessary to accomplish the task. But, really, I don't think there is any disaster movie or fictional novel that strictly adheres to 'possible'.
'**Plausible**' agrees substantially to what the general public, with non-specific knowledge of engineering, physics, or science knows or understands about reality. Fortunately for science fiction, the general public does not know that much. Things like escape velocity, the molten core, and energy requirements are vaguely understood by most people, so disaster movies generally take liberties with the laws of physics and define them within the generally accepted public perception of them, not he mathematical models of pure science and engineering.
'**Believable**' generally acknowledges that the general public can be convinced of almost anything, if the writing is convincing enough. There are an abundance of disaster movies that fit this level.
**TL:DR**
**Do you want the event to be valid within every law of physics, or within the realm of the public's generally believed and generally accepted laws of physics, but not completely confined by ALL of the laws being applied at once? That is, obey a few that are necessary to create the event, but ignore others that are inconsequential (inconvenient) to the plot?**
Most people understand **plate techtonics**. They understand earthquakes, the movement of these plates, and the fact that they 'float' on a solid mantle. Okay, that layer is more 'plastic' than 'solid', but whatever. There is a 'wrap' that keeps the insides of the earth inside, that continents float on. People also understand that earthquakes are a result of a tremendous amount of energy. How much energy, they really are not concerned with, but just the notion that this energy can move an entire plate and cause mountains to form is overwhelming to them. They have also been inundated with factoids about asteroids, and the asteroid belt, being remnants of a planet that somehow self-destructed, without being re-constituted by the gravitational forces. Add to this all of the scare stories about mankind having enough nukes to blow the world apart ten times over? Everyone knows about unrestrained chain reactions. How about anti-matter? The general public perceives this to be able to produce phenomenal energies. Nuclear fusion plants and containment vessles gone bananas, releasing huge amounts of energy? And the creation of artificial black holes in large colliders? The fact that all of these things are created in lightning storms aside, the public is really gullible when it comes to armageddon disaster theories. What if they all happened at once, in some 'perfect storm'? One event leading to another?
So an event that is so powerful, it breaks up and knocks one or more of these techtonic plates off of the earth? It is not 'possible' escape velocity wise, when one does the actual calculations, but can it be made 'plausible' or 'believable'? An earthquake that is so powerful, it breaks these plates up into pieces, like a broken saucer, and flings them into space? Peeling them away from earth, leaving only the molten core, wrapped up in its 'mantle', behind? Notwithstanding the fact that most human structures and buildings depend on the existence of a gravitational force to 'hold them down' in compression, and could probably not retain their structural integrity in low gravity, especially during an earthquake, could the general public be convinced structures could survive on these plates?
Could a very convincing author make the general reading/viewing public believe that an all-out nuclear armageddon, where all nations fire off their nukes at the same time, even perhaps having progressed to anti-matter or controlled black hole weaponry, cause an earthquake of such magnitude that the earth shakes off its plates?
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# Impossible.
Let's take earth and just for the thought experiment split it in 8 with 3 slices and then magically pull them apart without destroying everything. Let's ignore the huge energy that is needed to get this done and the destruction that alone would bring.
These chunks are all 1/8th of the weight. Their *desired* center of mass is just R/2 from their own crust, but it currently is at 3/8th of the former earth Radius - considerably furth on the outside. The resulting forces are tremendous and first pull the pyramidal inner section of the chunks back up, which flattens the body. As a result of inertia, the center of the bent triangle former surface breaks open in the center and floods over with molten rock, the surface melting as it sinks to the center. Lacking the support of the (now missing) center, the corners of the former surface get pulled center wise harder, break down and melt. After a (geologically) short time the quarters have returned into their natural shape of mostly molten spheres - ruining their former surface - and start to cool again, rebuilding a surface.
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Highly advanced force-field bubbles would need to exist.
Let's imagine in the future it's possible to create an impenetrable bubble that would protect you from a nuclear explosion. These bubbles can be small enough to protect a house, or large enough to protect a city. They're spherical, so they contain air above and ground below. The force-fields can be sustained almost indefinitely by fusion power plants.
Presumably there is a way for a spaceship to pass through these bubbles, using similar force-field technology.
(We might also need some kind of artificial gravity to keep the air in the bubble from filling up with floating dirt. Luckily everyone already has gravity pads, because they like to turn down the gravity when they want to relax.)
Having established this technology, it no longer matters much what destroyed the earth. As soon as the earth's core got turned into anti-matter (or whatever) the seismic detectors were triggered, and the bubbles activated in time for the people in them to survive the immediate aftermath of the event.
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This suggestion isn't within the known laws of physics - I agree with others that that's probably impossible - but I quite like it.
If you were somehow able to make the force of gravity almost zero but very slightly negative in the region around the Earth, that would do it. It could be the result an experiment gone wrong, or maybe a doomsday weapon.
On the surface of Earth it would feel like there was no gravity. The atmosphere would expand out into space with nothing to hold it down, which would kill everyone pretty quickly, but buildings and chunks of landscape and so on would pretty much hold together, because there'd be no forces pulling them apart.
However, because of the slight negative gravity, each part of the Earth will be feeling a slight force pushing it away from the rest of the Earth, and on large enough scales this should be enough to rip it into big chunks and send them slowly accelerating away from each other. The effect can wear off once they've eventually reached each others' escape velocities, because then they won't just fall back down again.
It should be noted that this violates the conservation of energy fairly drastically, so if you're going for hard science it's not a good choice. But if you're willing to wave your hands about that sort of thing, it's a reasonable way to achieve the effect you're looking for.
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I think other contributors have amply demonstrated that the desired effect is not possible with any technology (or even any natural process) within our current understanding of possibility.
If you consider a speculative technology such as teleportation to be one that
"respects the currently known laws of physics", however, here is a possible way to do it:
At some future date humans develop teleportation technology capable of moving large masses over interplanetary distances. Like the Star Trek teleporters, this technology requires a teleportation station on only one end of the journey,
but unlike the Star Trek teleporters it is capable of teleporting something the size of the entire USS Enterprise over the distance from Earth to Mars.
This technology is implemented in numerous places around the Earth as a method of interplanetary travel that is rapid and relatively safe (compared to sitting in a spaceship bathed in radiation for several months).
In order to safely teleport an object over such a large distance, the station must be extremely stable, and so it uses teleportation technology to "stabilize" the crust of the Earth within 20 or 30 kilometers radius of the station (in three dimensions),
essentially by continually teleporting that entire mass through tiny distances (measured in nanometers) in order to compensate for any disturbance.
Unfortunately there is a bug in the software that controls the "stabilization".
One day an earthquake very near one of the teleportation stations exceeds the normal bounds of operation and triggers this bug.
Instead of teleporting a few nanometers, the teleportation station (under the control of the software) teleports itself and a nearly-hemispherical chunk of the Earth's surface 20 or 30 kilometers in radius to somewhere around the distance of the Moon, and leaves this chunk with enough velocity to remain in orbit far above the Earth.
The resulting shock waves caused by the removal of this chunk (and the collapse of the hole left behind) trigger the same software bug in stations around the globe, and they also teleport chunks of similar sizes to similar orbits,
turning the tectonic plates of every continent into something resembling Swiss cheese.
The effect on the remaining surface of the Earth is cataclysmic, destroying every structure and human artifact and wiping out all life.
The effect on the teleported chunks is also disastrous -- whatever part of the atmosphere was teleported is quickly lost -- but each chunk has such weak gravity that there is no deformation or fracturing of that piece of crust.
Buildings are severely damaged by explosive decompression but many artifacts remain.
---
This is still quite fantastic and I'm not sure even I would be able to comfortably suspend disbelief this far, but I think you could do a lot worse.
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You could look into something similar to the [Spindizzy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindizzy) from James Blish's [Cities in Flight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight). In the novels, the spindizzy is used to separate entire cities from the gravitational field of Earth, establish artifical gravity, and allow them to travel faster-than-light, eventually leading to these cities acting as roaming contract workers for various outposts of human civilization.
If you want this to be a sudden event, you could postulate some mad scientist inventing this technology, and using it to accelerate large chunks of Earth's surface out into space. This would still leave most of the Earth behind (since less than 1% of Earth's surface is the Crust we live on), but from humanity's perspective, only the chunks that were broken off would be habitable.
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# A localised effect "disabling" gravity
The "problem" preventing our planet from flying apart is the gigantic amount of energy required to move matter outside of its own gravity well. But what if some magical technology disabled gravity for a time?
The earth's crust would be ripped apart by the pressure of escaping magma from the earth's mantle and its pieces would be accalerated away on pillars of slowly cooling flame. Normally this acceleration would probably be relatively slow, and people might even survive if they don't drift of into space when trying to walk outside, asphyxiate in the very quickly escaping atmosphere, get hit by splatters of crustal magma or commit sudoku when realizing they might never reach their loved ones again. But whatever process disabled gravity might cancel the gravitational energy debt imperfectly, also resulting in a superheating of the earths core, instantly sublimating/evaporating the metal and blowing away the fragments on a shock front made from high-pressure metallic gas...
## In-depth ideas
**Energy Source**
Depending on the hardness of your scifi story, it might be necessary to postulate some source for the energy necessary to cancel the gravitational energy debt - after all, spontaneously violating conservation of energy would seem pretty implausible to most readers. Perhaps the researchers were utilizing some zero-point energy source to power an experimental flying car antigravity engine, but underestimated the actual energy output of the energy source, leading to a much less localized effect (spatially as well as temporally). Or perhaps the energy was pulled from the future, through some kind of time rift...
In any case, the combination of some gigantic source of energy and antigravity experiments could very plausibly cause big parts of the earths crust to fly around relatively undamaged.
**temporal energy source**
If a spatial rift was the energy source used, there might be a mysterious anomaly flying through the wreckage, sucking up all energy from its vicinity to send back in time.
**Is the effect permanent?**
If (active (1)) gravity was permanently disabled for all matter that once was part of old earth, it would spread out rapidly. Distances would quickly grow huge, and after a few years a very loose asteroid belt would form (its looseness increasing at a speed depending on the initial speed of the "explosion" - there would be no internal gravitational interaction to stabilize the belt).
If, on the other hand, gravity returned slowly, the outcome would depend on the speed of that return - ranging from stable asteroid belts (like the one we have) over clumps of wreckage barely bound together (and sometimes escaping), to an unstoppable cataclysm in the nearer future (few years to few millenia) where all pieces would crash back together (and obliterating all traces of humanity in the process).
**Other side effects**
The gravity-altering technology might have created other disturbances - some pieces having an earth-like gravity at their surface, others actively repelling nearby objects. This might (depending on your desired hardness) require additional handwaving to explain.
**Conclusion**
Whether a mindbending experiment gone wrong or a society playing with technology they didn't understand until reaching a catastrophic tipping point, the question of circumventing gravity is probably at the heart of every plausible solution to your problem, since any source of energy capable of quickly removing a large piece of our planet out of an intact gravity well would vaporize it in the process. More "mundane" sources of anomalous gravity (like the Roche limit idea mentioned by James McLellan, or perhaps an alcubiere warp drive experiment) might work equally well and might be more plausible, but would probably destroy most of the surface structure of our crust as well. If gravity was turned of "peacefully", very large chunks of crust could stay intact, and there would only be minimal to medium (depending on acceleration speed and "tectonic" collision rate) damage to buildings - even precarious skyscrapers could very well survive intact.
**Notes**
(1) by active gravity I mean the effect of matter distorting surrounding spacetime. "passive" gravity (as in still being attracted by the sun) would still work, as it is an intrinsic effect of the geometry of spacetime. But the spacetime-distorting property of matter would be much easier to counteract, at least in the (my) current understanding of the nature of gravity. Just imagine exotic (negative) dark matter swirling around, canceling the (active) mass of our normal matter... (and there are probably many more good explanations of decent scifi hardness).
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Humans aren't currently at any sort of technological state where we could consider disrupting the structural integrity of the Earth. If you want the disaster to be man made, you are already so far beyond what we currently have access to or know that you can basically say whatever you like. It's sufficiently advanced technology.
I like trying to compress Jupiter into a red dwarf using mass from an artificial white hole so that we can wrap it in 9 / 10ths of a Dyson sphere. Use magnets and the open part of the dyson sphere to turn it into a generation ship. Lots of things that can go wrong there.
It seems that you could tune a black hole or neutron star's speed and mass so that forces the earth into a really good spin (kind of a reverse gravity assist), so that it tears itself apart. Kind of like an Olympic discus thrower trying to set a distance record with an uncooked pizza. If an npc proposes it as a hypothesis, and another lampshades the improbability of such an event, you're basically there. From there, you can sidestep the further and much greater improbability of human artifacts surviving. Your characters already know it's improbable. If your players need a better explanation of the event, they can attempt to figure it out themselves.
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So I know this is rather old, but I feel like most of the other answers neglected a possibility, so I wanted to add one.
Strictly speaking, this is not currently acheivable based on current knowledge of physics, and depends on the *exact* composition of the earth's core, which is not currently known. However if there is a "real" answer to your question, it's this:
You do not want to slow things down, but rather to speed them up. Instead of happening over minutes, it needs to be near-instantaneous. (You can still potentially have some lead time where you know it's going to happen, but when it does, it's instant.)
Other answers have rightly noted the massive energy release required, but they have generally assumed the energy release would be omnidirectional. Instead, we want it to be linear (vorticity), or at least planar (implosion).
They've also assumed you need to account for the entirety of Earth's mass-energy, or alternatively, to gravitationally unbind the crust from the entirety of the core/mante. This is unnecessary, and actually counter-productive. The debris would scatter outward in all directions. This includes perpendicular to the solar plane ("up" or "down") and to the orbit itself as viewed in-plane (either sunward or "Jupiterward"). Seriously bad news if you've imparted *any* acceleration and don't have gravity to pull things back together. Within very short order (hours, days, weeks at most) everything will be too far apart to be worth the fuel cost to travel between them.
Instead, you want *most* of Earth's mass to remain exactly where it is, for the fragments to remain loosely gravitationally bound, and for them to continue to coorbit at Earth's general distance from the sun.
The most plausible scenario I can come up with involves assuming the "inner inner inner core" is in fact composed of fissionable elements, currently held by the heat and pressure of the planet above in a very specific homogenous crystalline structure/state such that the rate of fission is tightly controlled AND significantly more stable against collapse than alternative arrangements. I don't know of any such structure, but there's nothing I know of that says it can't exist.
Assuming you have all this, then the core (at least this deep inner portion) is basically a giant nuclear bomb waiting to be detonated. So detonate it. Provided your process shapes the blast right, you should be able to direct most of the energy along a line (ideally passing through the poles), or a plane (ideally along the equator). Equitorial probably makes the most sense, and has the "benefit" of channeling excess explosive force into uniform "thrust" separating the halves.
The remaining core and mantle will tend to "glob" and "stretch" back towards the center of gravity, leaving the crust unsupported against collapse itself, with an "outward" momentum, and the shifting gravitational attraction of the various globs pulling it differentially.
Since we don't know the exact composition of the core, you can play around a bit with some of the plausible options without violating the currently known laws of physics, and you can even "dial-a-yield" by picking the option best suited to your result.
The important thing is that this happens incredibly fast. It must be a highly asymmetric and chaotic process. As others have noted, anywhere *close* to this level of energy release is going to tend to level every conceivable structure. However, if it happens fast enough, theres not actually enough time for most of that energy to be transferred to the remnants before it passes through to space. There will still be global shockwaves - and earthquakes of such a magnitude that we've never even conceived. But they won't have time to coalesce before the earth itself breaks apart, and the intensity will vary immensely. Most of the surface will be unrecognizable. But sizable portions could easily go relatively unscathed. At least in terms of vibrations.
The real problem is atmosphere. Not just what we have now, but what would be released as the crust disintegrated. I'm not sure how you manage any version this without essentially lighting the air on fire. So you'd have to explain why that fire didn't destroy everything on the surface. There's probably a way to do that, but it's beyond me.
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The question is about stopping arrows fired as a barrage by an army far away. You control fire, and suddenly blast the entire barrage of arrows with fire hot enough to incinerate the wood in a matter of seconds. Would the not-completely-molten arrowheads still be able to roughly reach the target (a moving band of soldiers)? Or would the destruction of the shaft, partial melting of the arrowheads, and force from the hot air (fire is basically hot gas particles that glow) be enough to change their course completely?
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### Arrow heads are undamaged, shafts are slightly blackened - but they're going to miss for 3 reasons:
**Raw windspeed**.
In extreme cases the winds from fires can reach [150 mile per hour](https://theconversation.com/extreme-wildfires-can-create-their-own-dangerous-weather-including-fire-tornadoes-heres-how-144904#:%7E:text=One%20fire%20tornado%2C%20or%20fire,the%20center%20of%20the%20vortex.) winds. That's 241kmph. Recurve bows fire at about this speed. You're not going to stop it mid air in time, but you can throw it off course by adding a 240kmph cross wind.
**Wind shear.**
Even if the archers can predict the updraft and adjust their trajectory, the wind from the fire isn't uniform, and the arrows moving from one region to another with vastly different wind speeds will ruin their trajectory. A wind shear of about 30mph (ie 30mph difference in wind speed between two adjacent regions) has downed [a commercial airliner](https://www.weather.gov/fwd/delta191). Wind shears from fire can get strong enough to make fire tornados, which make arrow trajectories tricky to predict.
**Fin / feather melting**
These delicate fins are very susceptible to fire:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xe6o6.png)
The wood will partially protect one fin more than the other(s), meaning they'll melt unevenly. When these melt unevenly, it will throw off the aerodynamics. The arrows will turn and start tumbling. When they tumble they'll slow down and fall short. If they do reach you - you will probably be hit by the arrows side-on, it'll be like a soft caning rather than an arrow impact.
[Answer]
**Yes, but you don't need anywhere near that much heat**
Enough heat to incinerate the shafts might melt the heads, but it's irrelevant. Without the shafts the heads will begin to tumble and they'll fall far short of their targets.
But you don't need anywhere near that much heat. Those arrows were aimed given the archer's best estimate of the meteorological conditions at the moment of release — and you just changed them. Heat rises. All you need is enough heat to materially effect the arrow's trajectories and they'll still fall short. Such a blast of heat might be more believable than a blast so devastating that it would be more useful to use it against the archers themselves rather than their arrows.
Such a blast would be the fantasy-medieval equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
[Answer]
Unless you manage to completely destroy the arrow shafts, you have a problem.
The feathers help with accuracy, but the aeroynamics of a heavy head and lighter shaft will still keep them pointed in the same basic direction.
It takes little fire to set a wooden shaft on fire.
It takes a ***HUGE*** amount of fire to completely destroy a wooden shaft in 2-3 seconds! (try cutting through a wooden broomstick with a oxy-acetelene torch, to test. It takes about 30-40 seconds! You can cut through a mild steel bar of same diameter **faster** than wood)
So you have a barrage of incoming arrows. You have heated the arrowheads to scorching heat, you have blackened and set on fire the wooden shafts. You have destroyed the feathers. You have nudged the arrows a bit off path due to winds from your fire.
Net result: You have made the barrage MORE dangerous.
It is a *barrage*. Not accurate pinpoint fire. If the arrows arrive anywhere in the direction of the target, they have done their job. Barrages of arrows is the medieval equivalent of saturation bombing.
BUT!
The incoming arrows are now not just pointy objects that might penetrate your armor and defenders. It is now an equal number of ON FIRE, with superheated metal tip, pointy objects that are landing on your armor and defenders.
What hurts more, being hit by an arrow, or being hit equally hard by a hot arrow that is on fire?
If your fire IS hot enough to burn away the wooden shafts, then the arrowheads are now red-to-white hot blobs of molten metal. I would *rather* be pierced by an arrow, than have a redhot blob of molten steel land down my pants.
Hint: set the archers on fire, not their arrows.
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My father was a fireman. Wood catches fire fairly easily, but it takes time to burn. I don't think that any temperature that fire can reach will burn the arrow shafts in time.
One bit of wisdom he imparted was that in a building fire, steel stairways soften and fail before old-fashioned wooden stairways could burn through.
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The destruction of the shaft, and the feathers on it, will destabilise the arrowheads, and remove much of the mass of each arrow. They'll go off course and start to tumble.
They'll end up scattered and few, if any, of them will hit their targets. They'll also be going slower because of the tumbling. While being hit by them won't be pleasant, they've lost much of their momentum and will do far less harm.
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The accepted answer is along the right line of thinking, but way understated. When you heat air up very quickly as you do in this scenario, the air will expand with explosive force. Heating air up enough to burn an arrow mid flight means you are creating a LOT of explosive force. Your fire wall would would closely resemble the mechanics of the [Iron Curtain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain_(countermeasure)) countermeasure that the US military uses for stopping missiles, but arrows have much less kinetic energy for their cross-section than missiles do, and your firewall will have much more explosive force than an Iron Curtain to be able to burn away the wood and melt arrow heads.
Instead of just blowing the arrows off course, you will blast the red-hot arrowheads backwards in a spray of shrapnel... and possibly burn both armies to death in the process...
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I am no metal engineer, but I think temperature that is not high enough wouldn't do anything to metal arrowheads.
**EDIT**
After quick search, wood start burning at 300 degrees ([here](https://startwoodworkingnow.com/how-hot-does-wood-burn/) ) and forging temperature for metals (alloys, but I don't think iron would be much further from them) is way higher then 300 degrees ([here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging_temperature)). Therefore it wouldn't make any difference.
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That's a very general question, because of course it depends on the speed and design of the arrow, the mothod of firing the arrow, etc. Already we have incendiary rounds and tracer bullets that have no problem reaching targets while on fire; a red hot piece of metal is not melted (and isn't close to melting range yet for steel) so conceivably there wouldn't be a problem with sending hot arrows.
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What would be the best way in which to genetically modify (or create through some other method) an animal which breeds normally for a certain number (50?) of generations before becoming sterile? Generations 1-49 would be normal, but generation 50 should be unable to breed.
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I think you'd have to mess with telomere length. I'm not sure exactly how you would do this and have it pass down to their offspring, but if the species loses a specific amount of telomere length per generation, eventually things stop working. (This might result in severe medical problems in the last few generations.)
Note that within 50 generations there's a chance that this change mutates away, and the larger the number of offspring, the more likely one of them rolls the dice just right. Have a backup plan. (But then that's a problem with almost anything biological.)
Alternate: make them extremely susceptible to a certain chemical, not naturally found in the environment. Release the chemical once generation 50 rolls around. (Does require you to stick around.)
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Make fifty generations of eggs (or whatever). Put them in incubators that only trigger the hatching criteria at the appropriate time. This will be much easier to manage than the biological alternative.
Biologically, what you would do is change the gene copying mechanism to remove a sequence from the DNA. For the first fifty generations, it removes a meaningless sequence inserted for that purpose. On the fifty-first generation, it removes something important. It's also possible that it might remove something reproduction related in the fiftieth generation so that it's sterile.
The problem with the biological alternative is that it will tend to have a high failure rate. Think of the things that can go wrong:
1. It might start at the wrong place and end early.
2. It might continue too long, removing two sequences (or more) instead of one.
3. It might fail, allowing the animal to keep breeding perpetually.
4. It might start at the wrong place and introduce a problematic mutation in that generation.
And variants of those.
Another easier alternative would be to make the animals long-lived. Then you could have just one sterile generation that lives for fifty normal generations.
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`Grandchildless' gene in the fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster) exists. It increases the fly's average number of offspring, but the offspring are sterile. You may look into whether the gene has been modified for a larger number of generations.
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If it's OK that not exact but **expected** number of generations is limited then you could add mutation which makes child sterile. With 10% for such mutation in single generation you get about 0.5% that 51th generation will exists.
The drawback you have decreasing population during whole period.
## UPDATE
It works only for animals that grow up few childs in a moment. Most big enough animals select this strategy. If your animal produces numerous offspring (like mouse or fish) then we should change mutation: **It should reduce every next generation by 10%**. And somehow you need to make sure it will appear in each generation.
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Make part of the childbearing process rely upon a specific material, such as a mineral or a chemical, passed down from mother to children (maybe while the child is developing in the womb). There is only a certain amount that is necessary, and they start out with far more than they all need, but it is non-replenishable and slowly degrades or is lost. Eventually, around the 50th generation (or whatever other point you wish, just adjust the variables) there won't be enough to catalyze a successful pregnancy, and any pregnancies will fail.
The weakness of this is threefold: one, it's imprecise: if a significant number of the breeding population dies, then the end may come that much faster (as the catalyst now has much less to go around). It's also somewhat reliant upon guesswork, for some individuals may run out faster than others, leading to a few stragglers still having successful pregnancies in the 51st generation, or a sudden lack of viable births in the 49th, etc. Finally, there's the lesson we learned from Jurassic Park—life finds a way. It's entirely possible that (if this race is sapient and has access to science of a sufficient level) they may diagnose this issue and correct it via synthesis of the catalyst, or at least delay their extinction. But I think all these are easily overcomable with a bit of handwaving or proper setup of the scenario.
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**You can't do it reliably.**
If it can breed for multiple generations it can evolve and change whatever you did to it. More importantly if it can breed for multiple generations it already has everything it needs to keep replicating forever so such a mutation is easy. The best you can do is limit their diversity so detrimental genes kill off most of each generation and does not leave enough diversity to survive catastrophic events, but that is not going to be precise or 100% reliable.
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The encoding would need to be in the individuals phenotype and control the expression of individuals gametes on entering sexual maturity.
That way when two generational limited animals mate and their offspring carry their genomes, the “decrement to sterility” could be part of the genetic instructions that generate the animals eggs or sperm.
And with each generation, barring mutation, the number of generations that genome could sire would be one less than the previous generation.
There might be tricks to work around the ‘decrement to sterility’ genetic encoding. Take the case were a 1st generation male impregnates a 4th generation female. The offsprings genotype would contain two different expressions of the generational limit. If the trait is dominant, then the child would be 2nd generation, but if it was recessive the child would be 5th generation.
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The telomere approach of user3757614's approach is close but it ticks as the creature grows so it won't be reliable.
Thus lets take a slightly different approach:
1) There is a loose gene in the sperm, along with a chemical that replaces a target pattern in the egg with the gene. This gene is vital for survival.
2) Include 51 copies of the target pattern in the creature's DNA. This must likewise be vital for survival.
After your 50 generations are up the creature is missing the vital gene, it quickly dies in utero.
Mutation is going to be a serious problem here, you probably want something like a quad-DNA approach (instead of our two-copy approach) with very good checking chemicals to make mutation very unlikely. Note that such a creature inherently must be from the lab, the mutation protection needed to keep the death switch working over 50 generations makes it evolve **very** slowly--which means it won't have time to evolve in the first place.
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Of the existing answers I like [this one by Aos Sidhe](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/144515/31507) best, but I would probably do it slightly differently.
Make your animal susceptible to a poison/virus which causes infertility. The poison should be airborne. Set 3 or 4 (*for redundancy*) meteorites moving towards you plant so they arrive in 50 generations, they carry the poison/virus, and will air burst as they enter in the atmosphere.
There is less risk of genetic drift devaluing the poison/virus as it does not have a counterpart on the planet. Winds should delivery the poison/virus world wide in a year or so, even if only a single meteorite arrives. Faster if the animal has developed intelligence and travel.
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**Tandem repeat mutation disease and genetic anticipation.**
Some genetic diseases occur earlier and earlier with each generation. Most of these diseases are caused by mutations in genes with tandem repeats. The number of repeats gradually expand, and affected children manifest the disease younger than their parents did.
[Expandable DNA repeats and human disease. Mirkin SM.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6254859_Mirkin_S_M_Expandable_DNA_repeats_and_human_disease_Nature_447_932-940)
>
> One of the central principles of classical (mendelian) genetics is
> that mutations are stably transmitted between generations. As long ago
> as 1918, however, a different type of inheritance was described for a
> human neurological disorder, myotonic dystrophy1. This type of
> inheritance was characterized by increased expressivity: that is, a
> decreased age of onset and increased severity in individuals of
> subsequent generations. A similar hereditary pattern was later
> observed for other neurological diseases: for example, Huntington’s
> disease, spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, and several ataxias. The
> penetrance — that is, the probability that a given mutation results in
> disease — can also increase in successive generations, as was first
> demonstrated for fragile X syndrome2. This unusual type of inheritance
> — characterized by a progressive increase in the expressivity and,
> sometimes, the penetrance of a mutation as it passes through
> generations — was called genetic anticipation.
>
>
>
The gradual expansion of the mutant gene is your timer counting down to 50 generations. With each generation is gets slightly longer. A (probably neurologic) disease which initially would not manifest within an individual's lifetime begins to show up in the very aged. With each generation, younger individuals develop the disease. At the 50th generation the disease occurs at the time of puberty, and these individuals do not live to bear children.
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You can do it by having the first generation of females have a set number of eggs, all of which are transferred to their first offspring (except for the one that generates the offspring). This way each child has one fewer egg available than their parent, and when the eggs run out, the species dies.
How it happens biologically: I would say take your pick between the gestation process engulfing all the remaining eggs at the start (and maybe this is necessary in order for gestation to be successful), or at some stage of the growth of the embryo the eggs are transferred in (and again, this is necessary for successful growth). The first might be easier to work up as a biological process without (too much) handwaving.
This also gives you some options for twins taking half the egg supply each (or some other percentage) and so having some of the animals unable to produce a full number of generations) and an option to have (mad?) scientists interested in taking eggs from 'weaker' animals in order to extend the generational life of 'stronger' animals.
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## Express mtDNA-specific cytidine deaminase in oocyte mitochondria.
Mitochondria are cellular organelles which, among other things, convert hydrocarbons like glucose into fuel that the cell can use, typically ATP. Mitochondria actually contain their own DNA, called mtDNA, which is separate from the cell's nuclear DNA. Because mitochondria originate from bacteria, they lack the sophisticated DNA protection and repair mechanisms provided to nuclear DNA. Because mitochondria are only passed on by the mother (the ones in sperm do not make it to the oocyte), mutations can build up over generations. This is especially likely given the fact that the internal environment of the mitochondrion is highly toxic to DNA due to high concentrations of free radicals. To prevent this, oocyte mitochondria are kept in a highly inactive state, limiting DNA damage.
So... what if you could speed up the mutation rate of mtDNA? There is a class of enzymes called cytidine deaminases which mutate nucleic acids, including DNA and RNA. It converts a nucleic base called cytidine to uridine, causing a mutation. This mutation is quickly corrected in nuclear DNA, but not in mtDNA. If you were to express a slow-acting cytidine deaminase in the mitochondria of maternal oocytes (egg cells), then over time, sufficient mutations would accumulate in the mitochondria of offspring that the embryos would eventually become non-viable. Because these mutations would be passed along in each generation, there would be a gradual reduction in viability.
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Polyploidy.
I don't think the telomere approach will work at all. If it did, we would have died out. Or rather, would never have existed. Short telomeres are a normal thing, happens to everybody (except the ones who die in an accident), yet nature "just makes it" so gametes are good to go anyway. Sperm from a 100 year old is, well, not precisely as good as sperm from a 17 year old in terms of numbers and mobility and such, but... whatever. It still works, and whatever comes out is a perfectly good individual with perfectly good telomers.
Now, polyploidy might be a better strategy. While it can be somewhat troublesome on higher animals, it's a well-established thing for plants, some frogs and amphibian stuff, a couple of marine vertebrae, and some worms.
If you have a population of, say, 2n males and 4n females, the offspring will be 3n. For a 3n individual, undergoing meiosis is, uh, troublesome. Because 3 doesn't divide by 2 so well.
So, that's that. No gametes, no offspring. Unless you do it like wild dandelion, which *despite being unable to reproduce* just tells you *"Yeah, you know what, f... off!"* and simply goes agamosperm, reproducing anyway. But for an animal, that's reasonably unlikely to happen.
The real challenge is that you want not 2 or 3, but 50 generations which are OK, so you would need to find a number which only results in an odd pairing after 50 generations. That's probably a tough one.
It's fiction though, so... got some leeway, I'd say. Might just say "poly" and not mention how many.
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I've already talked about this world in [How would criminals be punished in a world where everyone can teleport?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/203394/how-would-criminals-be-punished-in-a-world-where-everyone-can-teleport)
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> Everyone in this world from the age of 5 can teleport to anywhere they have been before even if they forgot how to go there. This started about 4,000 B.C.E where a bright green star landed on earth and affected all humans to be able to teleport, they can teleport with them 5 times their weight (they choose what they bring) and if anyone forgets a place they've been they can not go there. The reason why young people can't teleport is because the part of the brain isn't fully developed.
>
>
>
### How would transportation evolve?
#### Pros
They would be able to go anywhere they have been before. If they wake up late, they are now at work. If they are chased by a bear, they are now at home. They can easily go to safety. The problem is they would have had to be there once before. A simple fix to that is if someone they know has been to any far place they can be teleported there by that someone and can now always visit that place.
#### Cons
People are known to be lazy. People might not build roads because "Who needs roads, I have my brain I can teleport." Whole families might just teleport their young to any far place and never walk there for generations, whole places might be only available through teleportation because people forgot how to walk to any far place.
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**Almost Identical Teleport Stations**
Other users have suggested Teleport stations, places designed to be easy to teleport to and not change with time, so old memories are always valid. I imagine they work like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J7AKPl.png)
Each station has a large Lobby. The architecture is very simple and easy to remember. For example plain white walls. Any two stations are identical except for:
(1) Size. Larger stations have larger lobbies.
(2) Labels. Each station has the Station name printed on the wall in huge black letters.
It is very easy to remember what the stations look like. Even if your ability to visualize is poor, you can always stand in one station and imagine the words on the wall are different, and pop to any other station.
Instead of Timetables the stations distribute maps with the names and locations of the other stations. They also provide a service where you can call a porter with your location. The porter appears beside you and teleports you to any station you like. The next time you don't need the porter.
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You have hit the wall of this system, congratulations!
>
> if anyone forgets a place they've been they can not go there.
>
>
>
Places change and memories change. If the memory and the place create a link, any change to either of the side will break that link.
For example, there is a lake I remember to have visited as a kid, and I remember it is a fantastic place. I have been there in my adulthood after about 15 years, and it has turned into something unappealing: the water level has dropped, the lake sides are no longer green but covered with dried up grass and garbage where not occupied by bars and restaurants. Simply said, the place that I have in memory doesn't exist any more.
Or the place I know better in Tokyo, the very house where I leaved there for some months, it's simply no longer there, replaced by another building after just 5 years after I left.
What might happen is that something akin to stations will develop, as places purposefully kept with an unchanged configuration and set up, which can act as hub for teleporters. They will teleport there, and from there will move with more conventional means.
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Roads as usual
Not sure that transporting pipes for gas pipe line is such a pleasant activity, or cargo containers, or 40t of gravel/cement/wood/sand/fish/toilet paper/whatever
So leave it to robots, autopilots and cargo transport(in the future)
To adress memory issues and natural changes of places or their dissapearances - special tranporting hubs, a room with a QR code on the wall, those rooms are identical across the world, it just QR code/whatever is more convinient is different on each wall. Roads from there to else near by places as well.
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While personal transport would be different, any other transport will be different.
A lumberjack can get his equipment into the forest, but teleporting an entire tree is not in their power (I assume). This means that any large scale transportation still requires "normal" transportation. Horse and carriage, cars, trucks, aircraft etc are still required for construction and other things. You can also imagine someone on the market not wanting to leave his goods as he teleports them back home, so he uses a horse and carriage instead. At least as far as he needs to feel safe and teleport his stuff the rest of the way.
This means that sidewalks and bicycle paths will be non-existant but a dressed down roads system will be available to reach city centers and important places like shopping malls, storage facilities and industry.
Because personal transport isn't as important the speed of transport technology advancement will be much slower.
[Answer]
Here's a few things...
**As for forgetting where you've been:
Teleporting should be a trainable ability the same way driving is. How will that help?**
Anyone can just get behind the wheel of a car without any training or a license and use the vehicle. But they won't do it correctly, at least not at first. So you get training. There are driving classes at high school and dedicated driving schools.
My point being that in the training you are taught how *not* to forget the places you've been. Memory shortcuts are connected to specific words, and in that way you think "teleport" and "sand" you always go to the beach. You don't have to specifically remember all the details of the place, you just think "sand" when you're teleporting and appear at that beach you've attached that memory word to. Or to be more specific, you attach a visual with the name of the place and that's all you need to get to that place.
You've basically trained or tricked your mind into a shortcut way to teleporting without having to have all these vast and detailed memories. And we've already kind of done that anyway. Whenever we think of the name of the street that the house we lived in we think of that house. Whenever I think the word Crotona I remember that apartment building I lived in on that street. It's my first thought. That will be your trainable ability.
**Teleporting to someplace you've never been:**
Extrapolating from the above, instead of using words linkage to go to go to places you've been, how about using photos to go to places you've never been. Training to focus deeply on what the place looks like (and then training to link the picture to a word, like above) you can teleport to that place. The way your teleportation works is that what you really need is the mental image of that place, not actual first hand experience of the place.
Here's an interesting rub then. Unless you have that word/picture, first hand experience of a place, you can't teleport there. I have none of the above of Huntsville, North Dakota so I can't teleport there unless I get that info. This might be a reason why picture books will be very popular in your world. Or better yet, Google Earth!
**A method for gaining firsthand experience of places to teleport to:**
In Teleportation Training School, Class 101 is just going to all sort of places all over the world. Once you get to a new place you do your mental training exercises to memorize it/link it to a word. And it's your job to do that for the next few months.
Later, your mid term exam is taking the teacher to those places with you successfully.
**Traditional mass transportation, or what's left of it:**
One thing is that people are absolutely lazy so they won't spend the time and effort to create new transportations modes, or continue to maintain existing ones, if they can teleport anywhere. So public transportation goes away. And only collectors would keep old cars and planes as collectibles for fun.
Maybe transportation of mass amounts of goods might continue if those goods in those mass amounts absolutely needed to get somewhere ASAP. But even then groups of paid teleporters might be able to do the trick. There's your new industry.
There's even a question about something like this:
[How can a colony of teleporters make the most money while keeping their teleportation a secret?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/111349/how-can-a-colony-of-teleporters-make-the-most-money-while-keeping-their-teleport/111353#111353)
[Answer]
**Transporting goods**
Five times your own weight is not that much in way of goods, particularly bulk ones. A well-organized system where porters teleport to and from places with exactly five times their own weight in goods (or less, if one region has a more concentrated good) might work, but involves a lot of complications, such as ensuring the porters know the place in the first place and having to have people to divvy up goods into correctly sized bundles. This would give more mundane means an opening.
As a consequence, any transportation system will be heavily weighted toward large-scale transportation of bulk, heavy goods. Spices get teleported, steel goes by barge.
**Cheapness**
Since you mention teleporting entire families, obviously creating a new porter is just a matter of a porter teleporting five other people weighing as much or less than he does. Or more than five if they are substantially smaller, such as children.
This creates the high potential for a guild that maintains its cartel and jacks up the prices. When it's cheaper to go by water, or even by land, people will go by water or land.
**Stealth**
People who don't want people teleporting in will regularly change a site so that it's no longer what it was. The only way in is mundane.
Furthermore the safest place to teleport in is a location kept carefully identical and distinctive, to make it easy to remember. This also allows the government to watch for smugglers, escaped criminals, or the like. Mundane means evade this.
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I would look at this through an economic lens. When everyone can teleport, what is the demand to offer a service around it? Or what is needed/in-demand? Then:
1. How long does one teleportation take?
2. How fast can you teleport again given your last teleportation?
3. Can you only teleport a certain number of times?
4. How does volume relate to weight?
5. Can you teleport with others to transport heavier items?
6. How can teleportation be disrupted? What can go wrong? Are there mitigations? What are they worth?
7. Can you make your teleportation look cool when you leave or arrive? Is this valued?
8. Long long list here...
Anywhere you can spot friction in the process, you could potentially find a market there so long as the incentives are worth the effort, and then you could speak to what may occur or "evolve", all other supply/demand remaining equal.
On your point about roads. Roads are a byproduct of people going from point A to B. When we pave the road, we are saying that we value a paved road over using that money for alternative uses. Roads in a teleportation scenario would cease to exist. Answer how people will teleport to a site without teleporting into an object already there (or even what will happen to the gasses that we generally think as empty or available). What if the available locations are taken? What dictates whether you can teleport there? Can you elect to teleport unsafely? Can others elect to teleport only safely? Does this relate to your brain in someway? Is this handled centrally? Can a teleportation be cancelled? Do cancellations cost you anything in time or money or other? Etc.
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**A Philosophical Counter**
I know this isn't what the OP wants, and I'm no luddite, but...
There would be a movement promoting walking, swiming, riding bikes, driving cars -setting aside the extra time required. That is because the metaphor for the **'journey' being more important than the 'destination'** is more than cliche. When you participate directly in something you get more out of it, a 'quality of experience'.
As technology reduces the requirement of outdoor-interaction, the need for physical contact with the outside world doesn't. Just as I could call door-dash and have a restaurant make and deliver my food, I choose to cook it. Not to save money or some other requirement, but the quality is better. I enjoy the result better *because* I participated in it.
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There are philosophical and physical challenges to this whole scenario which are difficult to resolve without changing the fundamental techniques involved.
## 1. Infrastructure
1. Teleportation has to happen from and to uniquely identifiable space coordinates in the universe. This itself requires certain **infrastructure** in place.
a. There is a **dynamic registry** maintained by a governing authority updated at extremely small intervals. Real World Scenario: There are multiple registries created by governments and private entities each competing to be faster and faster at updates
b. There is a mechanism to subscribe to one of these registries
c. There is a **licensing authority** that gives licenses to use teleportation, which is considered extremely dangerous. Wrong coordinates can take you to outer space, below the earth's crust, etc.
d. New technologies allow you to teleport your consciousness before teleporting your body, thereby reducing the risk, and fatalities by a great proportion.
2. Because **registry updates** and subscriptions don't happen at **light-speed intervals** there are certain lags at each stage and teleportation therefore is not considered an exact science. You always teleport somewhere near you wanted to and never exactly where you wanted to.
3. In the earlier days, when registries were only **government-owned** and not updated so frequently, fatalities were common and teleportation was left for the experts. Even the experts never tried teleporting to any interior of any structure, house or building because of the risks involved. People were frequently left fully stranded in walls or half-stuck in ceilings and floors with dire consequences. Therefore even the experts teleported in open environments.
4. Over time it was considered a good practice to leave open spaces near residential and commercial structures.
5. As the teleportation sector was slowly opened to the private sector leading to better technologies such as faster registry updates, better registry coverages and sub-physical pre-teleportation technologies, number of casualties due to teleportation went down, licenses became easier to get, however it still is always considered a dangerous mode of transport.
6. Even today after so many advances, accidents - though rare - do still occur, when in emergencies people do not pre-teleport their consciousness.
7. Because these registries do not have **publicly-available addresses** of certain restricted areas like *jails, political institutions, banks, private homes, bedrooms, etc.* there is a black market, a dark web of registries worth billions if not trillions of money.
## 2. Answer to Original Question
1. Certain primitive road and rail infrastructure does exist, because of several political and non-political movements against the harmful effects of teleportation. However as technologies became better and better these movements became weaker. Though cars never got invented, certain regions who do not have access to the latest technologies of teleportation still rely on animal transportation and steam engines for transporting valuable goods and for children and weak adults.
2. Because of the initial risks involved in teleportation, people generally left large open spaces in and around residential and commercial structures. This led to unnecessarily exaggerated distances between important endpoints of travel. And thereby making other forms of transport cumbersome, less desirable which in turn lead to less advances in non-teleportation means.
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My idea is that every building would be equipped with a teleport console. This would be for places you had never been to. You would type in a place name, and it would show you a picture of the place and give you 10 seconds to memorize it. You now know what it looks like, so you can teleport there. The picture would probably be live-updating (i.e. a camera on the teleport console of the other building), so changes in the buildinng/furniture wouldn't affect your travel.
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You might want to consider reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination> In that novel, the self teleportation is called "jaunting" and he goes into a number of concepts such as protecting yourself from assassins and the idea of always taking a vehicle instead of jaunting as a status symbol.
Edit
Since I was asked for a few more examples from the book, here are a few.
1. Since everyone could teleport, you wanted to make sure that people who might be potential assassins couldn't get enough information about your location that they could teleport in with a weapon and kill or kidnap members of your family. This involved such things as going through mazes in the dark so that you couldn't know your exact locations. It also meant that people had to have guards on alert at all times to stop assassins or thieves from carrying out their activities and escaping. Valuables would have to be rotated between rooms with traps placed in the rooms to catch anyone trying to break in. People who couldn't afford such protection were very vulnerable.
2. When people were put in prison, special precautions had to be used to stop people from escaping. They were rendered unconscious and placed in windowless rooms where they had no idea of their location. This meant that teleporting yourself would send you to a unknown location, probably embedding yourself in rock or thousands of feet in the air. In fact, it mentioned that one of the frequent sounds you heard in the prison was explosions from people embedding themselves in rock.
3. As I mentioned, being able to use normal transportation and never teleporting was a status symbol, and people would arrive at elaborate events in futuristic equivalents of aircraft and automobiles.
4. There were public buildings that had signs describing the locations of other public locations. It wasn't indicated how the directions were listed. Since being just a few feet off could kill you by embedding you in a floor or a wall, the locations had to be precise within inches. Some critics said that this was a problem with the world-building since the human mind can't handle such precise measurements.
5. Blind people couldn't teleport, which made them very vulnerable.
6. You still had spaceships since it wasn't possible to teleport between planets.
You have to understand that it has been a good many years since I read this book, and I'm not able to recall many details about the teleportation parts of the plot.
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Most of the time, the best way to get to a new place will be to find someone whose been there and pay them to bring you. After they've done this once, you won't need them anymore. In early days, cities will have transportation markets where well-traveled people put up stalls. In the modern era, this is managed over the internet.
You'll have small boats early, since that'll be the only way to get a first person to another continent.
You probably won't have roads until steam engines are invented. Sure, a horse-drawn cart can carry more than 5x the driver's weight, but not by enough to justify the longer travel time, much less the cost of building a road. Just teleport back and forth a dozen times.
With trains this equation changes. But without a tradition of road-building, track-laying will be very difficult. The social infrastructure for obtaining right-of-ways won't be there. Similarly giant cargo ships are worthwhile, but hull-building may not be developed.
Engines are still invented for factories and pumps and such. Eventually somebody applies them to bulk transportation.
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>
> they can teleport with them 5 times their weight (they choose what they bring)
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The question ignores the quite common reality that someone might want to transport **more** than 5x their body weight.
Thus, while roads won't be developed directly for people, they'll be developed for **our stuff**:
* grain to the mill
* flour from the mill
* stone
* wood
* copper and tin ores
* sheep/goats to/from pastures, sheering, milking, slaughter, etc
* manufactured goods
* etc. etc. *ad nauseam*
] |
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[
Note this is postulating that this starts from Stone Age.
'Mate' is defined as penile-vaginal sex with ejaculation.
Requirement starts at puberty. People know when it starts, how long they've got, the general info that this death-clock resets by sex, and they are also killed, via magic. Cannot be circumvented by science. Inter-sexuality does not exist, as I can't figure out how to rework the mating condition to prevent that from being an automatic death sentence.
Each mating gets each partner 30 days of life. Unless it's a woman, whose pregnancy keeps her alive for the whole pregnancy, and 30 days after birth.
Mating with condoms or any other kind of physical contraceptive, grants 1/2 the time to live of the previous mating. Like a 30-day girl and 30-day guy mate, and then they both have 15 days to live, keep doing it, and they could get to a point where they can't mate fast enough to prevent death.
However, non-physical, non-immediate contraceptives, like [the Pill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pill), or the rhythm method, or douching, don't shrink the 30-day death clock.
But, Inter-Uterine Implants or any kind of Surgery, do shrink the death clock.
Note that if a male gets a girl pregnant from mating, and they still get 30 days from that mating, but if they mate with her again, on their 16th day, then they just get one extra day of life. So, it's best to space it out farther apart... And there's some math like... 30+15+7.5+~4 +~2 + ~1 = ~59 ... If you time it so they cut it really close, they get a little bit less than ~2 months before they have to switch to a non-pregnant girl.
That's also how it works with normal sex. If you have non-pregnant sex on consecutive days, you keep adding only 1 day to your death clocks. as 30 days from day of last sex is 1 day before the last time. The death clock counts from day of last mating, and resets at each mating.
Also, women don't run out of eggs.
Effects of males mating with pregnant females is the same as contraception-mating.
People can die by injury and illness, but not of old age. Immortality begins at 20, but the 'immortals' are still subject to Mate Or Die.
Infertile people function basically as normal in the universe, as long as males can still ejaculate, and women still have a vagina, so certain injuries will kill by proxy.
Lastly, for now, if you're on life support, you still need sex, or you'll die.
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As Samuel stated, society would develop in such a radically different way that it would probably be unrecognizable to us.
I think there would be several major consequences to consider:
**Hey there, good lookin'!**
People who are poor AND ugly/unhealthy/unattractive will die off rather quickly. A number of ugly women would die, although in fewer numbers. Eventually the human species would become a lot ... prettier.
**No longer a taboo**
Talking about sex, or negotiating a session strictly as a means for survival would probably become commonplace. Prostitution would become not just a legitimate profession, but probably an incredibly important, respected, and lucrative one.
**Family structure**
It's been argued that we are not genetically wired to spend our lives with a single mate. This situation would more than likely mean that monogamy would never even arise as a concept, let alone be enshrined in society.
If you examine how deeply monogamy affects our societal structure, and many of our morals, laws (laws to property, for example), etc. you'll understand why this is such a big deal.
**War**
The way wars are fought will have changed to a great degree. You need to take carefully plan your supply chain, etc when planning a campaign, but now, in addition to having to pack enough food and supplies, you must also bring an adequate balance of women and men to keep your troops alive for any campaign lasting more than 30 days.
**Disease**
Sexually transmitted diseases would run rampant through the population. Seriously. Rampant.
**Enslavement**
This situation will more than likely lead to the enslavement of women everywhere, and to their being treated as prized commodities more so than actual human beings.
Additionally, a woman who becomes pregnant instantly loses her value, so forced abortions would also probably become commonplace (with the associated loss of life involved). Being pregnant may very well become something like a faux pas - especially if a woman can't depend on the support of a husband.
Just to add to their misery, sex crimes would likely become completely acceptable. Imagine a man in front of a judge saying:
>
> "Your honor, if I didn't have sex right then and there I would have died, and she wasn't going to accommodate me. I ***had*** to rape her!"
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Of course, I don't think it would even get to the point where this would become a serious offence. Most likely rape will just become a completely acceptable practice, as long as you're "keep your hands off of other people's property". More of an issue would be made if you got some other man's property pregnant than over the fact that you forced yourself on her.
Furthermore, having no effective contraceptives will lead to a lot of women getting pregnant all the time. This will take a horrible toll on their health, and I can guarantee you that they will die in droves.
Baby girls would be valued above baby boys, with most boys probably being left to die in the woods, or sacrificed, etc. Who would want their sons to grow up only to become their "competition"?
This is just off the top of my head ... I'll think about it a little more and maybe come back to edit my answer, but basically, it would be pretty grim.
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**Your world becomes "Abortion-world", "Baby-killing-world" or "Bloody-sex-world".**
The core of the problem is that getting all women pregnant means death for the men because of the diminishing returns. This needs to be solved one way or another.
The somewhat gross but non-nightmare way would be for the men to only have sex with the women during their menstruation, assuming they still have one. If this has the same diminishing returns as sex-while-pregnant, it will not work.
The next way is to abort 90% or more of all pregnancies as soon as they are detected. That way things can be back to normal before the men reach 30+15+7.5 etc. days.
The final way is to start killing men, boys and male babies, until the ratio men-women (of age 15+) is about 1:10. Then each man can have sex with one of his 10 wives every 30 days and the last one should have given birth by the time it's her turn again. You can bet that the strongest and most violent men will pass on their genes in this scenario, completely changing their world from how ours developed.
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**There's not a lot of mystery here; people would have a lot of sex.**
Sex would lose its taboo in society (if it ever gained one). When it becomes as essential as eating, except with even greater benefit, people aren't going to be all squeamish about it.
We'd see a lot more mixing of genders in places like the military, expeditions, and remote postings. We'd have no celibate priests (not for long) and religions in general would look quite different. We'd also probably see a lot more terminations of pregnancies. Since this started in the stone age, human societies wouldn't have anything near the same views as we do on these subjects.
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If this begins in a stone-age society, odds are that everyone would die long before they figured out that having sex would keep them alive.
The first most likely scenario is the extinction of the human race. Congratulations.
But let's assume some shaman or whatever explains it to the tribe and they all start procreating en masse. Within 3 months every female capable of having children is pregnant. Within the next 60 days all of the men die because having sex with a pregnant woman doesn't count. With no more men to impregnate them when they give birth, all of the women die 30 days after giving birth.
Second most likely scenario: The extinction of the human race.
But let's assume there's at least one infertile woman per tribe. (And let's assume the holy so-and-so told them about pregnant math, too, because otherwise we face human extinction.) The infertile woman would quickly become the most popular in town! And the most sore...
So now that we've established a deus ex machina for the human race to survive the "die" part of "mate or die", we can actually talk about the interesting part. **FREAKING IMMORTALITY**.
**HOLY FREAKING IMMORTALITY BATMAN!**
Even accounting for disease and war, a society of neanderthals with the reflexes and immune systems of 20 year olds would have a dramatically lower death rate1. Factor in the insanely high birth rate caused by non-stop mating, and you have a population boom the likes of which this world has never seen.
But how much of a boom? Let's play with some numbers. The average population growth rate from 10,000BCE to 1000CE is about .03%, so let's use that number as our control.
In 1000 years at .03% population growth, a tribe of 30 would grow to 40.
With an increased birth rate and decreased death rate, we can easily double the population growth rate.
In 1000 years at .06% population growth, a tribe of 30 would grow to 54. That's not so bad...
But slightly more optimistic numbers could give us 4x the control growth rate.
In 1000 years, at .12% population growth, a tribe of 30 would grow to 100.
But to get more accurate math... The average woman in a 3rd world country today has about 4 children in her lifetime. In your world, since everyone would constantly be having sex and neanderthals were not known for their knowledge of contraceptives, it's likely that women would spend the majority of their lives pregnant, potentially having a baby once every year2. So we would go from 4 children per average adult mating life to as many as 50.... Which would give us 15x the growth rate.
In 1000 years, at .46% population growth, a tribe of 30 would grow to 29843.
**It would take a tribe of 30 neanderthals 4,188 years to reach a population of 7 billion**. Since agriculture won't be invented for another 30,000 years, I'm sure you can figure out what happens to 7 billion neanderthals competing for very scarce resources.
Third most likely scenario: Extinction of the human race4.
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* 1For the purposes of my math, I'm using a death rate modifier of 1/2. Most of the reason old age kills us is because our bodies grow weaker and more susceptible to disease and injury as we age.
* 2 In this scenario where everyone's having sex and condoms won't exist for another 50,000 years, the men can easily outnumber the non-pregnant women 10:1. Therefore, we can assume that non-pregnant women would be having sex with multiple partners potentially multiple times per day. With typical human fertility rates, yes, they would be getting pregnant.
* 3 None of these numbers are really accurate. My math is woefully inadequate (as are my math skills). I suspect that I am vastly underestimating the impact of immortality on a vivaciously procreating race.
* 4 Of course, as population increases, famine, disease, and war will increase as well. They'd never reach 7 billion. It's even possible they might reach a balancing point between baby booming and famine, where death by attrition keeps the population growth to 0. But that's highly unlikely when you're talking about migrant hunter-gather tribes. Your society is doomed.
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Basically, to summarize, you can *not* introduce immortality without dramatically cutting the birthrate or increasing the death rate in other ways. Overpopulation is a big deal even today with all of our agriculture and techno-wizardry and myriad contraceptive methods. A stone age society with a mating mandate could not survive the explosive population growth.
However, since this whole idea is hypothetical and fictional, maybe we can figure out a way such a society *could* survive. Here are some things we can focus on:
* The death rate would have to increase substantially to compensate for the immortality.
* The birth rate would have to drop substantially to compensate for the immortality.
* The ratio of men to *non-pregnant* women would have to remain close to 1.
* The rules surrounding your mating mandate may need some changes. You have a *lot* of problematic conditions and non-sequitur stipulations.
And here are a few thoughts to kick around:
* You *must* have war. Lots of it. And only men go to war. It may even become a ritualized aspect of society. Send all the old men a-viking so we don't have to feed them. Or send all the pubescent young men to war as a "coming of age" test, and only the survivors can come home to mate (I personally like this one - it puts an interesting selective pressure on the species).
* Women and men are significantly less fertile than normal humans, reducing pregnancy rates to once every few years.
* Infertility may be more common than it is in humans. This guarantees that you have enough non-pregnant women to keep all your men from dying, and it slows your birth rate.
* I don't like explanations like "because magic". I'd recommend a biological reason for your mating mandate and then let biology determine the rules that govern the mandate. That will also help you sort out how the society would evolve and survive. It gives you ways to mess with fertility rates and gender ratios and death rates that wouldn't be "normal" for us. It also solves your intersex problem and simplifies a number of your conditions that are simply unrealistic. It also removes the requirement for a deus ex machina shaman to tell everyone the news.
* As others have mentioned, yes, STDs would be a big big thing. But so would immunity. STDs would put a tremendous selective pressure on your society, causing immunity to evolve rapidly. AIDS might be no more dangerous to your neanderthals than HPV is to us. Similarly, immunity to other diseases would develop rapidly, as disease becomes the biggest selective pressure and those with greater immunity live longer and reproduce much much more.
* When in doubt, remember [Star Trek](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tribble).
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**Everybody would die and the human race would be extinct before getting to the bronze age.**
Really.
If this starts somehow in the middle of the Stone Age, people won't be able to make sex on the speed needed to survive.
Your rules regarding pregnancy would kill everyone in a few generations. Women aren't really comfortable to engage in those types of act soon after a pregnancy, and even with modern medicine the recovery time for comfortable intercourse can take up a few months. But, that's not your only problem.
Those rules are really hard for someone on the stone age to understand. Most males would simply die out during puberty - for young males, getting a mate is really hard when you have to compete against stronger, older, and more experienced males. Since successful males don't die out, they will keep reproducing with available females - including their own offspring, since females are a really limited resource. That would make inbreeding defects skyrocket, and soon everybody would have serious genetic defects to cope.
But, that's not all.
Unless you somehow had 9-to-1 female-to-male ratio, your people won't survive two generations.
Let's suppose you have about half of your population of each sex, at the start of our experiment. That's the normal ratio for humans, so let's use that. Let's consider only people at reproductive age, at first.
Consider that there are around 15 people on a settlement. That's a good number for a stone-age family.
From those 15 people, let's suppose that you have 10 adults, 5 of each sex.
Once the females get pregnant, and they WILL get pregnant, their death-delaying abilities would be useless and all the males would die in a month. The females would last a few more months, but would die soon after, followed by the children.
That's it.
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**Sex, and many of its currently taboo components, will be a culturally accepted concept that children are familiarized with from a young age. This will make some of what follows sound disturbing to many of us.**
Youth will grow up in a society where advertising, pop culture, and parenting all handle sex in an open and relaxed way. Given the life-or-death situation, parents and society will be very involved in ensuring that their children begin mating as soon as their clock starts ticking at puberty. Science will take great efforts to pinpoint this moment as precisely as possible. There will likely be school services in place to help children pair up at an appropriate time to get an age-appropriate mate.
More generally, familial and age-related taboos about sex are going to be very different. It’s possible that age-related taboos may not exist at all — what we currently consider to be pedophilia may not be a societal concern as long as the child is on the onset of or at least near puberty. Incest or close familial mating will maintain its genetic risk, but may very well be a go-to option when you get into the last week of your thirty day period.
Sex will also take on a very different emotional role and may be divided into two (or three) categories — sex for survival, sex for fun, and romantic sex. It’s very likely that an entire industry will evolve around this with prostitution being legal and both men and women being involved in it.
Disease will be a tricky one. It’s possible that the sudden appearance of a disease like AIDS could actually wipe out a massive portion of the human population. It would also be treated as an epidemic on the level of ebola or other mass-casualty bugs. For other less deadly STDs, there may be some societal classification systems that require frequent testing and give you an ID card that certifies your status.
Pregnancy also has an interesting aspect. Prior to a society in which a major “prostitution” industry has developed, the pregnant woman would have significant control over the man given that she can survive without him for 10 months. Considering that this change is expected to begin in stone-age humans, it’s not inconceivable that society would develop with a matriarchal focus controlled by women rather than one dominated by men.
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**Expansion to new lands would be limited. Wars over resources would be common and abortion would happen regularly.**
It's likely that small communities, lone rangers, family pioneers, etc. would be non-existent. Essentially, individuals can't be separated from a breeding population. As soon as a woman became pregnant, she would lose her usefulness to men wanting to have sex to stay alive. Since as you say "Effects of males mating with pregnant females is the same as contraception-mating."
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People will also become quite miserable in their earlier years(before puberty).
In the real world, boyfriends/girlfriends might have sex more often than husbands/wives do or parents of young children do, simply due to it being not much of a medium of "relaxation" after marriage.
What will happen to a baby when the mother is constantly forced to abort/have sex with someone as a job/anything else? Who will take care of the baby? The 30-day requirement is too short. The woman lives till she has a baby, but what about the father of that baby? He'll still need sex every 30 days, at least, if he ever wants to live long enough to see the baby grow up. Heck, the concept of a baby having a father might have to be abolished.
Raising a kid will become immensely difficult.
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[ I accidentally skipped a paragraph in my first read of the question, I didn't notice that sex with a pregnant women doesn't keep the man alive. So unfortunately my answer below assumes that people with partners are basically OK, and that's not true.
Therefore, either this problem can be solved (because there are enough post-menopausal or otherwise infertile women alive to make things work), and things proceed as below, or else very quickly men become rare in the population and the social order is rather different. Possibly the species doesn't survive that: it's theoretically possible, but we aren't really set up for it.]
This starts in the Stone Age, so human society already exists in some form. Everyone understands the death clock, so they know what they have to do. There is probably a rather traumatic time during which everyone's understanding of the social role of sex has to change, or else the species dies out. Basically, dominant men can't monopolise women (or vice-versa) or else the numbers don't add up and too many people drop dead at puberty.
Men without partners seek prostitutes (once commerce exists: before that they seek any women available). As was the case historically, prostitution is an even worse deal without effective contraception than with it. We know what prostitution is and how it works, all you've changed is that those without partners now need it to live.
Without wishing to dwell on it, rape might be much more common since it's "justified" by the need to live. Elevating the urge for sex into a legitimate survival requirement is potentially an extremely disturbing notion. Then again, people need food to live and societies still managed to somewhat police theft. Perhaps there would exist charitable infertile men and women willing to take one for the team to keep others alive.
I'd like to say that women without partners seek male prostitutes, but I think we all know that's not how human history really happened.
A couple that didn't want children *could* in theory get by reasonably well by having sex once a month at the right time of month. OK, that's not 100% effective at preventing pregnancy, but it's not bad and if you're only having sex once a month then it's a lot more effective than the "headline" figure for the rhythm method in real-world practical use. But history tells us that's not what people will choose to do. Fertile women are going to spend most of their time pregnant, with all the medical danger that entails, but that's nothing really different from 99% of human history and it's not because of "mate or die".
I think society could develop just about as normal (it might not: but it could). There will be a different attitude to the sexual act itself, but not necessarily to gender roles. Obviously there are no celibate religious roles. *Maybe* the Catholic church is still opposed to contraception, but since it cannot preach abstinence I suspect that the notion of the sexual urge being sinful is much less entrenched in society the first place, and so the Church never considers it a big deal either way.
The "sexual revolution" came about from the contraceptive pill, *not* merely from barrier contraception (sausage skin with a knot in it or whatever). So, the pill is basically a complete escape from the "mate or die" scenario, since it's permitted by the magical powers that be who enforce the rules. So it has a similar or even stronger effect on social gender roles. In modern technological societies, the "mate or die" requirement is a mundane historical inconvenience that has been dealt with, just like cholera or short-sightedness.
Then the question devolves to "how do societies with immortals function?", which (if it hasn't been already) could be asked as a separate question since the *reason* for the immortality is almost insignificant.
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I find myself disagreeing with many of the answers here.
I see no reason to think ugly people would die. There are ugly people of both genders and they'll end up desperate--ugly will have sex with ugly.
What I would expect to see are sex houses--places people whose clock is running out can go with the expectation of sex when you're desperate. There are two parts, the first akin to a swinger's club (although it's all individuals rather than couples) and the second part where you're matched by lottery and expected to have sex with whoever you are matched with, perhaps even with more than one person (if the genders don't come out even.)
You'll also see sex workers of both genders providing such services.
I don't think you'll see the huge abortion rates many are picturing but you certainly will have to abort most pregnancies as the death rate from accidental death will be well below the oops rate of any permitted contraception.
Another thought: I think you would see more emphasis on a male version of the pill. The likely candidate we have would actually be tested.
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Since all this starts in the Stone Age, all social norms will develop differently, but at first, back then, things wouldn’t be all that different.
I do not know what the life expectancy was 10’000 years (or more) ago, but I think it’s a safe guess that people often started reproduction earlier, i.e. before puberty ended, so they could raise their children, although the group/family/clan would be there as a backup. Since many infants died early (and more than pregnant or delivering women) there should be enough wet nurses available if a girl had not enough milk because her breasts hadn’t developed yet.
Overall, however, there would be more successful child births than in OTL. Populations would grow more and feel the pressure to supply more food. Farming would be invented much earlier. That, or infanticide would be common (before abortions became safely possible), especially of male babies. Even a society that can support all children may accept to deny sex to some of its pubescent (male) members.
It might also become normal to have “gang-bangs” to compensate for the pregnancy advantage of women. Fatherhood then wouldn’t mean much. Monogamy wouldn’t evolve in any case, except maybe if enough infertile prostitutes were available and extramarital sex with them was accepted during a wife’s pregnancy. Naturally infertile people would be very popular, probably they would become the clergy. They would also become the hubs of STIs, but maybe these diseases wouldn’t be as bad as in our world, because people became immune to them over time.
With almost every girl in their teens delivering about one baby per year, children are plenty and with better health care there’s a constant explosion of population (further fueled by the immortality of adults), although it will see setbacks in waves due to famines and epidemics. A single life doesn’t count much, losses are coped with. Overall, this keeps the pressure on innovation and expansion constantly high. Humanity will cover the planet even quicker and may not have time to diversify as much, because there’ll be lots of contact between ethnic groups which either results in wars or intermingling. Evolution will probably prefer the fittest women who have wide hips early on. The sexual dimorphism would be stronger than we know it.
Then, some day, abortions are invented – apart from beating a pregnant girl up until she has a miscarriage – and quickly perfected, although some women die or become infertile (since dozens of abortions before your twentieth birthday won’t be a fun ride). Even if pregnancy control isn’t possible, birth control is. Some traditionalists will say it’s against the will of the gods, but soon many girls will bear less or no children before they reach adulthood (and immortality). From then on, humanity will develop similar to how we know it except that teenage sexuality is nowhere close to being a taboo. It’s the most normal thing in the world – and always has been – that puberty means experiencing sexuality. Adults will glorify the memory of their Wild Days.
Big projects that are mostly executed by men due to their physique (e.g. the pyramids, wars etc.) require extra logistics for the supply of non-pregnant women and are therefore less likely, though still possible.
PS: I also can see the “women as commodity” variant happen.
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As well as the other points raised in answers, society would be very much more religious, since there would be daily proof in everyone's lives of some kind of God or other supernatural entity, causing miraculous deaths with no reasonable biological or evolutionary explanation.
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## A dark and grim future ahead...
With usual female fertility most tribes would die out in less than a year, because all women would be pregnant in no time, then the men die after 2 months and the women will die 30 days after giving birth, leaving the newborns to starve and die.
Except the lucky chosen tribe with an infertile women, who can't get pregnant but can give live eternally! She would be the center of religion for generations to come and be regularly used by the whole town for survival. other tribes would fight for their own "eternal maiden" or "live spending infertile slave" however the worldview. And the rest of society would process normally. Except women being pregnant almost all the time, producing children without end. Children would be raised and used for war and everything before puberty. Because there are more newborns then society can sustain, many of them would be slaughtered after birth. Women would most likely also less favored in society, since they are pregnant 90% of the time and so need a lot more food, care and cannot work 2 months every year.
So society would be mostly immortal males, using the eternal maiden to survive, there would probably a lot of experminets with young girls after puberty to make them eternal maidens.
If the twisted society survives till the modern day and finds a usable contraceptive which still grants the 30 days, women would for the first time gain equals rights to men and live an eternal live with them (if the church and powers in charge would let it come to this)
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You don't need a nine-to-one ratio. Even a one-to-one ratio would be workable. First realize that the fertilization rate for one intercourse session is going to be less than one-in-six, assuming standard human fertility rates. So if you only have sex when you have to, never just for fun, you have a one-in-six chance of fertilization per month.
Or to put it another way, take fifty men and fifty women, thirty-six of whom are pregnant and four just delivered. Each man's time comes up and half grab one of the pregnant women. The other half have sex with the ten non-pregnant women. So that's four pregnancies (twenty-five acts of intercourse divided by six). Next month the half that had sex with non-pregnant women switch to pregnant women. The other half have sex with the ten non-pregnant women, producing four pregnancies. That's steady state. There will always be thirty-six pregnant women, four recently delivered women, and ten available fertile women.
Now you might point out that there may be more than four pregnancies in a month. That's an average. And some women will die in pregnancy. But twenty-four children will reach adulthood each year (half die between birth and adulthood). Two a month, a boy and a girl (average). So if women die once in a hundred pregnancies and half of births grow to adulthood, that's twenty-five new women for every death.
Also, men will die off in battles with other tribes or while hunting. If there's a real shortage of women, the men will get together and raid another tribe for women. That both reduces the number of men (some die in battle) and increases the number of women.
They'll have tremendous excess population, as the population doubles every two years. Cannibalism maybe? Human sacrifice? Constant war? Presumably they'll use whatever mechanism to increase the ratio of women to men. Even if a one-to-one ratio is workable, it puts more pressure on women than men. If fertile women have sex once a month, that would give them an average of six months not pregnant for every ten months either pregnant or newly delivered. So that's an eight to three ratio of women to men is optimal.
At eight to three, each man and available fertile woman has sex once a month. Each woman averages three kids in four years. Ignoring deaths, population doubles every thirty-two months. With deaths, that may decrease to every six years.
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Other people have written about how women would be pregnant a lot. This is going to be incredibly hard on the women, with many losses of life:
* because of vaginal tearing from the birth, most doctors recommend waiting at least six to eight weeks after birth to have sex. Being forced to have sex after 30 days at most after every pregnancy is going to result in pain, possible infection and possible scarring making subsequent sex even more painful
* subsequent pregnancies within a year are hard on the body and nowadays usually classed as "high risk pregnancies". That's one year after birth, not after the last conception
* since 20 to 40 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which can be dangerous, and pregnancy and birth is dangerous, especially in a society without modern medicine, you'd lose a lot of women to these causes. Many women won't see menopause.
However, at least some of that can be at least lessened if your society recognizes that longer breastfeeding can delay the next pregnancy. Usually, breastfeeding women don't get their normal menstrual cycle back - it's not even close to accurate, but in a world where the pill and condoms aren't used, the six to eighteen months this gives a woman might just save the tribe. So, lots of sex with breastfeeding mothers might ensue.
And one the bright side for the women (God knows there aren't many for them in this scenario), even today with well-nourished people tracking their ovulation and having sex precisely on the most fertile days, only about 20 to 30 percent of women get pregnant each month if they are trying to. So you won't have them pregnant all the time, having 15 kids over their lifetime. Maybe closer to 7 or so - which is still hard on the body and will result in high maternal death rates. And possibly infanticide, because who's going to feed all those heads?
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I am developing a culture for a species that lives in freshwater. They are solidly stone/bone-age, so no issues with "how do you develop metallurgy underwater?" and so on, but I would like them to be able to develop writing.
Carving rock is possible, but that seems overly cumbersome to become a normal method of writing for general literacy. And ink is a non-starter. So, I am considering a system like cuneiform, intended to be pressed into soft tablets. But while clay is easy to find on a river or lake bed, clay tablets don't exactly hold together well underwater!
So, is there a natural or easy-to-make substance that could substitute to allow for underwater cuneiform? Modern oil and polymer-based sculpting clays ought to work, but would a stone-age society be able to produce something like that?
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**Tar balls.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dynz2.jpg)
<https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tar-ball-questions-20150604-story.html>
We see tar balls when they wash up on the beach but the ocean is full of them. A lot are floating around out at sea, and those which are denser than water sink. They can be products of natural oil seeps, like these from Los Angeles.
Tar balls stay softish. The old weathered ones can still easily be carved with a bit of shell, I will testify from personal experience. Tar balls are durable, with no natural predators. Beach tar balls stay until they are cleaned up or buried or carried back out to sea.
Your people collect tar balls. They might amalgamate several in a claylike fashion. Perhaps they have methods to age them more quickly. Maybe they back the tarballs with stones or other large flat items. The tar balls have that clay consistency you want for cuneiform and they are out there.
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**[Quipu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu)**
The quipu is an ancient Inca method of storing data by essentially just tying knots in strings in specific patterns. Typically, one long string has many cords tied on to it, with knots located at varying positions along the cord. The spacing, thickness, and color (among other factors) can be used to store a variety of data. Additionally, small shells or other beads could be tied into the quipu if more symbols are desired.
Here is a picture of one:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tz5SU.jpg)
and here is someone holding one:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zFfKC.png)
It should be noted that the Inca successfully ran an Empire on the quipu for centuries. They used these extensively for accounting and logistical purposes, using them to track taxes, census data, and plan military operations.
To read something like this, one simply starts at one end of the main cord and then follows it until you reach the first branch. Then, follow that branch down and read the spacing of the knots to decode the character/number/word before returning to the main strand and following it to the next letter.
Advantages of a system like this:
* It's (potentially) very rugged. Unlike paper or tablets, it cant shatter or tear easily
* It's completely waterproof
* It's possible to read in the dark or in poor visibility because it's tactile
* It's cheap to make and inexpensive
* It's lightweight and portable. Long strings could even be worn as accessories
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They could weave stripe shaped sea-weeds (like poseidonia mediterranea)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W8zuU.jpg)
into a sheet like shape, and use spiral sea shells or pebbles inserted into the thread as characters. For a given sea shell the pointy end and the hole end would make two possible "bits", so they could make an elementary alphabet, similar to the cuneiform alphabet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qVwJr.jpg)
Alternatively they could still use shells or pebbles into a rope made with natural fibers, again taken from some sea weed, to make something similar to a rosary which would be read by following the line.
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By living in fresh water the people are essentially lake dwellers.
Cuneiform relies on having a stick with a flat end making an impression into a soft material such as clay. As you state, this is not practical for an underwater environment. You might be better off considering [runes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes) being scratched onto large flat shells.
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## Bamboo or wooden strips
Bamboo or wood falls into water, where it might be pried into strips. It can be incised with small sharp stones. Wood might be buried in sediments which (maybe) would tend to blacken the wood. If carved afterward, the text might be much lighter; alternatively it is possible that the carved areas would blacken more than the wood split only along the grain. The strips can then be bound together with a cord after the fashion of [traditional Chinese wooden books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips).
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As a school project, I am designing an extraterrestrial animal, and I would like to include a multiple-hearted mammal-like organism. Is there any set of circumstances in which having 3 hearts would be beneficial to a mammal-like creature, such as the hematocrit or possibly the complexity of the organism?
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Well... we already have some 3-hearted organisms here on the earth. Octopuses have 2 "respiratory" hearts, that they use to increase the flow of blood running through their gills, and one "main heart", which keeps the blood-flow on the body.
You can do something similar for your mammalian creature, having your extra hearts do work for some specific but intensive task, keeping the main heart free to focus on the flow for the "main" parts of the body.
I used a concept similar to this for the dragons of my fantasy world - they are dual-hearted, and have two completely separated circulatory systems with different functions. Each heart serves one of those systems.
You creature can have two sets of lungs, each set tied to one heart and providing oxygen to a different body section. A third, segregated heart could be localized on a central part that serves as a meeting point for those two body sections, pumping blood between those halves as a bidirectional pump.
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Take a look at our own organs. We have 2 lungs, 2 kidneys for example. We COULD survive with [1 lung or 1 kidney](http://www.livescience.com/27896-pope-one-lung-organs-you-can-live-without.html). We may not be able to function as WELL, but we could survive. A creature in turn, who has multiple hearts may be able to have far superior endurance because their body can feed oxygen to the muscles much more efficiently. The 3 hearts would also share the workload of 1 heart significantly reducing the wear and tear of a tired heart that will eventually cause death.
Now, depending on how you work it, as I stated in my first few sentences, you can survive losing 1 of a set of an organ. The implication is that if someone with 3 hearts were to lose one due to an attack (stabbed, gunshot, etc), or because one went bad, a surgical procedure or an internal process could then bypass the dead/failed heart and continue living while the 2 other hearts pick up the slack.
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### Gravity
Your creatures probably live on a planet with a really strong gravity.
Our body already fights gravity by having valves inside our veins, however on a planet with strong gravity these valves might not be enough to prevent back flow, so the creatures could have developed more hearts which work in parallel to increase blood flow in order to decrease the chance of back flow.
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In ***STTNG*** Worf had duplicate organs. So they thought it worked and the audience accepted it.
My own heart has four chambers, they could be separate in another species, I'd think. Perhaps if one or two were harmed/destroyed the others could do the work. Ruminants have more than one stomach. Humans survive with one lung or one kidney after an accident. It works if you make it work. Some species regrow organs (humans/partial livers) or (lizards) limbs.
If a human man can potentially lactate [LINK](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-males-can-lactate/) then I'd say it's possible.
The benefits of a redundant system seem fairly obvious. You can survive when 1 fails.
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In the Mass Effect games, the Krogan species is often mentioned having several redundant organ systems, developed to survive an astonishingly hostile home world. From the [Mass Effect Codex](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/Aliens:_Non-Council_Races) entry on the Krogan:
>
> The krogan evolved in a hostile and vicious environment. Until the invention of gunpowder weapons, "eaten by predators" was still the number one cause of krogan fatalities. Afterwards, it was "death by gunshot".
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VA9H0.jpg)
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Another solution is segmentation. Some organisms have multiple body segments, each with its own set of organs. Although vertebrates are segmented, we only have one or two of most of our organs. But a more strongly-segmented organism could have one complete set of organs for certain segments. There wouldn't even need to be a strong reason, it could just be imposed by their evolutionary history (like the fact that human segmentation is laid out for an animal that walks on all fours).
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A sufficiently large organism (e.g., the size of large dinosaurs) might have secondary hearts to assist circulation, even if there isn't a question of gravitational impedance. The more blood a single heart has to move at each beat, the more stress is being placed on that heart. Under such circumstances, two or three hearts at relatively large separation may be more efficient than a single heart, even one significantly larger, and the organism may well be able to live longer.
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According to an [authoritative source](http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=52337), earth has 3 creatures with multiple hearts:
* Cephalopoda have 3 (1 main plus 1 at each gill)
* Earthworms have 5 ("aortic arches" are simple pumps that effectively hearts)
* Hagfish have 4 (1 main 3-chambered, plus 3 boosters)
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The creature is arbitrarily large as a result of higher rates of evolution, and has multiple hearts, lungs, etc. to avoid negative consequences of the square-cube law. Having multiple respiratory/cardiovascular systems could provide oxygen to the larger area, which a single system may be unable to cover (because the creature needs more of its mass to be muscle to support its higher weight.[These creatures evolved very rapidly in this scenario])
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So I have seen some [fictional characters](http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Lancer_(Fate/Zero)) dual wield spears or would it be wielding twin spears? While it was done with [Implausible fencing powers](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImplausibleFencingPowers) using polearms, I would like to know whether this has any real combat applications and what the **merits and demerits of using two spears are.**
I have seen games that allow the use of two spears like the [Drang Twin Spears](http://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Drang+Twinspears) in Dark souls 3 and it seems to work pretty well. Thanks to [what fighting style is lancer in using in Fate/zero?](https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/8334/what-fighting-style-is-lancer-using-in-fate-zero), I know that there is a real aspect of using twin spears since there was a 'style' revolving around using twin spears.
Now from my basic knowledge of weapons, I know that
* Spears have a **longer reach** than swords giving the wielder an advantage
* The shorter spear would probably be used for **parrying** against attacks since it has less reach.
* The wielder would need to have excellent skill and conditioning to even use the two spears properly.
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One of the best things to consider when deciding what weapons to use is if there is any better option. You may be able to fight with dual spears, but if you consider what better options there are, then you quickly realize you're only limiting yourself.
Some other options:
* Two-handed spear. With both hands, you can have greater control over a longer spear. With a longer and more agile spear, you can keep people further away from yourself. If you are using two one-handed spears, someone with a two-handed spear should be able to out-range you, and swat away your one-handed spears with their added power.
* Spear and knife. If you have two spears, you're essentially doubling down on strengths *and* weaknesses. If someone gets past one spear, they've probably gotten past the other spear. In this case, it may help to use a knife. Knives are relatively short, which means they can be moved quickly without knocking into things. This way, you can parry with the knife without worrying about hitting into your spear, and if anyone gets past your spear you can easily stab them. It's also nice to know that if you're in an enclosed space, you have a way to attack someone who comes from behind.
* Spear and shield. Shields are really useful. They're pretty much the only defense against arrows, and they let you close in on an enemy spearman without worrying so much about getting stabbed. With dual spears, you have to constantly worry about parrying, whereas with a shield you can focus more on attacking.
So these are three different options, all of which are much more well-known and battle-tested than dual spears. With enough training, you can use anything as a deadly weapon, but if you have better options, you might as well save yourself the time and train with those instead.
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**There aren't a whole lot of merits to using two spears**, in fact I can think of exactly two situations where it *might* be useful.
Negatives:
* Spears are heavier than your standard one handed weapon (with the exception of the short spear)
* Spears are long and hard to control with a single hand
* Your weapons would be slow, you're moving more mass with a single hand/arm
* Generally spears are used in formation, having two awkward weapons in formation... *sorry buddy I didn't MEAN to stab you*
* Do I really need to keep going? I could probably think of more reasons...
Potential, yet still impractical use cases:
* Gladiators. I could see a gladiator wielding two short spears being entertaining and potentially deadly...this is never going to be a common skill.
* Stationary pike men. So...hypothetically you could have a formation of pike men each with two long spears/pikes/halberds. In a situation where they have good ground to do this you could maybe have them plant each pike in the ground on either side of them and hold each with one hand. This would double the spear points in the formation.
Admittedly this would also require the formation to spread out a bit as they would have to stand facing forward as opposed to sideways and there would need to be more space between those in the formation as the spears are on both sides instead of one. Spreading the formation means its not a true doubling of spear points in an area but I am pretty sure cavalry would still shy away.
Keep in mind this formation would be horribly susceptible to missile fire a single spear and a shield is still probably the more regular and reliable option.
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As someone who has fought both with and against spears, I'll weigh in that using paired spears actually loses you a lot of the benefits of a spear used in one or two hands.
A spear designed to be used in two hands can be much longer than one used in a single hand, meaning greater range, and in the majority of fights range is life. The second hand also greatly improves the handling of the spear, allowing you to make deft motions with the point to change thrust alignment or draw out enemy defenses; many of the fights I've lost against spearfighters have been due to a feinted thrust using the upper-hand point control to strike me where I'm not defending. The haft of the two-handed spear is also usable in a fight, and is a surprisingly effective defense and alternate weapon.
A single-handed spear loses many of the benefits of the two-handed version. It's no longer nearly as deft or fast as the two-handed spear, and can't be as long. It's also much more difficult to use the haft, as you can't lever it forward or support it like you can with two hands. Nevertheless, the single-handed spear has a niche role in conjunction with the shield, as shown by historical hoplites. The shield allows a fighter to nearly match the range and strength of the two-handed spear, as they can use their full body weight behind the spear and use the shield to cover the long recovery.
Trying to use a spear in *either* hand loses nearly any benefit. You can't feasibly devote your whole weight or reach to any strike as it both leaves you open while you recover, and means that your second attack will be very slow in coming. You can try to devote one hand to attack and one to defense (the most practical way of two-weapon fighting) but the weighting and construction of a spear doesn't lend itself to covering a line or to oppressing a weapon, so the defense aspect won't be very effective. Furthermore, on the offense, the one-handed spear isn't quick or versatile enough to take good advantage of the opportunities provided by its off-hand twin.
This isn't to say that twin spears is a style that's useless or impossible; it's simply overcomplicated compared to two-handed spear or spear and shield, and ineffective compared to equally complex styles such as paired swords, sword and cloak, sword and parrying dagger, and the like.
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There is a decent article on [Brittanica](https://www.britannica.com/technology/spear-weapon) about the historical use of spears as a weapon, although it only focuses on European development.
As a great man once said, "Shields are for hiding behind." Only slightly less famous is the commentary of edged weapons, "The pointy end goes into the other man."
The point (pun intended) is, spears are designed for mass use to stick the other guys before they can stick you. The Roman pilum was designed to bend on impact, preventing the enemy from tossing it back (with the nice bonus it snared any shields it stuck into).
Any modification of the haft of the spear to make it a more convenient single-handed weapon also reduce its effectiveness. It's just not a good design for single combat at melee range, unless you treat it as a pointy quarterstaff - in which case there's no way to effectively wield two of them, unless you have four hands and an ungodly amount of dexterity.
Many swords, by contrast with spears, are designed for one-handed operation (greatswords excepted). Even with rapiers, which are designed for the gentleman duellist, the *Florentine* style or *brace of rapiers* (dual wielding two full-size swords, as illustrated by [Agrippa](http://www.umass.edu/renaissance/lord/pdfs/Aggrippa_1553.pdf)) requires significant training to be more than a death trap for the wielder.
Even in feudal Japan, it took until the 1600s for the advent of Miyamoto Musashi's quite radical [Niten Ichi-ryū](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niten_Ichi-ry%C5%AB) school of swordsmanship that introduced the idea of dual wielding katanas effectively.
Let's imagine for a moment you have two spears of moderate length, and you are an expert at using them together. You have all the pitfalls of Florentine, with none of the inbuilt safety mechanisms. If you parry with a single spear, there is no guard to stop a blade from sliding up and chopping off your fingers. If you catch your opponent's blade with both of them, you have no way to bind the blade with a single spear to return the second one to play. If your thrust is parried, there is no edge on the inside with which to cut. If you happen to fight someone with a shield, the best you can hope for is to stab their foot and so hope to manipulate an outcome that way. The spear by itself is not equipped for complex defense.
Video games and movies are wont to make us believe the fantastic (which I am all in favor of), but there is scant evidence dual wielding spears would be a winning combination. It is precisely these limitations that caused other permutations and the abandonment of the spear in its purest form for general use.
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I think that the core of your question is to find what differenciates a spear from a sword, considering that some swords can have a pretty long range (shorter than a phalanx spear, but still quite long, like the Shinwa Odachi).
Looking at a shorter spear, it can compared to a standard sword.
So the real différence are, I think, in the mechanical properties of the two weapons : swords are generally much **heavier**, because of their steel core (even in the handle), but it makes them **stronger** too (which can be useful for parrying.
Their solidity make them more usable in a two two-hand style, because the chances of breaking a sword while parrying is low.
In the other hand, parrying with a spear has two disadvantages : due to its length, it is harder to manipulates quickly (length create moment of inertia) and it can break because of its relative fragility.
Beside, I can find two sword style fighting in history, but not two spears style...
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Won't work.
Even short spears are fairly hard to manoeuvre with one hand. Due to their shape, the centre of gravity is about halfway along the shaft. Holding the spear there means you lose half your effective length. Holding it anywhere else means one end will drag, slowing you down.
The long length means a little movement goes a long way at the tip. As a consequence, there will be little force behind a one handed thrust unless the weight of the body is behind it. You thus can't use both spears together, other than in a double headed charge.
The shape also means you are completely exposed, since you can't use the vulnerable shaft to protect yourself. The comparatively thicker shaft of halberds and pikes needs both hands to support.
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### It might make sense, but only if you used a shield as well.
While spears offer a fairly light weight option for striking an opponent from a distance, they're severely lacking as a defensive weapon. Because of this weakness, most single-handed spear or polearm wielders used a shield in their off-hand to protect themselves. An example of this would be the hoplomachus, a type of Roman gladiator who fought with a shield, a spear, and a short sword.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/e9VQD.jpg)
In similar style, a person wielding two spears could carry a spear in their dominant hand and a second in their off hand, which would also bear a small shield or buckler. While the second spear wouldn't be as useful for one-on-one combat as something like the short sword of the hoplomachus, it would serve as a useful backup if the first spear were thrown or broken, while also allowing for opportune strikes as opposed to a secondary spear carried slung across the fighter's back.
It's likely that such a fighting style would be used by a group of people who lacked the technology to craft strong, lightweight swords out of steel. Compared to a sword, spears would suffer less wear than swords if made of a weaker bronze, iron, or stone material, while also being lighter in weight. Once a nation developed steel arms and armor, though, dual spear wielders would likely be replaced.
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Is it possible, yes. Is it practical, No.
As other answers mention, you are doubling down on strengths and weaknesses and using weapons in ways they weren't really designed to be used.
Spears are balanced a certain way so as to be thrown. If you were to rebalance it so it was more effectively swung in arcs, used to parry, etc., you've ruined it's ability to be thrown.
Using two spears, without redesigning them, would require not only a mastery of a unique technique but it would require massive upper body strength - even more so than mastery of a sword and shield. You would need a really good reason to master this kind of technique instead of going with something more conventional.
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In viking times, dual wielding was a [common practice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Deadliest_Warrior_episodes#Episode_2:_Viking_vs._Samurai), the episode linked will show you a viking weapons specialist actually dual wielding spears and is very accurate and effective with them.
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If you look at ancient art the only time you see any one carrying two spears at a time is if they are carrying javelin, and are throwing them.
Looking at ancient art we see spears and shields being used together everywhere.
It is possible I guess to double wield spears, the fact that 2000+ years of history we do not see this occurring ever. While we do see a variety of other weapons double wielded or in combination with another weapon.
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I've fought with dual spears in foam combat, 6ft & 8ft. I'll start off saying that it WEARS you out and requires tons of strength. It's not actually that good, by itself, but it is intimidating at times and is good at pot shots. The one and only thing I was able to effectively do with it was keep 4-5 people at bay by myself because none of them wanted to get stabbed and I kept getting close to a stab, they could have rushed me and ran me over but they didn't.
It can be a bit effective in that you can stab in multiple spots all at once. Stab high on their shield to pop their shield a little and stab with your other spear. However the amount of control you have with each spear is horrible and can be swatted away easily or someone can just grab the shaft and have more control over it than you do. It's difficult to choke up on the spear so they can just charge you and get in close, but if you are good at baiting you could trick them then trip them with one spear and stab them as they fall with the other spear.
You really don't gain much using 2 long spears. You can do better with a 6ft spear and a ~4ft spear because you can use the 6ft spear for when they can't touch you and then when they get in close you can use your 6ft spear as a shield of sorts that can stab them if they forget about it while your 4ft spear keeps them busy. However if they have a short sword and a shield your in trouble. I really can't think of any good reason to use 2 spears, your better using a spear + sword, flail, or something to handle people who get close because 2 spears are unusable when they get too close.
One thing I have done that works decently is used a strap shield while holding a spear in that hand so I can defend with the shield or pop it open and use it as a spear while using a sword in the other hand. You keep them busy with the sword for a bit then SURPRISE STAB from the spear they forgot you had with your shield.
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I would actually not take video games as a reference, especially not ones focusing on action.
Historically spears started out as mainly single handed weapons but in a much shorter fashion probably somewhere in Africa. As different cultures evolved them to be longer for the advantage of greater distance especially agains cavalry they also became harder to handle. For the right balance and accurate control infantry started using them with both hands. The single hand usability actually differs from the weapons length and balance.
Greek hoplite used a long spear single handedly in combination with a shield as seen in the movie Troy. For a compromise between balance and protection their shields had an indentation to rest the spear on, basically as a weaker second hand to lower the negative effects of the single hand use but it was probably still less easily controllable.
I honestly do think the use of a long dual hand spear as a single hand weapon is anything but beneficial. Even the advantage of close distance combat with a dagger or short sword would probably not outweigh the loss of control of your main weapon. With the right shield that lowers the negative effects like explained earlier it can work but other than that, I'd rather take distance from such an approach.
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Two spears cannot be wielded effectively in a fight, because the effective use of one spear involves the wielder's whole body-- from the feet, through the legs, up to the torso and arms. The point of the spear is to keep your opponent away from you-- and to manipulate the pointy end from that distance requires strength to overcome the leverage. It's the same way a boxer starts their power punch from their feet and involves the musculature of their whole body.
One doesn't just stand there and slash with the spear-- in that case it would be a sword, a really long, heavy, ungainly sword. If you have two spears, one in each hand, your opponent can grab one and use their whole body to overpower you with its leverage, while you can only resist with the strength of one arm. Then you either drop the spear, or have it wrested away from you, and you're down to one spear.
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Related to [How would a weapon act if it negates the effects of gravity for itself?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27907/how-would-a-weapon-act-if-it-negates-the-effects-of-gravity-for-itself)
I'm in the middle of building a fantasy world with one core component – a reasonably rare magical metal that gets lighter the purer it is, without losing any of its mass. Alloys of this and steel are a magical equivalent of [Damascus Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel) – sharp, tough and resilient, with the added advantage of weighing less, but having a slightly greater mass than a steel weapon of the same size. How would this affect the weapons and armour of the setting?
So far, I've come to the conclusion that magical armour would be in high demand as lighter plate mail and chain mail equals somewhat better manoeuvrability. Where it comes to weapons, obviously as they are negating the weight weapons would be wielded differently.
I'd come to the same conclusions as many of those writing in the attached question, that oversized weaponry isn't much use, but that lighter weapons for the same mass would certainly give an advantage to things like hammers and axes in warfare. It should be noted that too pure a concentration and things start literally floating, so a purely magical sword would actually not be very useful at all.
My question is, am I right in my assumptions that weapons the same size with the same mass that were "lighter" would be more effective in battle? Specifically thinking of swords, axes, and arrowheads here.
Currently my idea is that the metal in question would impart a magical "upward" force equal to its concentration. 100% "unobtanium" would equal 100% upward thrust, akin to if gravity were acting on the item the exact opposite direction, with 50% equalling gravitational influence (as if you were using it in a weightless environment) and 25% making the item 50% lighter. The mass increase would be akin to that of a steel quantity 5% larger.
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Well, a high mass armor with high unobtainium ratio would generate lift. This would allow soldiers with such armor to have reduced weight. While the inertia of the armor would restrict the practical weight that can be negated, your specially trained elite imperial stormtroopers in their shiny white armor would be able to scale walls with ease, cover large distances with long jumps, run over quicksand and maybe even water. This would make them pretty good assault troops.
Assassins Creed style parkour on roofs or trees would allow ambush and hit-and-run tactics that would be very hard for normal weight troops to counter. No matter how good their horses are, they can't follow your troops to the foliage or rooftops.
And of course being able to negate weight would allow muscle powered flight with fairly simple technology. The advantages from being able to fly should be obvious.
I'd assume this would result in a lift generating, fairly massive, plate armor on the upper torso with rest of the armor and weapons being weight reduced but otherwise normal.
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Removing the weight but retaining the mass means that the inertia is also retained. This has several consequences.
Imagine if someone were to try to run and then subsequently trip while wearing a full plate suit of this metal. They would end up tumbling due to the mass of the suit, but only slowing down due to the friction caused by the weight of everything else. As such there wouldn't actually be much mobility improvement, they would simply get less tired from standing or marching in it. "Lighter" suits and pieces would scale similarly, with perhaps the least massive ring pieces offering some mobility advantage.
Melee weapons would suffer similarly; holding one would be less tiring, but swinging one would require just as much effort.
The main application of such a material would probably be missile weapons. Projectiles, due to their lack of weight, would fly truer and much farther. Armor-piercing ballista bolts as heavy as a toothpick would be a strong defense for any city above the size of a village... or in the siege weapons against such a city. Even crossbows would see some benefit from lighter quarrels, as would arrows made almost entirely of the metal.
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**For armor:**
You wouldn't have armor that is similar to our world's middle ages armor, but lighter and providing more maneuverability. Instead, you would get massive armor that weighs the same as our world's middle ages armor did. Knights were the ancient Main Battle Tank. And look at today's tanks. We don't reduce the thickness when we come up with better, stronger alloys. If we come up with with a lighter alloy, we don't get faster more maneuverable MBTs. We thicken up the plating.
Instead of chainmail light as a tshirt, your unobtanium would create massive nearly invincible behemoths.
**For weapons:**
I don't think swords or axes would be more effective in combat. The force of a blow is mass times speed. The mass of these weapons is the same. And the speed they are swung at won't change either. At least at first. The biggest advantage would be that you can swing your weapon all day without getting tired (assuming you survive all day). So your first blows in a day will be the same strength as a regular weapon. Later in the evening you might be still hitting just as hard, where as with a steel weapon you would be swinging slowly because you are tired. On the other hand, running around all day fighting for your life has got to be tiresome all on its own. I think that would overwhelm any advantage in energy the lighter weapon would provide.
Bows and arrows work out to the same, but worse. The limiting factor is how hard you can pull on the bow. The arrow being lighter doesn't change that. You would get just as tired pulling on that bow regardless of what arrow head you used. The only good thing with the lighter arrow is that it would have longer range. This may or may not be useful depending on the situation.
tl;dr: Your weapons will be hitting just as hard as regular weapons, but they'll be hitting people wearing armour a foot thick.
**EDIT:** You might be able to use this to enhance the effectiveness of pike or spears. If you balanced the weight well -- having a 'lift' force counteracting the weight pulling down -- you could possibly effectively use stupidly long spears.
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Considering that the potential energy scales with weight (weight \* g \* height) but the kinetic energy scales with mass (mass \* velocity^2 / 2), you either
a) don't have conservation of energy, hence a weapon could utilize a perpetuum mobile for infinite energy, or
b) in order to retain conservation of energy in that universe, things with less weight not only need to be less heavy but also to fall slower, so gravity would not accelerate everything at the same rate anymore.
This last point might be an interesting thing to consider for (simple/middle-age/steam-punk?) technologies that might be established in that universe.
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# Initial failure
You could not simply replace standard gear with this new gear and expect a positive outcome. Unless they have extensive training with the new gear, the first battle in which troops are equipped with this gravity free equipment you will make two major observations:
**Troops arrive to the battle fresh and feeling ready for combat.**
With reduced weight, there should be less effort spent to walk in straight lines.
**The troops using the new gear will lose dramatically.**
Due to the decreased weight, they will feel more maneuverable than they actually are and either be slow to react, or constantly throw themselves off balance. Both are costly in a life or death situation. Furthermore, if the armour is actually more massive than their typical gear, you can expect a lot of torn ACLs when they try to stop or change direction due to the increased horizontal momentum.
When using the weapons, they will not be able to hit a target (literally to save their lives.)
All the muscle memory built training with normal weighted weapons includes a component to counteract gravity, without gravity most swings and jabs of melee weapons will be high.
Any upward swing which misses its target risks dislocating the wielder's shoulder as the swing will reach its apex without losing any momentum to the pull of gravity.
Targeted projectile shots will go high of their mark, how high depending on range.
Volleys will fly long. If these shots do come down at all, it might not be point first. This would depend on if just the arrow head, or the entire arrow is weightless, and whether the head or the fletching provided more wind resistance.
# Indefensible Siege Weaponry
Over time you will see changes to take advantage of the weightlessness, but this might not be on the level of the individual soldier, I see this as a means of making indefensible siege weaponry:
**Friction-less Battering Ram**
Picture a truly massive battering ram of mostly weightless material. Start pulling it with teams of horses toward your target, it might take a few miles (in a straight line) to get up to speed, but you could release it even out of range of sight of the target and it would glide in with its unstoppable momentum.
**(near) Infinite Range Catapults/Cannons**
If a 50% blend of the new metal makes perfect weightlessness, with careful blending, ballistics could be made to fire at nearly any range. The only limitation being wind resistance.
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First thought I had was that giant tower shields would be back in style. Yes you can make bolts that are "lighter", but the stresses and strains on the shooting devices wouldn't change. Instead, you can lug around giant shields, that yes, they have a lot of momentum, but you can just push it around as you need to and it'll protect you from most anything.
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One aspect of this metal would effect architecture. There was a lot of work in the Middle Ages to make taller buildings using relatively light weight building materials (cathedral architecture). With a metal that can be made pure enough to literally resist gravity, you could do interesting things with super tall towers made of a skeleton framework of the stuff, or even a platform of uber-pure metal that floats, held to the ground with a tether, that you can perch archers on. They get an arrow proof metal shield under their feet and they can hover right over an enemy force and hit them from overhead at will. Have a couple floating platforms tethered to the corners of your castle for defense, or use them to get fighting troops up onto an enemy wall as an attacker. Lots of possibilities.
How about a lighter than air throne held down with a hook/lever to the stone floor. If they breach the throne room, the lord pulls the lever and floats up and out through a hole in the roof.
What about a "reverse catapult" that uses a block of unobtanium as a "counterweight" like a trebuchet? Instead of a heavy block to pull down on the end of an arm, it's a light block that pushes up. Fiddle around with the design and some trebuchet type thing would be feasible. Why would you want this? Because the weight of the counterweight made a typical trebuchet hard to move. You have more mobile artillery. Maybe even to the point where artillery becomes a factor in field battles more like the Napoleonic era than the middle ages.
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(This answer is all about 50% alloy weapons and armor, since I think you're only asking about these.) At first, it didn't seem that useful to me. I have no experience using real-life weapons, but I would imagine that melee weapon techniques have been developed to take advantage of gravity (for example, on a downstroke, the force of gravity is added to the force imparted by the person holding a sword, making a more powerful blow). Therefore, taking gravity out of the picture doesn't necessarily make things any easier (this was pointed out in the comments). It also requires the person using the weapon to use different techniques from regular sword-fighting, so they either have to re-train or train from the start with special, expensive weapons.
However, since the material is rare, it's possible that opponents would not have much experience fighting it. So for melee weapons, the biggest advantage might be the unexpected behavior compared to regular weapons.
I'm not sure about armor yet. Weighing less could reduce fatigue fr carrying heavy armor. Of course, the inertia is the same, but with your armor the person weighs less, which means all else equal they'll have less friction with the floor. So it seems to me that they may have less traction (a possible disadvantage). But I don't really know. One advantage seems to be that they would be able to jump higher.
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I'm surprised no-one's mentioned aerial warfare: with the stuff as described in the question, you could use it to fly high in the air.
Of course, controlling altitude and velocity would be a major challenge, and the only way to come back down is to let go of some very expensive antigravity ballast, but still, it might be useful from time to time, for surveillance or for dropping bombs of some kind.
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So pretty much what I'm getting from the majority of these questions is that everyone will be wearing foot thick armor. Hand-held weapons such as swords, axes, etc. would be placed at a significant disadvantage due to this fact. Maneuverability of the soldiers would be slightly hampered due to the bulky nature of their armor, and there would most likely be some weak areas of the armor that the attacker can use to their advantage.
So, you might ask, **How can we solve this? How can anyone be killed?**
Well, since we can now apply much more metal to our weapons, since we seem to have an unlimited supply of metal and unobtanium, we can start to delve into huge steel catapult balls, ballistas, etc.
**Kitting up animals with unobtanium armor would be extremely effective.** Let's say you train up either a group of dogs or another such animal that's pretty sturdy and can run relatively fast. Kit those bad boys up with some unobtanium armor and set them loose on the enemy. Make sure to pad the armor up pretty heavily, but then, they'll be pretty much impervious to the enemy as long as they keep running out of harm's way after they ram someone. **Rhinos would be extremely effective, too.** If you kitted a few dozen rhinos with unobtanium armor, a ridiculous amount, due to their immense strength, and set them loose upon the enemy, they would be incredibly effective. Especially if they ran down a hill. You could simply kill them off by injecting a toxin in their system that would allow them to live for five minutes longer, and hope that they would die before they got to attacking your forces. Or, you could hide an explosive in their armor that would essentially turn them into a grenade, if you're really that intent upon winning.
**You could also create giant contraptions with this newfound metal, because wheels would be able to carry more of it. Also, you could make a metallic model of Da Vinci's tank a few hundred years before tanks became a thing.** Da Vinci's tank was a revolutionary idea, and if his ideas were copied off by someone, they could probably have been used to create the first tanks almost 400 years before they were in our timeline. It's hard to say how effective and thick the armor on Da Vinci's tank would've been in your timeline, but nevertheless, it would've revolutionized the way people thought of warfare, and new inventions and ideas by people who in our timeline never got to think/work on such things would be available. Who knows, maybe WWII tanks would be commonplace a hundred years before WWI started.
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First, let's go over what it WON'T do. It won't help ground troops. Reduced weight only helps bring things up, but would actually make moving things horizontally much more difficult. The reason is that the inertial mass is the same, requiring the same amount of energy to gain speed, but the friction with the ground, which is the main method in which ground troops propel themselves, is actually reduced. It's like trying to move around in reduced gravity, or on ice.
So, option one would be to replace friction-based propulsion with other methods, e.g. thrusters. But that doesn't sound like the type of setting you're going for. It would essentially result in hovercraft and aircraft.
However, a much more interesting use would be kinetic bombardment. With friction removed, it would be possible to slowly build up a large amount kinetic energy in a sufficiently large quantity of unobtainium. Imagine a large floating boulder, neither moving up or falling, being pushed across a large distance. Initially, it's very difficult to move, because it's very heavy. But with no friction slowing it down, it would just keep gaining more and more speed. Then, you just let it keep on flying until it hits an enemy fortress or something. The sheer amount of kinetic energy it gained over potentially hours of pushing would be incredibly difficult to negate. Air drag would still be a factor, but against a sufficiently heavy and/or aerodynamic object, not a significant one.
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Assuming a spaceship with artificial gravity was possible, would it be possible for it to have an extremely short range, like a few feet. So you'd be able to have a ship with 1g but not have it attract every other ship in a 1 or 2 mile radius around it?
Please excuse the crudity of this render, I didn't have time to make an actual spaceship, but I created a very basic thing in Blender to show what I mean. The grid representing space, the monkey representing a spaceship, and the earth representing... earth.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sKlUS.jpg)
As you can see, the incline/falloff on the monkey spaceship is much steeper than the Earth. Would something like this be possible?
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It would be conceivable, which is the important part. You are hypothesizing a new development in scientific knowledge.
A simple way would be to introduce a rule that the effect is only short-range. The ideal way to introduce it would be in, or discussing, a situation where a longer range would be very useful, up to and including saving many lives but the characters know it's impossible: pseudo gravity can only extend for a short range.
If you want to introduce some handwaving on top of it, compare it to the strong force and weak force, which extend no farther than the nucleus of the atom they are affecting.
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## If your fiction needs it, make it so.
Such artificial gravity works perfectly well in Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc. ad nauseum. No-one needs to explain how it works (nor can they beyond techno-babble).
Maybe someday we discover a way to do so in the real world. Not that we have any promising loopholes in physics that we know of that would allow it.
Others have already pointed out the ways to simulate gravity via rotational or linear acceleration, or the (highly impractical) use of degenerate matter plating to create real gravity.
Just write your story with real "Star Trek artificial gravity" and move on. Drop in the techno-babble if you think it makes your story more interesting, enables a plot point, etc.
**Technobabble answer**
Some have complained, (I believe unfairly), that I did not answer the question, so here is my alternate technobabble, one that I've never seen used in fiction - but if someone has, be sure to point it out.
It is actually based on known physics - or at least plausible for a story. Einstein's famous equation declares mass energy equivalence, and this works both ways - energy warps space too.
This part is real physics. Much of the mass of some particles is not mass per see, but the energy associated with the energy binding the particles together. E.g., 6 Deuterium atoms has more mass than one C12 atom due the the differences in binding energy, etc. Both are 6 neutrons and 6 protons.
Imagine an incredible superconducting network that resides below the floor or your space ship - one with properties far, far in excess of known superconductor current densities. Pump it full of incredible amounts of current and you now have a electrical "mass field". Extend the network over the entire hull of the spherical ship and you have a way to divert the mass field uniformly into the hull so that it has no net gravity field in the interior of the ship. This allows you a way to modulate the level of energy in the floor plating by switching the energy between the floor plate and the hull. Unequal distributions of the mass field allows creative custom gravity configurations.
If you don't think energy would work this way, enlighten yourself with the [kugelblitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)) - a concentration of energy so great that it creates a black hole. Back in college many years ago, I actually came up with the idea of a kugelblitz, only to later discover that it was first published in 1955 as [Geons by John Archibald Wheeler](https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.97.511).
What you don't want to consider too closely is just how huge a supply of energy will be required. Almost 90 billion MJ (9E16 J) to create a mass field of 1 kg, and you need at least trillions of kg of mass to get a decent level of gravity for your ship. Which means that starting and starting your ship with trillions of kg of energy is not going to be easy.
For comparison, 9E16 J is about 12 hours worth of electric power for the entire world. Or about 1/2 the energy released by the [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)
So, I propose adding a 2nd handwavium - the ability to create and destroy energy (from the perspective of the ship) by using zero-point energy (ZPE) as a source/sink for loading and unloading the superconducting network.
Such combination of technologies also gives you a way to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. Because you can "create mass" by using the ZPE converter as a mass source you could create regular mass to eject at high speed for acceleration. Of course, if you can do this, you could also simulate gravity by the simple expedient of continuous 1 g acceleration.
You need more handwavium to explain the structural strength of the ship needed to support the use of such mass fields, but such super materials are also known in SF.
The problem with this solution is that it is complicated and boring. If you get the engineering contract to produce the mass field for the latest generation of ships - it would be exciting indeed.
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[Newton's law of gravitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation) states the force that exists between two masses is based upon the magnitude of those two masses and the distance between them. The force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance:
$$F = G\frac{(m\_1m\_2)}{r^2}$$
as is the [gravitational acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_acceleration):
$$g=G\frac{m\_1}{r^2}$$
where
* $F$ is the force between the masses;
* $G$ is the Newtonian constant of gravitation $(6.674×10^{−11} m^3kg^{−1}s^{−2})$;
* $m\_1$ is the first (larger) mass;
* $m\_2$ is the second (smaller) mass;
* $r$ is the distance between the centers of the masses;
* $g$ is the acceleration due to gravity.
In effect, $G$ constrains the gravitational force between two objects to fall off at a constant rate according to the square of the distance between them.
However, the effect of the square in the function means that while earth's mass behaves as a point source in this equation, gravity is measured at its surface, some 6371 kilometres distant.
In effect, by having a large central mass and being very close to it, on the order of a few hundred metres, you could have a force producing 1g of acceleration at that short distance, but at long distances, the force and acceleration would be much less.
This effect of the square of the distance is why an earth-mass neutron star or black hole would have a very much higher gravity than earth at its surface/event horizon than exists on Earth's surface. However, at 6371km distance, its gravity would still be 1g.
So, to produce an acceleration of 1g at a few hundred metres range or less would require much less mass than that of Earth at 6371km... but as far as a spacecraft goes, it would still be an awfully big mass, and the tyrrany of the [rocket equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation) would say "**NO!**" to this spacecraft getting anywhere easily or quickly. Not to mention that you'd need [degenerate matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter) to have that much mass in such a small volume.
The other problem of such a system would be that at its optimal distance, it would generate 1g, but not very much further away, the gravity would drop significantly, and only a little closer, it would increase significantly, giving significant [gravitational tides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force).
To give some examples:
If we want a gravity of $9.8 ms^{-2}$ at 10m, we need a mass of $1.47 \times 10^{13}kg$.
However, at 12m, the gravity is $6.8ms^{-2}$ and at 8m, it's $15.3ms^{-2}$. So, from this we can see that there is a significant gravitational tide. The mass itself would be dangerous to approach, since at a range of 1m, it would have a gravity of $980ms^{-2}$, or 100g, while at 2m, it would have a gravity of $245ms^{-2}$, or 25g. This gravitational force *and* these tidal forces could easily cause physical injury or death to humans at this range. However, this also satisfies the OP's desire for little impact on nearby spacecraft.
* At 1km (which is docking range), the gravity would be $9.8 \times 10^{-4}ms^{-2}$ / $1 \times 10^{-4}g$.
* At 100km, (which is still close range) the gravity would be $9.8 \times 10^{-8}ms^{-2}$ / $1 \times 10^{-8}g$.
* Since space is so big, I wouldn't expect spacecraft to approach each-other any closer than 1000km except when attempting to rendevous, at which range, we'd have a gravitational attraction of $9.8 \times 10^{-10}ms^{-2}$ / $1 \times 10^{-10}g$, which is effectively zero on a human time scale.
As for 'virtual masses', such things haven't been shown to exist. Your science fiction story may disagree, and allow you to produce as large a temporary/virtual mass as you need. Of course, if you can generate these virtual masses, you can have a [diametric drive](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/antigravity.php#carrot).
Otherwise, in hard sci-fi, you're better off using centrifugal forces in a spinning container to generate gravity-like forces.
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## There is no modern day Physics-based answer to this question
By definition, artificial gravity does not work in the same way as the one, and only one, way we know to create gravity - having mass. Since we know of no way to create gravity without having a large mass we cannot say how it would work if you could.
## But speculating based on the properties of gravity suggests it could
Gravity falls off with the square of distance in the same way as, e.g., a light source or heater behaves. If we assume that the artificial gravity generator is placed a small distance under the floor, let's say 30cm, and produces 1G at floor level, then it will produce 0.25G 30cm above the floor and 0.11G 60cm above the floor. At 10ft (3m) it will be producing just 0.01G. So it would fall off within a few feet as you describe.
In fact, it might be that you need to separate your generator and the floor level by a greater distance just so you don't get uncomfortable differences in gravity across a human body.
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If the spacecraft used rotation as a means of generating artificial gravity then the space craft need not be that massive nor have any significant gravitational field but those aboard would still be able to experience 1g.
Alternatively (and less usefully) if constant acceleration was applied in a straight line again the ship could feel 1g whilst not exerting a gravitational field.
Beyond that I do not think what you want id possible. If sufficient mass was collected to generate 1g then the gravitational field could not be restricted in its extent.
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What if instead of the gravity being short ranged. You had an anti gravity shielding on the hull that cancelled out the gravity.
This neatly solves the problem of gravity escaping, but also creates new dangers for the ship because any failure of this anti gravity shielding would result in space dust and rocks collecting on the hull.
Anti gravity hull could also be a nifty form of long range stealth. (And it's failure obvious on radar thanks to gravity escaping)
As for the science. If your civilization already figured out the magic of gravity fields, then why can't they figure out the magic of an anti gravity field? They probably already did when they figured out how to make their space ships float in the air.
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Normal gravity has monopole sources. Just assume that artificial gravity is an artificially generated dipole e.g. by pair production of mass and "anti-gravity" (repulsing) particles stored above and below your ship (even if we don't know how to generate one and the existence of an anti-gravity particle would kind of contradict what we understand about physics, since anti-particles seem to be ordinary masses, so invent something which sounds nice ;-)).
Fields from mono-poles decrease with distance^2. field from dipoles decrease with distance^3. (which is the reason why magnets only produce big forces on short distances),
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There is no known way to have artificial gravity. Gravity is tied to mass.
There are ways to have simulated gravity which are only local, but because they're not 'true' gravity they won't affect external objects as gravity would in the way you're representing in your picture. So artificial simulated gravity by it's nature will achieve what you want.
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If space is a transport medium for the information of gravitational attraction and you want to hack the transport medium to create the false information of mass to be transported, while the mass does not exist.
That would be difficult, if you can not do it from a distance, as in machinery has to be at the point of space that is to be hacked. So lets assume there is a box that can do so- you would need drones that swarm around your ship, smothing out the "hack" simulating the gravity of a m-class planet.
Then what happens if these hacks amplify one another, for example when two ships crash?
What if the hacking mechanism goes wrong and the black box creates a "virtual" black hole, with no mass, but the gravity similar to that?
Or what if the mechanism is considered a orbital weapon, as it could easily derail a planetary system by simulating a body of mass m appearing in the middle of orbital mechanics.
Finally - the danger of gradients.. as in - your artifical, hacked information is not smooth in all 3 Directions.
So you can push your ship from zero-g into reentry levels of stress - easily shearing the ship or structure.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton>
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Such technology would be quite advanced, and the only way that could possibly and reliably be achieved is if the civilization in question is sufficiently advanced enough to where their technology is indistinguishable from magic - that is to say that they'd be so advanced that the laws of physics are less *laws* and more *suggestions* to them; capable of bending or even breaking physics entirely at will. At that point they've essentially become metaphysical, and are no longer bound by universal constraints and science as we understand them.
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Hypothetically yes.
Membrane physics...
I recall a science documentary, where String and M- THeory.
It establishes 1-dimensional strings consist 2 types, One bound, one unbound.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UkRLU.gif)
Unlike the other forces in nature, Gravity doesn't have a particle assigned to govern or interactions. THe bound ones more functionally interactive with the universe, the loose ones are not. The hypothetical graviton which governs gravity's strength, Since gravity is the weakest of the fundamental interactions they thought 99.99% of it's power seeps other dimensions or doesn't interact with the 3 typical ones.
Artificial gravity guides gravitons thru two membranes; The ceiling and the floor where they dissipate....
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A slightly different perspective:
Let's assume your humans have discovered a technology that lets them somehow turn electrical energy into gravitational force. Let's also assume the process behind this technology can be 'reversed', turning electricity into "anti-gravitational" force, which repels mass rather than attracting it.
Your spaceships could then have gravity generators inside of it to attract everyone to the floor, and anti-gravity generators situated around the hull to neutralize the gravitational force and prevent it from spreading beyond the spaceship, effectively flattening spacetime once again.
These generators would likely have strong implications for the rest of the world, and could perhaps allow for FTL travel in the form of alcubierre drives.
Their effect could be limited by saying that energy costs increase exponentially as gravitational force increases, e.g maintaining 1g of force might take 1GW of power, whereas maintaining 10g of force might take 1000GW.
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### Why artificial gravity generation?
The Expanse gives you two very good science-based answers here, neither of which need the complications of artificial gravity generation.
#### Constant acceleration
Currently we don't have power sources which can store very much energy. As a result, we have to give our spacecraft one big push to accelerate, coast for the duration of the trip, and apply another big push to stop.
With a massively energy-dense power source (which, OK, is a stretch!), we can speed up the trip. Like a race car, we can be constantly either accelerating or braking. And one side effect of that is that the humans inside get constant acceleration. As far as our bodies are concerned, this looks exactly the same as gravity.
If this acceleration goes on for a *really* long time, eventually of course you'll hit relativistic effects which might limit what you can do. And likely the force field or laser which repels or vaporises dust and micrometeorites (another extra handwave!) has an upper speed it can handle. Up to that point though, you can maintain that acceleration and the canned monkeys are fine.
#### Magnetic boots
If you simply need to walk around though, magnetic boots are your friend. They've been a staple of hard SF since the 1930s. Of course this doesn't solve some of the other problems with lack of gravity, like wound healing or loss of bone and muscle density, but it's an option.
At the very least, this makes it easier to put on film/TV. Of course no film/TV to date has properly handled how hair and clothing move whilst the protagonists are supposedly in zero-G and held down by mag boots, but that's a separate problem. :)
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How about you have "gravity plates" for the floor, but then put "anti-gravity plates" around the hull? To nullify it out? They could even be the same plates facing backwards. Or else some sort of projector that can control gravity and put it where it likes, like force fields?
It wouldn't work in real life but it's pretty normal to assume scifi spaceships have mastered gravity like it was magnetism.
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100% IMPOSSIBLE in real life by any lifeform, and please remember Gravity is not a force, but an effect so what you are really asking is about creating a virtual spacetime with a virtual mass so that you can experience an effect of virtual gravity.
However, for your fictitious use-case, why not? Your virtual reality and virtual gravity are only limited by your imagination and details won't matter anyway.
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A scene in my story involves the main character encountering a crashed spacecraft while collecting firewood for his village, and keeping it a secret for several months. The spacecraft is about 20 meters in length, and has among other things an Expanse-style fusion drive, meaning fuel and delta-v are mostly not a problem. Its only crew member and pilot is dead by the time the main character finds the ship.
While I currently describe the spacecraft to be an old but functional relic, I'm considering rewriting the scene to make it crash land while the main character is out and about, in order to better foreshadow a later event in the story. However, any spacecraft that re-enters an atmosphere from orbit would, in my understanding, probably be seen by the entire village, and the main character still has to keep the ship a secret for the sake of plot.
Is there any way for this crash landing to only be seen, or not be dismissed as a natural phenomena, by the main character? I'm open to giving the ship far-future or theoretical technologies to help with this, as the story's setting is largely a space opera.
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**Why does the crash have to be a fiery comet from space?**
The ship could have safely landed due to a medical issue with the pilot. The ship might have sucked a duck into the engine intake while hovering and fallen a short distance. The ship may have landed automatically after the crew got wiped out by a radiation blast. The ship's AI may have vented atmosphere and fled it's builders. It might have crashed during a storm.
There are plenty of reason why an (mostly?) intact ship could be alone on the ground with nobody seeing it land.
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There are a couple different things that make a mess when a spaceship lands: the fireball that streaks through the sky, the engine firing/parachutes deploying, the smashing into the ground.
The most noticeable of them is the fireball, which is a ball of plasma that creates sonic booms as it goes by. Getting through this violent process is why spaceships have heat shields. If you had infinity delta v, you could slow the ship down before reentry, and basically skip all the fireball in the sky plus not have a heat shield. Additionally, if the ship were to crash because of it's engines quitting, it would have no landing burn and noise, it would merely smash into the ground at terminal velocity.
A large object falling at terminal velocity would make a large impact cloud unless it hit something that held dust down, like a dense forest. The ship would still spend a good couple minutes falling in full view and make a thudding noise when it hits the ground.
Basically, an expanse style ship can crash land in theory with only a dull thud, assuming all the right conditions are met.
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It all depends on the reentry trajectory: if it happens over oceans and scarcely populated areas there will be not so many eyes seeing it.
Keep in mind that the "glowing" part of the atmospheric reentry takes place in the upper layer of the atmosphere, when the landing site is still far away. Then there is the supersonic bang which can be mitigated if the spaceship has some sort of automated landing control.
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Perhaps the crash was during a thunderstorm and/or a meteor shower, so the sound and light show were less distinct (and sensible people were home in bed anyhow). And in fact maybe the thunderstorm and/or meteor shower contributed to the crash.
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**Crash it earlier**
The main character doesn't need to see the crash, unless it's for further plot reasons. The ship can have crashed years or decades ago. That is why it looks functional but old.
**It's late**
The time can reduce the amount of people seeing it. It can ve so early in the morning that next to no one sees it, or is clear enough to pinpoint a crash site. It would be interesting to some to check out a meteorite, but the few who do see it might not take the time and effort to do so. Except the main character out of curiosity.
**Visibility**
Storms with thunder, rain and snow. Hurricanes and tornadoes. All can be valid reasons the crash isn't witnessed or heard.
**It is difficult to go there/private property**
If it crashes in a difficult area, like a swamp or certain mountains, it can be difficult for others to go there. Alternatively it strikes private ground. Lots of grown ups repect that, not entering the ground. At most you have to say "yeah something came down. Nothing left but a small crater". Even if kids find it, who is going to believe their 'wild fantasies'? Your main character can have all the time in the world if it strikes his farmland, some inherited piece of land outside the city, or his backyard.
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If crashes are a regular occurrence, because the orbit of the planet is/was being used as a [breakers' yard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking) and, if still active, low value hulks/components are often allowed to degrade in their orbit until they crash, or if inactive because the whole yard is slowly crashing out. Or there was a space battle in the system at some point and the debris has been hitting the atmosphere for years. Then it's not that your protagonist is the only one who noticed they're just the only one who bothered to go and have a look at the crash site. Most people who chase after crashing meteors on Earth find that if they go over the visible horizon that's the last you'll ever see of them. The locals have learned the same lesson, they'll investigate/use material that they find, or that lands in their laps but they don't bother *looking* for it. The pilot could be long dead, his body automatically preserved by the onboard systems. If you need to ship functional after a crash the same repair systems that have preserved the dead pilot can rebuild the broken hulk over a period of time.
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As someone with more than 300+ hours in Kerbal Space Project, I can tell you that there is a lot of potential for catastrophic failure of a landing during its final moments.
To take an example from real life, check the Soyuz TMA spacecraft, which the IIS crew uses to return to Earth. In its final descent it uses parachutes to slow down to ~7m/s (24 feet per second) [according to NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/soyuz/landing.html):
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If those engines fail, you are too close to the ground to try some backup measure. Hitting the ground at that speed is equivalent to falling from a height of 10m (~33 feet). I like to imagine that the Soyuz is prepared to cushion that impact internally for the astronauts, should the rockets fail. Still, the spacecraft will be damaged in that case.
You can see the landing rockets in action in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inl_gix-6NU), around the 0:10 mark. But if you blink, you will miss it. The rockets worked alright and the astronauts were all OK. If the rockets had not worked properly, then the capsule might have been damaged beyond repair and the astronauts might be anywhere between somewhat jolted to dead.
Your spacecraft might have had a similar landing, but its landing engines failed at the last second.
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The ship crashed during a heavy snowstorm, your character was out hunting/finding a lost sheep/a more nefarious reason and got caught in the storm.
No one else was dumb enough to be out and so your character was the only one to see the crash.
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The spaceship landed perfectly normally,
it just was using Apple Maps, and was setting up for a soft landing at 3200 ft ground altitude, when it discovered that actual ground altitude was 32**50** ft.
That's a gentle but devastating crash, much like parking your car 30 feet into your 25-foot long garage.
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For reference, here's a Progress launch, just a small cargo capsule, viewed from the ISS: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouBfzCgXHgk>
The booster engines make it a bright, easily visible moving light from the moment it leaves the ground, and at around 36 seconds, the reentering booster makes that look dim, actually noticeably illuminating a large patch of Earth's surface.
That's just a low suborbital reentry of a booster stage. A full orbital entry will be much more energetic...here's a bolide that came down over Russia in 2013, breaking windows and setting off car alarms: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLjB5qavxY>
As for a slow powered descent: first, that's a very wasteful approach even with a high-performance fusion torch. Second, such a fusion torch drive would make the chemical booster engines on that Soyuz look like nothing. A long, slow descent on jets of fusion exhaust might be more noticeable than that Russian bolide.
In short, given the amounts of energy involved, returning spacecraft are not likely to be very discreet. Your best bet is for the landing to be obscured by poor weather, or perhaps for the villagers to be distracted...perhaps by wreckage that came down more visibly elsewhere?
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Your shipped turned out to have soft landed on a small comet. That comet unfortunately then crashed into the Earth. After the fire ball stage of re-entry the spacecraft fell off what ever was left of the comet. People will assume it was just some bit of the comet.
What remains of the comet continues on wards and crashes a long way away. Thus when people go looking for the comet fragments, they are somewhere else, very far away from the spaceship.
Might still require some sort of low visibility event (at night, during a storm etc) for people to not completely see the spaceship when it falls off the comet and just dismiss it as bits of the comet.
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## Soft, stealthy landing at orbital speed
The alien ship has a surface capable of reacting at very high resolution. It models the incoming atoms in real time, focuses an electron emission array at them to ionize them, and guides them into channels that pass through its infrastructure to the other side, where the electrons are removed and they are sent on their way. Thanks to "regenerative braking" at the ionic level, the air the ship passes through leaves with the same momentum and temperature with which it arrived. As a result, the ship can simply fall through the atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, consuming no energy and leaving no visible trace. No one sees much.
When the ship reaches the ground, it continues the same process, but its ability to process material is overwhelmed by the density of the solid earth and the velocity it needs to travel. It brakes as rapidly as it can, uses emergency power to collect excess material ahead of it and eject it through an emergency channel behind as a fiery exhaust, and comes to a stop deep below the Earth. It is linked to the surface by a hole since it did not reconstitute all of the material it passed through, and traces of heat from the emergency exhaust may prevent exploration for a short time afterward.
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## Bad FTL exit
One issue that you might want to consider is that the spaceship could be noticeable well before hitting the planet. Most forms of propulsion are highly visible, so if the spaceship needs to decelerate before hitting the atmosphere then any NASA-like agencies would be likely to notice it.
Douglas Adams humorously presented another problem people often don't consider:
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> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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If you don't have FTL, you're really limited to a single star system. The closest star system to Earth is the Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light years away. That means without FTL you cannot get there in less than 4.37 years. Additionally, even with an impossible 100% efficient engine, [relativistic kinetic energy](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/relativistic-ke) dictates that in order to get close to the speed of light the amount of energy you need to spend approaches the energy equivalent of the mass of your spaceship. The break-even point is around 0.86 *c*, where for every 1 kg of spaceship + remaining fuel you've already used up 1 kg of fuel that you've converted perfectly to energy and propulsion.
Unfortunately, fusion is only able to convert about 0.7% percent of its fuel from mass into energy. This changes your break-even point to a little under 0.12 *c*. So to get to the nearest star system you're looking at a journey of close to 40 years instead.
So if you don't want your story limited to a single star system, you really need some form of FTL. This also gives you an easy way to have the spaceship's crash be hidden - [the spaceship didn't exit FTL when it was supposed to](https://youtu.be/JbpgM-JTang?t=122). Instead of coming out of FTL outside the atmosphere and being able to use its fusion drive to enter a stable orbit, it came out of FTL close enough to the ground that it crashed. The engine could have fired long enough for it to be visible only close up and left the ship mostly intact but the crew dead.
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Rather than creating an entire world for my worldbuilding project, I was planning on adding an additional continent to Earth. Since the largest “empty spot” is in the South Pacific and one of my goals was to create a temperate continent with minimal disturbance to the rest of the world, I’m planning on placing it somewhere in that general area.
What would be the most indicated area to place a moderately-sized (somewhat larger than Australia), temperate (temperate forests, grassland and mediterranean) continent without influencing the rest of the world’s currents?
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> What would be the most indicated area to place a moderately-sized (somewhat larger than Australia), temperate (temperate forests, grassland and mediterranean) continent without influencing the rest of the world’s currents?
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Nowhere. There is no way to put something the size of Australia AND not influence water and wind circulations.
This is the [flow of currents](https://seos-project.eu/oceancurrents/oceancurrents-c02-p04.html) in the Pacific
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LoCrz.png)
wherever you place something as big as Australia it is either going to deviate some flow or to accelerate it because it will restrict the section available for the flow to go through.
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I suggest the **[East Pacific Rise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Pacific_Rise)** as the basis for a new Pacific continent. This could create a fair-sized continent far from the coasts of Australia and South America. Since the main part is located in the middle of the South Pacific Gyre, it will have relatively little influence on ocean currents. I have scetched a possible contour of this continent onto the map below.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WPBCt.jpg)
The south of the Rise is close to the [Pacific Antarctic Ridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific-Antarctic_Ridge), which could rise to become a major island off the coast of the new continent
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**Turn French Polynesia into a single island.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNeoG.png)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Polynesia#/media/File:French_Polynesia_on_the_globe_(French_Polynesia_centered).svg>
That is where you want your new land. Hopefully the fact that there is a little land there already does not spoil your plan. You can invoke a technological terraforming project or sea level drop (which would of course have other effects) or put your scenario in the past or future of some alternate earth. Or invoke some unknown geophysical process like the one that formed these islands in the first place, but more.
The sites of these islands are such that important currents do not traverse the area - they would be disrupted by the land that is already there.
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A little off what you were asking, but have you looked at Zealandia? [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia) It's about half the size of Australia and it actually exists...
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I've done a bit of research and small bodies of water don't have significant tides, even the Mediterranean doesn't have particularly large tides.
So how can I get bigger tides on a small body of water?
The sea in question is, for simplification sake, on what amounts to a floating continent. I'm not entirely sure what size the body of water will be yet (really there will be quite a few of varying sizes, I'm happy with only the largest having more severe tidal effects), but I would guess no bigger than the Black Sea or Caspian Sea.
There is magic in the world and I'm happy with a magical solution as long as it makes sense, I don't want to just handwave it and say it just happens with no reason.
What else could cause a tidal effect, or the appearance of one?
Edit: It appears I was not entirely clear, when I say a floating continent I mean floating in the air, not in another body of water.
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**Rocking**
Your continent is floating. Maybe it is rocking back and forth as it floats. That can happen with floating things. Any number of forces can put a body into an oscillating motion.
As your continent rocks back and forth the water contained in it will flow back and forth, moving toward the low side. I could imagine the rocking being subtle enough that persons living on the continent do not notice it. But the water will notice it and flow accordingly.
The period of the rocking will determine the period of the "tides" produced. The amplitude of the rocking will determine the amplitude of the tides.
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# Quasi-magical mega-geyser
There are plenty of geysers around, the most famous probably being [Old Faithful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful) which has been shooting about 8000 gallons of water into the air every 40-120 minutes since at least 1870. A little magic and imagination can extend a geyser principle to something large enough to affect a lake or inland sea.
Your geyser is the lava tube of a massive underwater volcano. Every 12 hours or so, the geyser erupts sending cubic kilometers of water into the sky, and causing 'rain' in whatever the downwind part of the lake is (sounds like the world's wettest rainforest). With that amount of water blasted out of the lake, the water level lowers appreciably all along the lakeshore. Then, the huge lava tube, recently emptied of water, fills with lakewater further lowering the water level. Over the next 12 hours, water comes back down into the lake, both directly raining from the sky, and flowing back from rivers in the downwind rainforest, and the lake level rises again.
You can adjust the size of the blasts to the desired tidal variance, and the timing to your desired tidal period. This is obviously not believable for any substantial lake on Earth, but whatever force is powerful enough to make a continent float can surely make a nice mega-geyser as well.
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## The tides are part of a balancing system
If your flying island is actually continent-sized, the moon's gravity would affect parts of it at different times, causing it to rock or sway just a little, but enough to put serious stresses on the internal structure, reducing its lifetime.
Whether by design or natural selection (all the other continents crashed long ago), your continent has long underground water channels running in the direction of the moon's orbit. The water moves back and forth with the moons, balancing the moon's upward pull with extra mass and keeping the continent still. Some or all seas are in contact with the channels, giving them tides much stronger than their own size would suggest.
Alternatively, the water is moved around by magic. Nobody knows how, but smart people theorize it keeps the continent from tipping over somehow. This scenario would not even need a moon or predictable tides. Seas could experience ebb and flood at seemingly random times and ranges.
*(old answer below, invalidated since the continent floats in the air, not on the water).*
## The inland sea is connected to the ocean (underground)
You say that your continent is floating and for this answer I'll assume it's on the ocean, not on the rocky mantle deep under any ocean.
To have high tides, you need a large mass of water (larger than just a lake or sea) and a favorable coastline that compresses the water flow in the direction of the tidal flow. On Earth, those happen mostly around Alaska and Canada as explained [here](http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/highesttide.html), while in the southern hemisphere, there is no similar effect.
Your continent is probably looks something like a giant island (say Australia) on a map and is surrounded by open ocean, so it might not experience very large tides on its outside coast, but it still gets them. While there is no narrowing coastline, there is still a compressing of the flow happening as it goes *under* your continent, increasing the pressure.
If your inland seas are connected to the ocean through holes in the bottom of the continent, there might be water flowing in and out with the tides, causing the sea to have ebb and flood, although it will happen nearly simultaneously around its coast.
Of course, this would probably be accompanied by extreme currents and a maelstrom here and there, depending on how deep they are. If that is not the environment you want you seas to have, you could instead make the thin bottom of the sea somewhat flexible, to the point that the entire sea bottom rises and sinks a meter or two from the pressure changes in the ocean under it. Whatever material or magic (or turtle) is holding your continent together (and floating) can include the flexible aspect.
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## [Seiches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche "Seiches")
Seiches are standing waves in a bounded water body, which can give a resemblance of tides. They occur in several lakes on Earth, and are usually caused by the wind (or occasionally seismological activity). In extreme cases, they can be of equal or greater magnitude than tides - from the Wikipedia page,
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On a floating island, this could amplify the effect of a periodic rocking, causing significantly larger water level changes than would otherwise occur.
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The island is floating, so there are anti-gravity forces at work. Rather than having the island rock (as in the solution provided by will), you could have the island remain perfectly perpendicular to the planet it orbits, however the magic/science that holds it up is constantly readjusting to do so.
Imagine the island is on pillars of anti-gravity. To maintain balance the pillars move. The pillars are restricted to a certain depth, they can't come all the way to the surface or people would fly off the continent!
If the depth of the water is deep enough to intersect the anti gravity pillar. Then the sea would contract. Bedrock provides a good support but water does not. It would be lifted, forced up wards. The ocean would bulge, perhaps only slightly, over these spots. Large helical vortexes would be created.
This would create the following effects:
* The *tide-like-force* would contract the body of water on all sides, expansion would likewise be uniform; as if breathing slowly over time.
* Tides typically move slowly, these tides could be abrupt, depending on the how the force is diminished/reallocated.
* Things dropped into the ocean such as a body, could remain submerged for a long period of time due to the undertow that would be created.
* Travel could benefit, if a vessel could make half the trip during high tide (ocean is lying flat) then take advantage of driving force of the low tide (the ocean is pulled inwards by the upward bulge) then the ship would have an inclination advantage, in addition to favourable outward currents, it could make strong progress.
Of note: This mechanic could foreshadow the direct manipulation of the powerful anti-gravity magic supporting the continent, which could produce all manner of natural disasters earth quakes or tsunami, or simply throw people off the world.
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**Greater outside forces**
The tides on Earth are caused by the pull of the Sun and the Moon and their relative orbits. A closer moon and/or one with a stronger gravitational pull would increase the tidal effect on smaller bodies of water. A more elliptical orbit around your setting's star would cause a tide that shifts through the year, between very strong and much weaker.
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**Closed-cycle weather system?**
The center region of air above your body of water could be affected by a periodic, regular change in pressure - leading to periodic and regular changes in sea level.
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**Sloshing**
Any body of water will slosh back and forth with a period related to its overall mass. Water in a drinking glass will slosh very quickly, while water in a bathtub will slosh more slowly. The point, however, is that the period (the time between cycles) is constant as long as the mass of water is constant. In your lake/sea, if you "push" the water in one direction with series of pushes that match the correct frequency, you can get it to slosh back and forth. Think of it like pumping your legs when using a playground swing. Even a small push is enough as long as you have the timing right.
I remember reading in National Geographic a long time ago about the Great Lakes, and how natural sloshes sometimes occur in Lake Superior (due mostly to wind). Alas, I don't remember any other details, but I found [this technical article](http://www.miseagrant.umich.edu/lessons/lessons/by-broad-concept/earth-science/surges-and-seiches-2/) which may be enlightening. You could use either magic or some advanced engineering to make a big paddle that pumps the water at the required frequency. Depending on the mass of your lake, it would probably have a slosh period of several hours to a few days.
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**Resonance**
Tides are periodical. If you can make a water mass that oscillates with the same frequency of the tide, tides build up to larger tides even in an small water body, just as we make swings oscillate with repeated small pushes. In fact, real tides larger than average are caused by resonance phenomena.
You can tune natural frequency of a large lake or small sea by adjusting its geometry. With a rectangular long sea with reflective ends a few hundreds of kilometres length can be enough to allow a wave to go end to end one time per high tide.
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Looks simple to me. Take a filled bowl with water. Try place it up your head using only your arms. Ask some one to look on it. It is close to the impossible to not get waves! Magic (or science) is not perfect. Floating continents dangle, believe me :)!
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## Carbonize the water
I'm no physicist so this answer assumes *(probably in error)* that carbon-saturated water takes up more volume than just plain water, and enough to be noticeable in a lake/small sea.
Have a naturally occurring buildup of CO2 in your lake that occasionally gets released into the air. So as more and more CO2 builds up, the tides will rise and people that have seen it before will start to worry. Then one rainy day the water level will suddenly drop because a [Limnic eruption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption) was triggered. This releases a cloud of foul smelling CO2 into the air. Which is **deadly** by the way, because CO2 is heavier than oxygen and will displace it. So if you want the small sea and areas around it to be livable, make sure the CO2 can be drained somehow (maybe off the edge of your floating continent) fast enough to keep the death toll to a minimum.
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Set in the 18th to 19th century A.D. the industrial revolution started uncontrollably and began to take its toll on nature; more trees have been felled and rivers dried to make way for rail tracks.
Many mythical creatures such as fairies and the unicorns were driven out of their home which was once a majestic forest that booming with a huge diversity of life.
Now food and freshwater becoming scarcer, these mythical creatures decided to punish mankind for the crime they have committed against life. The problem is despite the fact that human beings are frail and weak compared to bear and big cats such as lion and tiger, they can develop tools for hunting and killing animal of all kinds, the mythical creatures are terrified of men and wouldn't dare retaliate when faced with a threat.
My question is how can the fairies standing no taller than a tennis ball and the unicorns which can't gallop any faster than a race horse have any chance of winning against mankind's innovation and cruelty?
Note: these mythical creatures do possesses some magical abilities but are limited to communication between fauna and flora, they can lead an army of wild animals but can't control weather. The mythical creatures can be bleed to death and are not immune to drugs, their survival depends on the outcome of this war between our insatiable thirst for power and knowledge versus their instincts and perseverance, the loser becomes extinct.
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Kudzu.
Kudzu is an extremely invasive vine that will swallow entire structures if left to it's own devices. As shown here:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7yQZn.png)
It makes life very difficult for humans (and it currently is doing that in the South-East US) on it's own. Directed by fairies it could become even more of a problem. Clogging sewer outlets, making roads unusable, tangling up in machinery are all possibilities.
We as humans seem to think we have dominion over this planet but we really don't. Most of our larger engineering feats are actually quite difficult to pull off and are usually completely at the mercy of nature. While weather is a large part of this so are plants and animals and at present neither is actively trying to thwart us. Given direction by fairies plants especially could become a huge issue.
Now as far as I know kudzu while tough to manage and remove it's fairly benign. Change kudzu into poison oak or some other highly irritant plant (perhaps made deadly via the fairies magic) and you could certainly disrupt major city centers.
Another possibility is farmland. No matter how technologically savvy we are we will still need to eat. Having our crops attacked by goats, pigs, cows (all farm animals) or some other invasive plant species (weeds, more kudzu, etc) or just have the fairies kill all the corn or make it poisonous would be extremely effective in attacking the human populous.
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(Edit: after thinking some more, **druid-like religion (worshiping nature), supported by damage of crops of non-believers by swarms** is the answer, see below)
Most important contribution of the druid religion is recruiting **humans** to fight on the side of fairies, protecting the nature, and showing them both carrot and stick.
Insects own the planet, if they stop fighting between each other and start swarming:
* Persuade bees to stop pollinating human plants. Guide hives to escape captivity and relocate to forests.
* recruit ants/termites to protect these corners of the forests by stopping wars between ants, attacking human invaders instead.
* wasps can build nests in engine intakes, disabling them (and attacking anyone trying to fix it).
* bats can spread rabies and spook cattle at night.
Synchronized swarms of insect and other animals can disrupt many human activities in damaged areas but "behave" in areas where nature is protected:
* swarms of locusts and birds can destroy human crops
* swarms of mosquitoes can spread diseases, decreasing human population
* swarms of any insect or birds can down the planes by flying into engine intake. Air transport could be severely disrupted.
Swarms of mice can attack crops and stored food. Swarms of frogs or crabs might overwhelm people to leave areas close to water. Swarms of birds can very effectively disrupt various human activities. Trick, as in any battle, is to **ambush by overwhelming force, instead of continuous attacks by small forces.** If attack is overwhelming but rare (black swan), protecting from it in all possible places becomes too expensive.
Secret of the success of the ambush is swarming: attackers are dispersed and hiding until time of attack, and disperse afterwards. To succeed, **attacker has to be small and fast. Insects, birds and bats** fit the bill.
Bigger animals which live in herds (deer) can also trample crops. If fairies are so inclined, trampled crops can form messages to humans. Or trample only inside parts of fields, so humans will have harder time to realize what is happening and try preventing it. And without planes, machine guns and telephones, organized response by humans will be much harder.
**Damage to crops should focus on the fields of people who refuse cooperation with nature,** and bypass people who support the nature.
Obvious next step would be forming some **druid-like religion, aimed to preserve the nature, and nature itself punishing those who disobey**. This will establish "magical" powers of the druids, proving to people that "religion works", and **it is in best human interest to protect the nature** - or else.
Continue until humans will get the message.
One advantage this answer has over the accepted one is that this answer does not rely on "magical growth" or other magic, just ability of fairies to communicate with animals/insects, and ability of animals to follow the orders and discipline.
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Allies. They need allies if they want to keep from being wiped out. They have the animals but as you said it appears that they won't be enough. That means they need to look for more.
The most obvious place to get allies that can counter humans, is more humans. The great thing about people is we are not one monolithic group think. If they (the fairies) decide to make enemies of all humans, one side or the other will be wiped out. Most likely the fairies, maybe some kept as pets. If some of their magic has healing properties, that is something they can offer the humans who fight for them, help heal them and keep them fit for fighting back.
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As I stated in my comment, it is hard to say without far more information about them. Lets assume a few facts that seem most probable.
1. they lack numbers, on the presumption that if there were many we would know about them
2. They are very good at hiding themselves from humans
3. They either can-not or do not utilize technology to the degree we do, or they would be a bit hypocritical complaining about us
4. They are intelligent as regular humans, or they wouldn't make as interesting a story.
Going with this I would say a direct fight would be hopeless. We could bomb any large collection or armies of them, or role in a tank and squash them. Our power is not in the size or strength of a regular human, but in massive and expensive weapons of war. If they have only 'some' magic I'm assuming you don't expect them to be able to bring the kind of magical BOOM that could take out a tank? if they can't then their only hope in a direct war would be to use our own weapons against us. However, we already own them, they would have a hard time getting them from us; and we still are the only ones with the ability to manufacture them. Plus, we still have a major number advantage.
Some have mentioned allies, but I don't think this will help much. Unless your allies *also* own tanks and fighter jets their worthless. In modern era it is our technology and weapons that decide direct wars. A hundred men with small arms can be destroyed by just one tank. Sure getting allies is always good, but unless you can ally yourself with entire governments it's not going to come close to evening the odds. And if you *could* ally yourself with large governments then this becomes a war of humans against humans more then anything. Plus, if your goal is destroy all humans who use destructive technology allying yourself with the group that has the most destructive technology (weapons) seems kind of hypocritical.
However, an asymmetric war is still quite possible. Gorilla warfare has proven capable of defeating far stronger militaries in the past. In this case your mythical creatures already have a massive trump card; they can hide! I don't know how they hide, but they do it well enough that we don't even know of their existence. Whatever tricks or magic they use, it's powerful. The most important ability of an guerilla is to be able to disappear after an attack, being able to do it with untraceable magic is huge.
How effective a gorilla war would be depends on many things, but most notably just how good they are at hiding and how well the can move while hidden. If they could, for instance, appear in the middle of a boot camp, have the unicorns stampede over the trainees, and then disappear with a finger snap to be untraceable....that would be ungodly powerful. Now every single location where any military officer is would have to be guarded with weapons 24/7, or faeries can appear and kill you. Your tanks and aircraft mean nothing, because you don't have anything to bomb, and your enemy will have disappeared before you can get to your weapons of war. This takes the battle down to mythical creatures against small arms, as they most lethal weapon that can be available in response to an unprovoked lightning attack, which is more effective.
Taking it further you said fairies were tiny, and that's powerful. Imagine the ability to appear in the home of an officer and assassinate him with a poison or some magical spell. or sneak in and just listen to their plans. For that matter a war of terror that worked simply by assassinating any who stand up to lead others against you would pretty quickly cripple any military by removing their leadership, and making everyone afraid to step up to do so.
How deadly they are now depends on how well they can hide, how well humans can adapt to it (will we learn ways to stop their magic, create magic-radar etc?), and how evil they are and what atrocities they are willing to commit. I need to know far more about them and their abilities to say further, but I will say that one way or another this *must* be a gurella war. If they amass in any number tanks and fighters destroy them.
Of course this assumes it goes to war. If your mythical beings are willing to reveal themselves they can do far more then fight a war. Their mere presence would change how humans look at them. If they tell us their suffering extensively due to some environmental damage were doing odds are we *will* work to stop that damage; humans aren't monsters, and once we have a face to place with the harm we do we tend to try to stop it. Just showing up and asking us to work to help avoid hurting them would be quite effective, not foolproof, but still powerful; especially since our culture would be so fascinated by them that we would listen raptly to them and worry about their plight to a disproportionate degree; we could ignore the deaths of thousands of humans to hunger to try to prevent the death of hundred of pixies to pollution because the starving humans are a faceless number, whereas the pixies are fascinating and our interest in them causes us to see their suffering in a way we don't with the boring starving humans.
If they were willing to teach us things they know, or offer their magic to us (maybe heal our sick, magic healing is pretty common in myths, and general far more effective then our hospitals), they would have further bargaining chips. They have many non-lethal avenues to peruse to get what they need.
It seems unlikely that a species would go from complete hiding to homicidal killing spree. There has to be a middle ground, of protesting and demanding we stop. A war risk their own lives, and kills countless humans if it is to win; and risks us using weapons that would further devastate the enviroment. I can't see a species so blood thirsty as to pursue such a lethal stance due to human *ignorance* of their plight managing to hide and ignore us for so long.
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## Nonviolent direct action backed by the media
Gandhi beat the might of the British empire by peacefully standing up to us and publicly shaming us into submission. A suicide bomber is forgotten in days (except by the victims), but a photo of a blazing monk lives on in popular culture today.
The sight of peaceful fairies being mown down by humans with chainsaws broadcast on CNN and spread across the twittersphere would change public perceptions and force us to grant fairy rights.
Not the blood and guts answer you were hoping for perhaps, and the revenge would be subtle, but viable I think.
See what has become of England now, a country subtly ashamed of itself, which refuses to celebrate its own flag day. A vestige of its former self where patriotism is practically a dirty word.
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**Disrupt their infrastructure.**
If they can persuade plants and wild animals to do their bidding, the best route for them is to attack where the humans get their food from. Make weeds grow instead of wheat, get foxes to help chickens escape pens, and so on.
Without any food, the humans will have to deal with either riots or importing everything. You can cripple the humans' economy so they're spending all their money on food while they will be hard-pressed to export enough to pay for it all.
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They would need to appeal to sympathetic humans, recruit from these 'hippies' warriors willing to become an insurgent, infiltrate the ranks of the industrial horde, and issue a campaign of mass-sabotage and propaganda. Pitched battles are likely to be avoided and actual victory is achieved through clandestine actions destroying and disabling the equipment, the dozers and dump trucks, used to pillage the wild. oh, and always remove survey stakes!
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**Don't let them sleep!**
At night the fairies would need to terrorize the humans with insect infestations - bees, wasps, fire ants, scorpions, poisononous snakes, bats, poisonous frogs. The attacks could be enough to frighten and maybe take out a few. But the ultimate goal would be to deprive the humans of sleep.
Have you ever tried to be creative after 48 hours of no sleep? Even the most mundane of tasks becomes near impossible. There would be the added bonus of humans hurting themselves in accidents. After several days of this, the fairies could step up their boldness as the human alert level would drop off significantly.
Additionally, since fairies can control/influence/aid living organisms, they would release bacteria and viruses into water and food stores; nothing that would go full pandemic. Cold, flu, dissentary, malaria - this would weaken most of the population, probably taking a few out as well.
After that, the fairies launch an all out assault on a sleep deprived, dehydrated, hungry, disease weakened village. This is when the elephants and chimps and gorillas and bears and cats come in and dismantle the village. Once the village is destroyed, the kudzu is brought in to cover the village and blot it out forever, with a cheerful fairy sign stating, "Tinkerbell was here :-)".
Rinse and repeat on the next village.
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